Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / May 12, 2019 | Turnaround Time - Your Go Forward Plan

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May 12, 2019 | Turnaround Time - Your Go Forward Plan · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Is that cool or what?
0:04
SPEAKER_00: So welcome, Mother's Day.
0:06
SPEAKER_00: Beautiful morning, a little rain on the ground.
0:09
SPEAKER_00: It's just, we're having a great time so far, and that was a neat dedication.
0:16
SPEAKER_00: It's uh Mother's Day and it's turnaround time, week number two.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: This is a five-week series.
0:24
SPEAKER_00: We started last week.
0:26
SPEAKER_00: Rodney Kinner and I were sitting on barstools up here last week.
0:32
SPEAKER_00: Rodney couldn't make it this morning because he had a root canal yesterday or something.
0:38
SPEAKER_00: He'll join me again next week for week number three.
0:42
SPEAKER_00: But I get to uh take it one step farther, and because I know May is a month where people are in and they're out because of graduations and for a variety of reasons, I'm gonna review sort of where we went last week and what we did.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: Last week our title was Who Needs A Turnaround, okay, in this five-week series.
1:07
SPEAKER_00: Most important thing is, of course, if nobody here wants to turn around their life or be willing to, then this series won't work very well.
1:15
SPEAKER_00: So we uh investigated this.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: We said that while the Bible was a text, we also had another text, and it was a book written by a certain person, a well-known Kansan, the Kansan of the year about 10 years ago.
1:31
SPEAKER_00: A guy named Greg Brenneman, who grew up in a small town south of here, came to Washburn University, then went to Washburn Business School, then Harvard Business School, did really well.
1:43
SPEAKER_00: Got hired by a corporation up in Massachusetts, uh, Mitt Romney, uh, a key part of that corporation called Bain Company, that took companies that were corporations that were struggling and tried to turn them around and help them.
1:59
SPEAKER_00: They got hired to do that.
2:01
SPEAKER_00: And Greg was the uh, he became a friend of Mitt's and he became sort of the star pupil up there, and he worked with Continental Airlines, which was at the total basement of airlines at that time in the 90s.
2:15
SPEAKER_00: And then finally, Continental said, We need you here full time, and they hired him as the chief operating officer, and then the next uh five, six years, uh, with his help, they completely turned it around and became the top airline in America as far as service, as far as income, and so forth.
2:35
SPEAKER_00: And then after he was successful doing that, he went to Burger King in the early 2000s and Quisnos and so forth.
2:43
SPEAKER_00: He has his own large venture capital fund uh now down in Dallas.
2:48
SPEAKER_00: And he began to began to be called the turnaround, he's called the turnaround guru on the Washburn website today.
2:55
SPEAKER_00: Uh he stayed really close to Washburn University.
2:58
SPEAKER_00: This whole thing started when I got a phone call a couple of months ago saying, Do you know Greg Brenneman?
3:03
SPEAKER_00: I said, No, I don't.
3:04
SPEAKER_00: Well, he's coming to Washburn.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: He's one of Washburn's main donors, and he wants to start, he's a Christian, and he wants to start a major program, and he's looking for Christian businessmen who will help mentor business students at Washburn University.
3:19
SPEAKER_00: So we got involved, it mainly was TBC and First Southern Baptist, and we've got a bunch of businessmen from our church who volunteered.
3:27
SPEAKER_00: Really fun that day that Greg flew in.
3:30
SPEAKER_00: We got to spend a lot of time with him, and of course, uh Jerry Farley and other people over at Washburn, very excited about this, uh, about this new uh great program.
3:41
SPEAKER_00: And as I read his book, I read his book before he, a week before he came into town, I just thought I read business books, self-improvement books, and so forth all the time.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: But this book is something special because Greg combines in there how to turn around a company with how to turn around your personal life.
4:03
SPEAKER_00: More about that in a minute.
4:05
SPEAKER_00: So uh, as a result of an article written by the editor of Harvard Business Review during his Continental Turnaround, Greg got the title in America, King of the Turnarounds.
4:16
SPEAKER_00: And his book talks about how to turn around not only a business, but an individual.
4:21
SPEAKER_00: So Rodney and I taught this book for several weeks at our Men of Success Group earlier this year, and then I thought, I want to share this with TB Sears.
4:31
SPEAKER_00: So that's what I'm doing.
4:33
SPEAKER_00: This is the second week of that, and much of what I say is gonna be drafted out of his book right away and all at once, which is an interesting title, unlike the title of any of the other books you'll read, business books by Stephen Covey, Jim Collins, uh, all the other guys.
