Purpose and Power: All-In August #12

Good morning, my friend. How was your weekend? I hope that you are doing well,

that you're excited about this day, that whatever comes before you today,

that the Lord has provided an opportunity for you to just excel in your life,

to find purpose and meaning,

that whatever struggles you're going through, that you have some clarity on

ways to have hope and to see possibility that you haven't been able to see before.

And one way to do that is to just go in all in with us. We're reading Mark Batterson's book, All In.

If you haven't read it yet, please do so. It's a great book and kind of help

focus your mind just about how important it is to really just finally throw

off the chains and get rid of everything that's holding you back and go all in with the Lord.

And you'll find a new source of power and resilience to get through the hard

parts of your life. Today, we're going to talk about purpose.

And Viktor Frankl, of course, a famous writer who was actually a prisoner in

a concentration camp during World War II, who wrote one of the most famous books

about suffering, Man's Search for Meaning.

If you've never read that, it is a classic and it's well worth,

it's a short book, but it's a game changer in terms of how to look at problems

and still find purpose in them.

One of the famous quotes from Viktor Frankl's book is this, man's main concern

is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain, but rather to see a meaning in his life.

That is why man is ever ready to suffer on the condition to be sure that his suffering has meaning.

In other words, Frankl recognized that the people who survived the concentration

camps or who came out of them with the best future life possibility were those

who were able to find some way to find meaning and purpose,

even in the midst of their suffering, who didn't just despair.

Makes me think of the scenes like in Saving Private Ryan when they're first

storming the beach at the very opening part of that movie.

And it seems hopeless with bullets flying from everywhere. They're getting bombarded

and shot at from well-entrenched German positions.

And it seems hopeless, right? They got to get off those Higgins boats and get onto the beach.

And some of them just wither under the fire. And they just sit down and they

hide behind the first barrier they get to.

And they can't move themselves forward. The battle is overwhelming.

And I want to just say that sometimes life feels like that, like you're getting

attacked from all sides.

Everything is so hard. You can't find a break. You can't find a moment of peace.

You can't find a moment of happiness.

And it just feels like the world is stacked against you and it's impossible.

God's given up on you. Maybe he's not even there.

Nobody sees you. Nobody hears you. Nobody values you. The attacks are never

going to stop coming. It just seems hopeless, right?

I want to just spend a minute here today to talk about what we do when life feels like.

How do we find a way to take that next step forward, to get off the beach,

to take the high ground again,

to find a way to move forward, to convince ourselves that it's reasonable and

it's sometimes necessary to continue moving forward? How do we do that?

We do that by having a sense of purpose.

We do that by understanding why we're there. the posterior temporal cortex of

your brain, the posterior temporal part of your brain is about.

Your ability to see purpose, to engage with other people and connect with other

people and find a way to help other people, that part of your brain,

posterior superior temporal cortex is wired for contributing to other people.

If it's not working properly, you're a little more self-centered,

you don't see the need to go out and try to help others and be altruistic.

And that part of your brain, when it's not working right, you don't function

very well in a group, in a situation where other people depend on you.

Your brain has to be working properly in order for you to see the reason to

continue performing with trying to help other people.

And so if you don't have the posterior superior temporal cortex of your brain

working properly, it's hard for you to find meaning and purpose.

What's going on over there? The neuroscience is that the neurotransmitters oxytocin,

dopamine, and serotonin contribute to your sense of well-being and happiness.

Oxytocin helps you to see the need for social bonding and empathy.

It has to do with lactation and motherhood and all those things.

Dopamine plays a major role in motivation and movement. And serotonin is the

one that helps your mood become stable and feel better and free to feel better.

When you start to feel like you're

all alone when you start to feel like everything is

happening against you everything is too hard the secret is

to engage that posterior superior temporal cortex to say

i'm gonna i want to find a way to look out for somebody else to try to find

an opportunity to help another person to come alongside there's a great story

there's a blog by a guy named zach mercurio who tells a story about the first

woman desiree linden who became the the first First American woman in over 30

years to win the Boston Marathon.

They've been won by foreigners for over 30 years. And she won because she was

running along that day and she said she felt terrible. Her body didn't feel good.