4:50
SPEAKER_00: Uh, Greg's view is that if you decide that you want to turn around your company or your personal life, but you sort of think it's gonna take years, it'll never happen.
5:01
SPEAKER_00: That actually turnarounds happen when they happen right away and when they happen all at once, which is a really nice idea, isn't it?
5:11
SPEAKER_00: That you don't have to wait until 2022.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: It's not gonna, if you if you try to slowly, gradually change your life over the next three years, it probably won't happen.
5:22
SPEAKER_00: But what we're going to do, uh Rodney and I are going to take you through uh the five principles that he gives for turning around your life right away and all at once.
5:32
SPEAKER_00: Subtitled Five Steps to Transform Your Business and Enrich Your Life.
5:39
SPEAKER_00: Now in the book, he asks the question, uh the question he had to do, he deals with with companies, because this is a book for businesses.
5:48
SPEAKER_00: Who needs a turnaround?
5:49
SPEAKER_00: And he says, well, your company needs a turnaround if it's in serious trouble.
5:53
SPEAKER_00: If you're like Continental Airlines and about to go bankrupt again, if you need, then you need radical surgery.
6:00
SPEAKER_00: But he said, receiving a call from Burger King and other companies, I realized, you know, these are companies that said that said we're returning money to our investors and we're actually doing pretty well.
6:11
SPEAKER_00: But we know we are underperforming.
6:14
SPEAKER_00: Satisfactorily on the surface, but we're satisfactorily underperforming.
6:22
SPEAKER_00: Who needs a turnaround companies like this?
6:25
SPEAKER_00: So in his book, he has five chapters, chapters basically one, three, five, seven, and nine, in which he has the five steps to a business turnaround.
6:34
SPEAKER_00: And these do not matter to me.
6:37
SPEAKER_00: Uh if you want to study this by the book, if you have a business that you want to get turned around.
6:42
SPEAKER_00: What I like is chapters two, four, six, eight, and ten.
6:46
SPEAKER_00: He wrote chapters two, four, six, eight, and ten because he had said no for 20 years to writing a book.
6:55
SPEAKER_00: Everybody said, you turn around businesses, why not write a book to talk about turning around businesses?
7:00
SPEAKER_00: He said, you know what?
7:01
SPEAKER_00: Everybody writes books like that.
7:04
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to take the time to do that.
7:06
SPEAKER_00: That's one of those sort of uh, you know, um, you know, things that you can list that's a resume virtue.
7:13
SPEAKER_00: And I'm looking now in the middle of my life, I'm at 40, you know, I want to I want to build eulogy virtues, the really important virtues.
7:22
SPEAKER_00: So he said, no, no, no, until all of a sudden he realized that he needed to change his own life.
7:29
SPEAKER_00: All right.
7:30
SPEAKER_00: So the background of this is that he grew up, he tells the story in, I think, chapter two of his book.
7:36
SPEAKER_00: Greg grew up as a Mennonite boy in a small town called Heston, Kansas, which I think presently has 3,700 people living in it.
7:44
SPEAKER_00: It's north of Wichita.
7:45
SPEAKER_00: It's a Mennonite town, and he grew up as the grandson of the founder of the great business in that town, the Heston Company, uh Agricultural Corporation, a Fortune 500 company, and he grew up learning how to work hard like other Mennonite boys.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: So he'd, you know, work all morning, uh, you know, cutting grass, he'd he'd work in the afternoon, hauling furniture, he'd work uh till 10 o'clock at night, baling hay.
8:11
SPEAKER_00: So he grew up, you know, learning a lot of good Mennonite qualities, and he also confesses in his book.
8:18
SPEAKER_00: He tells his personal testimony of how he trusted Christ as his savior as a boy.
8:23
SPEAKER_00: Grew up in a wonderful Christian home.
8:24
SPEAKER_00: He's not one of these guys who writes a book and says, My parents were awful, my grandparents were awful, I overcame a lot of terrible stuff.
8:31
SPEAKER_00: No, he says, I grew up in a great home and in a great community.
8:36
SPEAKER_00: And he says that I went to Washburn and he talks about all of his success, but he says, even though at age 45 I was well known, I was on TV shows, I was a multimillionaire, and I went to church every Sunday, and my wife and I, Rhonda and I, whom he met here at Topeka High Girl, uh worked in Iwana and I tithed, but I really only paid lip service to my faith, to my family, and to my friends.
9:05
SPEAKER_00: I was only lukewarm spiritually.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: I felt restless and unfulfilled.
9:10
SPEAKER_00: And I said to myself, there's gotta be more than this.
9:13
SPEAKER_00: His friends go, you gotta be kidding.