Her mind wasn't good. She wasn't engaged very well. She was struggling to keep

going. And she thought about quitting the race. She was getting ready to drop out.

Somehow she's noticed another runner that she

was gaining ground on that seemed to be struggling and something

kicked in and as she got next to that lady she

said the lady's name was flanagan she said hey if you need me to block the wind

for you or adjust the pace a little bit let's just run together let me know

if i can help you and we'll get through it together what she said was that after

she offered to help the other runner that lyndon said that she got her legs

back that But focusing on helping,

blocking the wind, setting the pace, getting in front of this other lady so

she would have more courage to continue, gave Lyndon her legs back.

She got her juice back because she engaged something outside of herself.

So helping other people helps us sometimes more than it helps them.

So the purpose of telling you that story is that sometimes when you feel like

you can't go on, Sometimes when you feel like you don't have the juice to take

another step, it's because you've become circled into your own problems.

You're running a circular firing squad in your own brain.

And your limbic system is telling you to run away or hide or quit or give up

or feel bad or notice that nobody notices you or pay attention to the fact that

nobody pays attention to you or to focus on how bad you feel because nobody else is helping you.

It just won't ever stop being hard. When you do that, you're basically convincing

your brain to keep your temporal lobes and your frontal lobes out of the fight,

and you're basically just going to give up and quit because it's all about you at that point.

And if you're doing it all for yourself and nobody's noticing anyway,

then why would you keep going?

There's scenes like the scene at Saving Private Ryan, that first battle.

There's several amazing little moments in that battle where somebody else grabs

another guy and says, come on, we got to move forward.

You got to go. We got to help move forward on this beach.

And the reason that they're able to keep going is because they have a sense

of purpose, not only just to stay alive, but that the reason they're on the

beach in the first place is because they've got to win this war.

They've got to save civilization.

They've got to set the captives free. They've got to overtake and defeat evil.

They've got a strong sense of purpose that becomes a shield for them to deflect

those things that are attacking them.

And helping others helps them. I'm there for a reason. I'm there for a purpose.

There's a famous story from the Civil War about Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain,

who was a colonel from Maine.

And he led the counterattack on Little Big Horn, Little Big Horn,

on Little Round Top, the hill that they had to hold that was the high ground

that was gonna make them either win or lose the battle.

And they were severely outnumbered. They were out of ammunition.

They were desperate and the Alabama infantry was rushing up the hill to take

them and Chamberlain knew that if they lost Little Round Top,

they were gonna lose the battle.

And if they lost the battle, they were probably gonna lose the war.

If they lost the war, they were probably gonna lose the Union.

And we probably wouldn't have our country anymore. So it's another one of those

moments where somebody had to see the purpose and why they were there.

Somebody had to see the reason and inspire other people to get behind the purpose,

and then they fixed their bayonets and they ran down that hill,

and 80 Union soldiers captured several hundred attacking rebels because they found their purpose.

It was impossible. It was against all odds. It was unlikely that they were going

to survive, but they did that because they had to achieve their purpose.

They didn't give up. They didn't just wither into the fight and sit down and

say, oh, I'm hosed. I'm lost.

I'm just going to surrender. Maybe I'll survive. Make it all about me.

They pushed through it because they had purpose. They were bigger.

The moment was bigger than their own individual life.

Now, obviously, we're here to talk about how neuroscience and faith line up, right?

Because I believe that no matter what application or what perspective or what

thing you're talking about, if you don't add the spiritual element to it,

you're only getting part of the story.

That's why we want to be more than 10% happier, right? When we talk about happiness,

by the way, and your brain chemicals, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin,

all of them, basically give you this sense of well-being and happiness. Right.

The problem is, if you're only pursuing happiness for its own end,

then you get that little hit of neurotransmitter and you want to have it again

and again and quickly become just this person who's seeking those feel-good

chemicals in your brain.

And that's what leads some people to a life that's all about themselves and

seeking pleasure and trying to find something that makes them feel better.

Alcohol, drugs, relationships, gambling, shopping, whatever it is that gives

you that quick, cheap dopamine hit.