9:16
SPEAKER_00: You got it all.
9:17
SPEAKER_00: He says, No, I know there's more.
9:20
SPEAKER_00: And then he really understood what his problem was when he came across a verse in Revelation chapter 3.
9:27
SPEAKER_00: Uh, I don't remember if his pastor preached on it or whatever, but it's a famous verse in Revelation 3, 14 to 16, where Jesus says to the church at Laodicea, I know your deeds, that you're neither cold nor hot.
9:40
SPEAKER_00: I wish you were one or the other, so because you're lukewarm, neither cold, hot nor cold, I'm about to spew you out of my mouth.
9:48
SPEAKER_00: We talked about this last week.
9:49
SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to talk about it this week.
9:51
SPEAKER_00: Just simply to say that when he saw that word lukewarm, he knew that was him.
9:58
SPEAKER_00: That passage seemed written just to me, he writes.
10:01
SPEAKER_00: I was a card-carrying member of the Church of Laodicea, and suddenly it hit me satisfactorily underperforming.
10:09
SPEAKER_00: That word he used for companies, right?
10:12
SPEAKER_00: He goes, Yeah, I was satisfactory, but I was not performing the way I could.
10:16
SPEAKER_00: That was me and my personal life, and I knew I wasn't alone.
10:20
SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of friends, CEOs of small and major companies that he gets together with, and he said, There's a lot of us who seem to have it all together, who are very wealthy, who have nice families, but who feel unfulfilled, who know that there's something missing in our lives.
10:40
SPEAKER_00: And so he said to himself, you know what?
10:42
SPEAKER_00: I wonder if I could take my five principles and if I could tweak them and flip them and if they would work for me personally.
10:50
SPEAKER_00: And so he started that way.
10:52
SPEAKER_00: He started off by saying, you know who needs a turnaround personally?
10:56
SPEAKER_00: People in bad trouble, of course, need radical change even to survive.
11:03
SPEAKER_00: A small percentage.
11:04
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it's 2% or 5% of you listening to me this morning here in Mulvaine or over in college or who'll be following along on computer and so forth, you're in this boat.
11:17
SPEAKER_00: You need radical surgery.
11:19
SPEAKER_00: You know you need a turnaround.
11:21
SPEAKER_00: You're gonna jump on this.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: This series is partly for you, but it's especially for the 90, 95% of you who, frankly, are doing fine, but you're satisfactorily underperforming.
11:34
SPEAKER_00: You know there's more, more that you want in your life, more that God wants in your life, more that the people who know and love you would like to see in your life.
11:45
SPEAKER_00: That's what he knew he needed.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: And so that's chapters two, four, six, eight, and ten.
11:52
SPEAKER_00: So chapters one, three, five, seven, and nine on the left hand side on this screen.
11:56
SPEAKER_00: So he has five principles for businesses such as Continental Airlines.
12:01
SPEAKER_00: On the right hand side, there's gonna be five principles.
12:04
SPEAKER_00: This morning's principle number one, five principles for us as individuals.
12:09
SPEAKER_00: All right?
12:10
SPEAKER_00: So I want to take you through the all-important first principle.
12:14
SPEAKER_00: But first of all, I've got to ask you one more time.
12:17
SPEAKER_00: Could you use a turnaround?
12:21
SPEAKER_00: Some of you ask this week for the three questions, for us to send you the three questions that uh Rodney and I ended up with last week, but before I show them to you, I want to share with you an interesting verse.
12:34
SPEAKER_00: Nobody preaches on this verse out of the Old Testament.
12:37
SPEAKER_00: And I actually uh I was reading uh a Jewish, what a Jewish rabbi in New York City wrote once, and that's where I got this idea.
12:45
SPEAKER_00: This is not really the way to study the Bible, but it is an interesting, it just is an interesting illustration of how many of us are in our Christian lives.
12:55
SPEAKER_00: The backstory in Numbers 21 is that God has redeemed Israel from bondage in Egypt, right?
13:01
SPEAKER_00: And he saved them through the Red Sea.
13:02
SPEAKER_00: You know the story, and he's given them his word at Mount Sinai.
13:06
SPEAKER_00: Okay, and here goes the verse.
13:07
SPEAKER_00: The verse says that the Israelites, get this, the Israelites went to a town called Matanah.
13:14
SPEAKER_00: Just so happens that in Hebrew that word means gift.
13:17
SPEAKER_00: And from Matanah they went to Nahal, and that word in Hebrew means God's property or God's possession or God's inheritance.
13:27
SPEAKER_00: And from Nahaliel to Bamot, which means the heights, and from Bamot into the valley, gift, property, heights, valley, which it seems to me is a nice narrative, a picture of your life and my life for many of us.
13:43
SPEAKER_00: For many of us.
13:45
SPEAKER_00: That is, we received the gift of God, the gift of eternal life, the gift of forgiveness of sins.
13:50
SPEAKER_00: By faith we trusted in the Son.
13:52
SPEAKER_00: We saw him hanging on the cross.
13:54
SPEAKER_00: We said, that there, he, that's God.
13:56
SPEAKER_00: He's dying for me.
13:57
SPEAKER_00: He's dying in my place.
13:59
SPEAKER_00: We put our trust in him.
14:00
SPEAKER_00: We said, I can't do it on my own.
14:02
SPEAKER_00: I trust you.
14:03
SPEAKER_00: And at that moment you were saved, and God gave you the gift of eternal life, the gift of forgiveness of sins.
14:08
SPEAKER_00: He made you a child in his family.
14:11
SPEAKER_00: Just amazing gifts, right?
14:13
SPEAKER_00: And then as you developed in your Christian life, you realize you were God's beloved child, and you were his possession, right?
14:20
SPEAKER_00: You were a king's kid, and your life, your Christian life grew.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: And in fact, you went up even to the heights, you would say there was a time in your life where, wow, felt so close to God and so intimate.
14:34
SPEAKER_00: We used to have, as some people here who joined me in that, we used to have a welcome class, and we'd have about 40 new TBCers come in.
14:42
SPEAKER_00: And we used to give a survey, and when we'd sort of have this list, one, two, three, four, five, where do you find yourself on, you know, on this uh on this journey?
14:51
SPEAKER_00: And more people than in any other category would say, you know what, but at this point I'm sort of in a valley.
14:58
SPEAKER_00: I'm not in the heights like I used to be.
15:00
SPEAKER_00: I'm I don't have the joy that I'd like to have.
15:03
SPEAKER_00: I feel somewhat unfulfilled.
15:05
SPEAKER_00: I know that there could be more there.
15:06
SPEAKER_00: I'm satisfactorily perhaps underperforming.
15:10
SPEAKER_00: So I simply state this verse, Numbers 21, 19, as an illustration.
15:15
SPEAKER_00: Some of you can find yourselves there.
15:17
SPEAKER_00: Some of you are clear back here, you're just trusted Christ as your Savior.
15:21
SPEAKER_00: One of you that I just prayed with a couple of weeks ago.
15:25
SPEAKER_00: Praise God for that.
15:27
SPEAKER_00: And you'll move to the place where you know you are God's chosen, you'll feel so loved by Him.
15:33
SPEAKER_00: And you move to the heights.
15:34
SPEAKER_00: But many of you, I suspect, are at a place where you think, I could be better.
15:39
SPEAKER_00: I would like to be where I once were.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's what we're talking about today.
15:44
SPEAKER_00: And so we ended last week with the three questions.
15:47
SPEAKER_00: Am I performing in life to my full potential?
15:51
SPEAKER_00: Question number two: does my life feel fulfilling and significant?
15:55
SPEAKER_00: Apart from my income, my business, okay, just my own personal life, does it feel fulfilling and significant?
16:01
SPEAKER_00: And third, are there areas in my life where I need to change?
16:06
SPEAKER_00: And if your answer to that is yes, and I hope it is, because my answer to that is yes, my title today is Your Go Forward Plan, because that's the first principle, and it's the single most important principle.
16:21
SPEAKER_00: Because if you don't get by this, then you'll know you have no need of principles two, three, four, and five.
16:26
SPEAKER_00: Next week, Rodney and I'll take two and three, and then we'll go four and five in our last two weeks.
16:33
SPEAKER_00: So here we are right now.
16:35
SPEAKER_00: Step one, principle number one, write a one-page go forward plan.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: This is the personal side.
16:41
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so last time you'll see the business side, it doesn't matter to us.
16:45
SPEAKER_00: Buy the book if you want to turn your business around.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: On the personal side, he said that he would go into a business, and if it took him weeks, he would do it.
16:55
SPEAKER_00: The most important thing he said was to be able to write down a change plan for Continental Airlines, Burger King, Quisnos, whatever it was, on one page.
17:04
SPEAKER_00: If it couldn't fit on one page, he said it was too much.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: And I would suggest the very same thing that you do what I've done this month, and that is you take a page, you take a pen, and you write down where you think God and you would like you to change.
17:21
SPEAKER_00: A go forward plan for your life.
17:24
SPEAKER_00: He's a friend, uh, it was a friend.