It's been shown in studies even that just thinking about or telling other people

stuff that you want to do gives you a little boost of those neurotransmitters.

And so some people just talk all the time and never actually do anything because

it's making them feel better.

I'm not talking about happiness for the sake of happiness, because as you've

been alive long enough to know that when you pursue something just for the purpose

of making yourself happier, that thing, once you finally get it,

becomes a moving target that doesn't actually make you happy.

That's when we did a whole episode recently about how Jesus tells us to hunger

and thirst for better stuff.

He's got food and water, living food and living water that actually fills us

up and satisfies our cravings and teaches us how to be satisfied and fulfilled in him.

And then we get the whole world thrown in. C.S. Lewis said, remember,

you aim at heaven, you get the earth thrown in with it.

If you aim at earth, you don't get either one. heaven or because the things

that we pursue in this life aren't worth it and they don't satisfy us and so

when we're talking about finding purpose we find purpose in something bigger

than ourselves let me give you a couple things one of the greatest gifts that we've been given.

By God, his purpose. Let's check out 2 Timothy 1.9.

God saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works,

but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.

It's easy to just think that verse says that God gave us grace,

and he did. He gave us grace. He gave us what we didn't deserve.

He didn't give us what we did deserve.

He forgave us of our sins when we couldn't have done it on our own.

That's That's the greatest gift of all, right? But there's an and in there.

He gave us his own purpose and grace.

So check that out. That means you were born, you were created,

friend, with a purpose that God gave you that only you can accomplish.

There's a devotional I read every morning, First 15, first15.org.

It's great. If you want to spend about 15 minutes, you can even click and listen

to it. They play music behind us. Great resource. source, first15.org, check it out.

But there's a devotional he recently did about purpose.

And he talked about how from the time of Adam, God has always made clear the

purposes we were created for.

And those purposes can change over time. Early on, it was be fruitful and multiply

and fill the earth. That's what humans were here for at first.

And then after the fall, we're supposed to find our part of the story of redemption

that gets us back to a relationship with him and help other people find the

path to get back into a relationship with him so that we We can all be with

him in a restored environment for eternity.

Our purpose now is to reflect his light to other people, right? That's our purpose.

And the guy that wrote first15.org says, have you lived days where you're simply

going through the motions?

Have you had bad days where you feel as if what you do doesn't matter?

Those days in my life were my absolute worst. I would rather go through trials

and persecution with purpose than live a meaningless day.

It's in purpose that we find satisfaction. satisfaction in purpose,

we find our lives matter.

And in purpose, we discover the reasons we were created.

Friend, our whole society right now is shattering because everybody's after

what they think is going to make them happy.

And if you don't give me what's going to make me happy, we're going to have

a fight. We're going to burn the city down.

You better give me what I have coming to me. I deserve it. It's my right.

It's my, I'm made this way and you better honor what I feel.

You better give me what I want. If I'm not happy, then I'm going to burn it all down.

That's what we're seeing in life right now. Why? Because people don't have their real purpose.

They think they're here just to serve themselves and make themselves feel happy.

And that's not the point. The whole reason you're here is because God gave you a purpose.

You don't find your own purpose. You find God's purpose. You align yourself

with him. The scripture says, remember our green light verses?

Delight yourself in the Lord and he'll give you the desires of your heart.

It starts with being in him.

Trust in him with all your heart, and he'll make the path straight for you, friend.

God has placed value and worth on your life, the devotional says,

to an extent you have yet to discover.

He has a plan and purpose for your life that he's assigned to no one else.

Your life, my friend, is meant to make an eternal impact for his kingdom,

which will reign for all time. but in his grace, he has also given you control over your life.

You can choose to live your life according to his purposes or your own.

That's from first15.org. I'll put a link in the show note. Here's my question

for you, Brad. My question for you is this.

Are you generally happier? Do you generally feel better?

Do you generally have better days and better weeks and better months and better

years when you seek your own purpose or when you try to find something bigger?

I'm just asking you. It's a legitimate question. Do you feel better? Dr.

Phil, the old pop psychologist used to say, or still does probably,

how's that working for you? Look at the things that you always tend to do in your life.