17:26
SPEAKER_00: Stephen Covey's passed away now about five years ago, but he was a friend of Stephen Covey, and uh and I got the feeling that he had developed his first principle in chat after chatting, too, with Stephen Covey.
17:39
SPEAKER_00: So uh in Stephen Covey's famous book, perhaps the most famous self-improvement book, called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, his first two habits, Stephen Covey's first two habits, I think, are sort of uh the expansion of this first go forward plan.
17:57
SPEAKER_00: Habit number one for Stephen Covey is be proactive.
18:02
SPEAKER_00: Be proactive.
18:03
SPEAKER_00: And what he means is get off this idea that somehow you're determined by your past.
18:10
SPEAKER_00: Either determined by your genetics, it's your grandparents' fault for giving you the genes they did, or determined by your uh, you know, psychically determined, that is your parents the way they raised you, it's their fault that you are the way you are, or that you're determined by your circumstances, by your job, or by your boss, or by the economy, or by anything else.
18:31
SPEAKER_00: No, instead realize the key to success in your life is to be proactive.
18:35
SPEAKER_00: Realize you're in charge of your life, you can create change.
18:39
SPEAKER_00: Stephen Covey liked to say, like to, he liked to say, that it is not your circumstances that define your life, it is your decisions that define your life.
18:52
SPEAKER_00: So that's sort of the prologue to his habit number two, which I think flows right into Greg's plan number one.
19:01
SPEAKER_00: Habit number two is begin with the end in mind.
19:05
SPEAKER_00: Picture the changes you want and make a plan.
19:09
SPEAKER_00: That's Stephen Covey.
19:11
SPEAKER_00: It's very much like Greg Brennerman as well.
19:15
SPEAKER_00: Greg makes it really specific.
19:17
SPEAKER_00: One page, a pencil or a pen, simple, straightforward, and honest.
19:25
SPEAKER_00: Every month, uh Greg says in his book, he loves to have, he's friends with a lot of young CEOs, and he loves to have, he and his wife love to have them in their house, and he says every single time he has these groups of uh CEOs that fly in, he likes to play what he calls the chip game or a chip exercise.
19:46
SPEAKER_00: And he piles a bunch of white chips on a table, and and just on the you know, on the inside of those, there are red chips and then there are blue chips, and he challenges the two teams, divides them into two teams.
19:57
SPEAKER_00: So he says, uh he says, pick a representative from each team, preferably one with big hands.
20:03
SPEAKER_00: And so then he says, put one hand behind your back, no scooping of chips.
20:07
SPEAKER_00: Now you have 30 seconds to go and grab as many chips as you can in one hand.
20:12
SPEAKER_00: And so they go up there and they start grabbing chips, one, you know, with their hand.
20:17
SPEAKER_00: And then they count the chips at the end.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: And then he says to them, okay, the exercise is over.
20:24
SPEAKER_00: Would it have made a difference if I'd told you ahead of time that the white chips are worth a single point each, that the red chips are worth 10 points each, and the blue chips were worth 25 points each, because he says, never does anyone grab any blue chips.
20:40
SPEAKER_00: They're on the inside, everybody just starts with the white chips.
20:44
SPEAKER_00: And that exercise, he says, is the beginning of him trying to explain to people that the easiest thing in life is to make to-do lists every day or every week that consist all of white chip material, that is the urgent things, the things that are right in front of us, the things that are the easiest to do, the things that don't change us forever, the things that uh, you know, maybe other people want us to do, or that we know we really need to do.
21:13
SPEAKER_00: But he says, those are white chip exercises.
21:18
SPEAKER_00: He says, what we need to do is to stop and think, what are the really important things I need to do in life?
21:27
SPEAKER_00: The whole reason he says for putting together a one-page plan for your life is to help you clearly identify your blue chips and then to develop a workable strategy to ensure that you focus on them.
21:40
SPEAKER_00: What he means by that is determine the things that are really the most important to you and that you believe are the most important in your life for the sake of others and for the sake of God.
21:51
SPEAKER_00: Those are the blue chip things.
21:53
SPEAKER_00: Those are the things says, because if you go through your whole life and you finish every to do list and you're on your deathbed, you'll look.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Back and you'll go, yes, but I really didn't do the things that really were most important, rather than focusing on the really important things that will make you feel better about yourself.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: Um I love the story about the woman who was uh trying desperately to get some ketchup out of the ketchup jar and she was going crazy because you know it was the you know a nice brand of ketchup heinz, I think it is, or something.
22:33
SPEAKER_00: It just doesn't come out very well, and she's banging it and so forth.
22:36
SPEAKER_00: The phone rings, and so because she's occupied, she asked her four-year-old to get the phone.