Because we all do them. We circle around the same set of stuff our whole lives

unless we find an off ramp onto something better.

And that's really what All in August is about. We circle around the same thing.

We keep having the same issues, we keep dealing with the same trouble. Why?

Because we never stop to ask ourselves, how's that working for you? How's it going?

Jules Walker posted one time, and I've written about it before,

talked about it before, if you keep doing what you're doing,

you're going to keep getting what you've been getting, right?

What she said was a quote from somebody else, and I don't know where the original

quote came from, but it basically said, choosing not to change something is

choosing to accept that thing.

Choosing not to change is choosing to stay the same. if

you keep doing what you've been doing you're going to keep getting what

you've been getting and again ask the question how's it

working for you you're on the beach the bullets are coming in do you have the

shield of purpose that's going to help you fight it's going to find your next

step to find the power and choose to go forward or not there's two verses in

colossians chapter three that give us a sense of what to how to focus are we

living for ourselves are we living for something greater.

Colossians 3, 17, and whatever you do, whether in word or deed,

do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

You're on top, a little round top, and you're out of bullets,

and you got bayonets, and the rebels are charging, and you got to say, I am hosed.

I need to sit down and surrender so maybe they won't kill me and they'll take

me to a prison camp where at least I can have food and water.

It's like the Israelites wanting to go back to Egypt for chariots and horses

or after they've marched around in the desert for a few days,

is that they start forgetting how bad slavery was and they start missing the

beans and the rice and the bread that they had.

Maybe it won't be so bad if I just surrender.

Are you living for yourself or are you going to say

i've got to fix bayonets and charge down this hill because

if we lose this battle we lose this hill we lose the hill we

lose the high ground if we lose the high ground we lose the city if we lose

the city we lose the war if we lose the war we lose our country if we lose our

country we lose our way of life and all is lost they're able to see down that

path batterson writes that story

in the all-in book about the for one of a nail the the shoe was lost.

For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of the horse, the rider was lost.

For want of a rider, the message was lost. For want of a message,

the battle was lost. For want of the battle, the kingdom was lost.

All for the want of a horseshoe nail.

If you give up and you're the one that has the purpose, you're the only one

that can fulfill this particular purpose, then you might find yourself just

like Queen Esther when Mordecai said, it was for such a time as this, as you were born.

If you fail, God will still work his problems out, his situation out.

God will still save his people, but you won't get the blessing of being part of it.

If you don't fix bayonets, friend, if you don't say, I've got to get up off

this deal and we've got to charge down this hill, I've got to move forward on

the beach, I've got to pick up and help run this race and help this other person

get through it so I can finish too.

If you don't find the purpose in your moment, whatever you do in word or deed,

do it all for yourself? No.

Whatever you do in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord,

giving thanks. Remember, gratitude improves your neurochemistry.

And here's what you can do. You can look at your workday coming up and you can

say, I got to deal with all these morons at my office and they're going to have

the same excuses they had for last time. My boss is an idiot.

I've got to deal with all these patients or I've got to deal with X, Y, Z.

And this person's giving me a hard time. I don't like my job and I'm tired.

I just want to stay home. You can look at your day ahead like that and guess

what's going to happen? and your brain chemistry is going to go down the drain

and you're going to feel bad and you're going to create all these self-fulfilling

prophecies about how it's going to feel when you get to work today.

Okay? You can do that. You can do that ahead of the next time you talk to your kid on the phone.

You're bouncing on a relationship that's not so great, and you either want to

connect with them again and restore that relationship, or you want to just let

the inevitability cause it to continue to fail.

Marriages do this all the time. You're circling right on the edge.

Is it going to make it, or are we going to fall apart?

She probably doesn't love me anymore, and she doesn't. Our intimacy is gone,

and we just don't connect, and we can't talk, and we're still mad about that

thing that happened five years ago.

And it's just, we're just lost and we're just not the same as we used to be.

And you can go down that rabbit hole in your brain or you can say,

God, I want to honor you with my marriage.

I want to be a better spouse to my person that you've trusted me with.

And I want to pray that you'll break these chains of sameness,

you'll break this inertia, that you'll help me find the words to say,

the little act of kindness that might finally unlock that little thing and ice might start to melt.