22:40
SPEAKER_00: Four-year-old gets the phone, she calls out to her mother, she says, It's the minister, and then uh, and he wants to talk to you, and she says, I'll be right there.
22:52
SPEAKER_00: And the little girl then says on the phone to the minister, she'll be right here.
22:59
SPEAKER_00: She's hitting the bottle.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: And uh, when I heard that story, I thought, you know, you can't control what other people say about you, not even what your own children say about you.
23:15
SPEAKER_00: And you certainly can't control what other people think about you.
23:19
SPEAKER_00: But you can control who you really are, right?
23:25
SPEAKER_00: And the purpose of the one-page plan is to change who you really are into the person that you want to be.
23:33
SPEAKER_00: Now, one of the difficulties with this is that we generally think about a work-life balance.
23:39
SPEAKER_00: That is, I have this work to do, I have these assignments I need to do, I have the urgent things I need to do, and in the time remaining, I am going to do the exercising that I know I need to do, I'm gonna do the quiet time I need to do, I'm gonna spend the time with my family and friends that I need to spend.
23:56
SPEAKER_00: Work-life balance, he said, will kill you.
23:58
SPEAKER_00: In an ADD society, when the media is just exploding, when you have a cell phone, social media, you know, videoing and so forth, you won't, it just won't work.
24:10
SPEAKER_00: Instead of a work-life balance, you need a work-life integration.
24:16
SPEAKER_00: Integration in such a way that as you plan your life, the blue chips are scattered in amongst the white chips.
24:24
SPEAKER_00: In your work life, in all of your life, you are doing things that are really important.
24:30
SPEAKER_00: It's not somehow segregated off into a special category.
24:36
SPEAKER_00: Now he gives a really specific guideline.
24:38
SPEAKER_00: He says, here's what I did, here's what my friends have done, here's what Rhonda has done.
24:43
SPEAKER_00: He says, I divided it into five categories.
24:46
SPEAKER_00: And by the way, as I was working on my go forward plan this last week, I used these five F's, all right?
24:53
SPEAKER_00: Faith, family, friends, fitness, and finance.
24:56
SPEAKER_00: Faith, family, friends, fitness, finance.
25:00
SPEAKER_00: Faith, of course, your relationship to God.
25:03
SPEAKER_00: And by the way, um, friends and family are not the same things, are they?
25:09
SPEAKER_00: You know, I love uh who it was the grandpa that said after a family reunion, wow, there's 50 of us there, and I looked at all the nephews and the nieces and the cousins and the brothers and the sisters and the grandchildren and so forth, and I said to my wife, wow, all of these relatives are not one friend.
25:24
SPEAKER_00: Sorry, that sounds bad.
25:25
SPEAKER_00: But, you know, friends and family are not the same thing.
25:30
SPEAKER_00: And some people might wonder, why is friends really on the same level of importance as all these others?
25:36
SPEAKER_00: If you've read Aristotle or C.S.
25:38
SPEAKER_00: Lewis, you know the answer is yes.
25:40
SPEAKER_00: The answer is your friends are completely unlike any other category.
25:44
SPEAKER_00: They're unlike family, they're unlike anything else.
25:47
SPEAKER_00: If you're too busy if you're your friends, you really are too busy, you know.
25:52
SPEAKER_00: Now the truth is, if you want to fly with eagles, you need to stop hanging around with some of those turkeys, but you need to uh f figure out ways to spend time.
26:01
SPEAKER_00: Family, friends, and so forth.
26:03
SPEAKER_00: And and you know, something that occurred to me, I I've been here a long time.
26:10
SPEAKER_00: You know, here's what's interesting to me.
26:12
SPEAKER_00: I can think of stories with each of these.
26:14
SPEAKER_00: Each of these is, in a sense, by itself a tipping point, or as who's the author, Charles Duhig, you think, call it a keystone habit.
26:22
SPEAKER_00: Where somebody who had almost everything going for him when they changed one thing in one of these categories, it was sort of the trigger that made their entire life better.
26:34
SPEAKER_00: I can think of a guy who said to me, you know, I had no idea it would change everything, but for the first time in all of my life, I started having a daily Bible, I started a daily Bible reading program.
26:45
SPEAKER_00: I'm happier.
26:47
SPEAKER_00: Everything else seems to be working better in life.
26:50
SPEAKER_00: That for him was the trigger.
26:53
SPEAKER_00: Family, I I can immediately think of a couple of my friends, one of whom terribly alienated, you know, from his father for decades, another alienated from a sister out on the West Coast, convicted by God, deciding that they would make that sort of a path, bought a ticket to the Pacific Northwest, spent a day with the sister, came back.
27:19
SPEAKER_00: Everything else had changed in their life as well.
27:22
SPEAKER_00: With the forgiveness and the and the unity that happened with family, that was the trigger that changed the rest of their life.
27:30
SPEAKER_00: It was sort of that keystone habit that sort of affected everything else.
27:36
SPEAKER_00: Friends, I think of, I think of a I think of a woman in this church who I thought had it all going together, a young woman, and she said, I think I'm the loneliest person in all of creation.
27:46
SPEAKER_00: Talked about what to do.
27:47
SPEAKER_00: She called another woman in church, an older woman, said, If I, would you be willing to meet with me one time a week just for coffee, I could pick your brain.
27:55
SPEAKER_00: And the result of that was a friendship which has lasted for life and and made this young woman, just was the tipping point for the rest of her life.
28:05
SPEAKER_00: We all know people, right?
28:07
SPEAKER_00: Fitness who've lost four pounds, no, 40 pounds or something like that.
28:12
SPEAKER_00: And you know these people, and all of a sudden they walk around more confident, their quiet time is better, you know, they're socially, they don't hide out in their house anymore, right?
28:22
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is the one that's easiest for me.
28:24
SPEAKER_00: I think about this all the time, right?
28:25
SPEAKER_00: And so do you.
28:26
SPEAKER_00: So do you.
28:27
SPEAKER_00: Some of you don't need to.
28:28
SPEAKER_00: I hate you.
28:29
SPEAKER_00: So, anyway, I don't really hate you.
28:33
SPEAKER_00: Just struggle with envy.
28:35
SPEAKER_00: So, and then there's finance.
28:36
SPEAKER_00: How many of us, and we all don't we know people who've had this huge debt, and it's like and they never thought they could conquer that debt.
28:44
SPEAKER_00: They had all these credit cards and so forth, and then they climbed that Mount Everest.
28:48
SPEAKER_00: They got help, you know, through the programs that we have and so forth, and all of a sudden that was the trigger that triggered the whole rest of their life, right?
28:55
SPEAKER_00: So I just throw that in.
28:57
SPEAKER_00: You may list, like, like like I have a list, and there's two of these categories where I know really clearly.
29:04
SPEAKER_00: I have cleared, clearly delineated already.
29:07
SPEAKER_00: I know you're gonna be doing it this week.
29:08
SPEAKER_00: You better.
29:09
SPEAKER_00: And uh, but I'm I'm waiting to see what the Lord will do in those areas.
29:14
SPEAKER_00: Now, I will just share with you, Greg shares his whole plan with you in the book.
29:18
SPEAKER_00: I'll just share this first thing for him, his go forward plan, the real the faith thing.
29:23
SPEAKER_00: He wanted a deep walk with God, something deeper than just going to church, and he knew that needed to include a daily quiet time and prayer.
29:32
SPEAKER_00: It also, you know, meant Bible reading and even memorizing verses once in a while.
29:37
SPEAKER_00: You know, in his 40s, he can still do that.
29:40
SPEAKER_00: No.
29:41
SPEAKER_00: But he said, for me, one of the key things was accountability.
29:44
SPEAKER_00: You know, he says there's some other CEOs, major CEOs in our country who are Christians, who we decided to challenge each other every afternoon.
29:53
SPEAKER_00: He says, from two to three, sometimes two to four, we get on a call.
29:58
SPEAKER_00: We four, at times been five CEOs in this country who are Christians.
30:03
SPEAKER_00: We hold each other accountable.
30:04
SPEAKER_00: We talk about our spiritual life, our devotional life, our family life.
30:08
SPEAKER_00: Every single Sunday I do that.
30:10
SPEAKER_00: He says, that's been transformative in my walk with God.
30:12
SPEAKER_00: And he reads A.W.
30:14
SPEAKER_00: Tozer and that sort of stuff too.
30:16
SPEAKER_00: So that's what we're talking, is an example of what we're talking about.
30:20
SPEAKER_00: You get really, really specific.
30:23
SPEAKER_00: Uh, let me, as I move this sort of to a climax, to a close.
30:28
SPEAKER_00: Philippians 3.13, brothers and sisters, Paul said, I don't consider myself yet to have taken hold of it, but one thing I do, forgetting what's behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press forward, he says, toward uh becoming more like Jesus Christ.
30:42
SPEAKER_00: So I want you to just observe a couple of things.
30:45
SPEAKER_00: Paul looked at each day as a turning point in his life.
30:51
SPEAKER_00: Today was a turning point.
30:54
SPEAKER_00: There is a past that stretches out behind.
30:56
SPEAKER_00: There's a future that stretches out before.