And maybe if we do that, God, maybe you can let us reconnect and maybe you can

build a bridge back to our family being intact again.

Maybe you can give me the right words to say when I call my kid or maybe when I get to work today,

you can let me encourage somebody else and maybe that'll change their attitude

and maybe that'll make the meeting go a little bit more smoothly and maybe we

can charge down this hill and get to a place where we can accomplish our purpose

today and we're gonna be grateful for that, God.

Thank you for letting me have a job in the first place. Thank you for letting

me have a spouse so I'm not alone and please help me find the way to save this.

Right? It's all up to you. Are you going to get in front of that other runner

and block them from the wind a little bit and help them and find your legs again?

Or are you just going to sit down and quit?

It's up to you. The second verse in Colossians 3 is verse 23.

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart as working for the Lord,

not for human masters, since you know that you will receive inheritance from the Lord as a reward.

It is the Lord Christ you are serving. You're not serving You're not serving

your boss. You're not serving your company.

You're not even serving your spouse. Really, ultimately, you're serving the Lord.

And if he's put you in this place at this time, it's for purpose that he has

given you, friend. He's given you the purpose.

2 Timothy 1.9, God saved us and called us to a holy calling,

not because of our works, but because of his own purpose and grace,

which he gave us in Christ before the ages.

Last verse, Acts 17, 26 through 28. This is New Century Version. I like how it reads.

God began by making one person, and from him came all the different people who

live everywhere in the world.

God decided exactly when and where they must live.

God wanted them to look for him and perhaps search all around for him and find

him, though he is not far from any one of us. Listen, friend, that's the story.

That's the story. that's the purpose that's the reason that you're here it's

because he gave you an opportunity gave you a purpose he gave you a passion

he gave you a plan he gave you a story.

And all you have to do is fix bayonets and get after it and go all in with it.

If you want your life to feel different than it's been feeling,

you've got to figure out what your purpose is.

And you got to stop saying, the world is too hard. There's too many bullets.

There's too many weapons.

The enemy is too great. We are overwhelmed.

I might as well just quit. It's never going to feel better than it does.

My marriage is over. My kid won't call me. I just, nobody ever sees me or hears me. It's too hard.

It's too much. It's too late. It's too far. are. You can do that,

or you can get your temporal lobes engaged.

You can start finding a way to be grateful. You can start trying to work for

something bigger and greater than yourself.

You can understand that you do have a purpose. It's already been given to you,

and that purpose is to find God,

connect with Him, and help others to see Him, and to use the context of your

life, the situation that you're in, the exact time and place and boundary of where He has put you.

And he told you why in Acts 17.

He put you there so that you would find him and help others find him too.

That's why you're here. That's what your purpose is. That's why you need to

go all in. You're on top of Little Round Top and you have the victories.

The battle's already been won. The war's gonna win. As Mordecai said to Esther,

God's gonna save his people.

The war is set. The war is determined. The question is, are you gonna have a

statue on the hill like Joshua Chamberlain does at Gettysburg because you're

the one that gave the order to fix the bayonets and finally get after it or

are you going to be a casualty in that war?

Are you going to be a casualty that didn't achieve your purpose?

Where are you going to win? The question, that's the question.

The answer comes and when you decide that you're going to fix bayonets and you're

going to charge down that hill into your own life and you're going to accomplish

your purpose and you'll start finding that your days feel better,

that the wind's behind your back instead of in front of you,

you'll start feeling that purpose and power and passion for your life.

And that's how you actually find happiness is when you're pursuing something

bigger than yourself, when you give suffering, meaning it starts to feel less

like suffering and more like hope.

And that, my friend, is the first dose of how you can feel better and be happier.

That's it. That's the plan. That's the purpose.

That's where you find the power and the passion. And the good news is you can start today.

I hope that was helpful to you, my friend. I am all in.

Lisa's all in. Tata's all in. People all over the world are all in with us.

Self-brain surgeons all over the world getting together to press through,

to remember that we've never once been alone.

You have all the tools, everything you need.

All you need to do is change your mind and you'll change your life.

Let's go all in. Share this with your friend. Let's get after it.