30:58
SPEAKER_00: He's gonna forget what's behind, he's gonna stretch out to what's in the future.
31:03
SPEAKER_00: In a sense, this day is a turning point.
31:06
SPEAKER_00: Every day is a turning point in your life.
31:09
SPEAKER_00: A decision that you make today can affect the rest of your life.
31:13
SPEAKER_00: I'm urging you to make a decision simply to grab a piece of paper and a pen.
31:18
SPEAKER_00: Talk to God, maybe talk to your spouse, talk to your friends.
31:23
SPEAKER_00: But you already know.
31:24
SPEAKER_00: You already know where it is that you want to change.
31:27
SPEAKER_00: All right?
31:28
SPEAKER_00: A second thing you'll notice is that it gets really simple.
31:32
SPEAKER_00: It's down to one thing.
31:33
SPEAKER_00: You don't need, you don't need 50 pages.
31:36
SPEAKER_00: You know, it just make it really, really simple.
31:40
SPEAKER_00: And notice he realizes he hasn't attained yet.
31:43
SPEAKER_00: That's important.
31:45
SPEAKER_00: That's important.
31:46
SPEAKER_00: Somebody came up after first service.
31:48
SPEAKER_00: I feel like it's hard for me to figure out how I need to improve.
31:52
SPEAKER_00: I got some suggestions for you.
31:54
SPEAKER_00: No.
31:55
SPEAKER_00: But you know what?
31:56
SPEAKER_00: Paul didn't need to grow in Paul had trusted Christ as his savior.
32:00
SPEAKER_00: He didn't need that.
32:01
SPEAKER_00: He would have been on the road to Damascus.
32:03
SPEAKER_00: The light had shined downright.
32:05
SPEAKER_00: He had the gift.
32:06
SPEAKER_00: He had the gift.
32:07
SPEAKER_00: So he had gotten forgiveness of sins in eternal life.
32:12
SPEAKER_00: Paul wasn't short when it came to his mission.
32:15
SPEAKER_00: He knew that he needed to lead the world's Gentiles to Christ.
32:18
SPEAKER_00: But Paul goes, in my personal life, in my personal life, in that internal life, I've got some developing to do because I'm not yet at the level of the person of Jesus Christ.
32:29
SPEAKER_00: I want to be like him and I know how I have farther to go.
32:33
SPEAKER_00: If Paul would say that, Greg Brennan would say that, you and I can say that as well.
32:40
SPEAKER_00: All right.
32:42
SPEAKER_00: And my father-in-law was one of the greatest leaders I've ever met.
32:46
SPEAKER_00: Wish he hadn't passed away young, age 55 in 1992.
32:49
SPEAKER_00: Melody's dad.
32:50
SPEAKER_00: Name was Jim Smith, one of the national leaders of Youth for Christ.
32:54
SPEAKER_00: Went down and became the associate pastor to Billy Graham's brother-in-law, one of the largest Presbyterian churches in the country.
33:00
SPEAKER_00: Started a major Dallas Counseling Center.
33:04
SPEAKER_00: Wonderful man.
33:05
SPEAKER_00: He was just a natural leader.
33:08
SPEAKER_00: He had this mantra, he had this thing he would often say.
33:11
SPEAKER_00: As a counselor, he really believed in reality therapy.
33:14
SPEAKER_00: He believed that you ought to start where you were.
33:16
SPEAKER_00: He thought you ought to look at where you were in life, your past, not let your past hold you back, not let dreams of the future, you know, cause you to be unrealistic, just to look exactly where you were, start where you were.
33:29
SPEAKER_00: Here's a good friend Fred Smith, one of the, still at age 89 or something, Christian leader in America, unless he's just passed away, used to quote, he and Jim Smith were best friends, would say, Jim Smith's always telling me, trust, start where you are and start now.
33:46
SPEAKER_00: It's a challenge I would make you, and uh and Fred Smith, uh Kenneth McFarland of uh Topeka Fame, I know a previous generation.
33:54
SPEAKER_00: Anybody ever heard of Kenneth McFarlane, former superintendent of Topeka schools?
33:59
SPEAKER_00: When I was a salesman, have you?
34:01
SPEAKER_00: When I was a salesman going door to door, I used to have this back in the old days.
34:04
SPEAKER_00: I had a phonograph and I had this record, Kenneth McFarlane, Topeka, Kansas, Superintendent of Schools.
34:08
SPEAKER_00: He was one of these motivational speakers, and I used to put this record on and listen to him back when I was in my teens a long time ago.
34:14
SPEAKER_00: Kenneth McFarlane told a story on that record of uh of growing up in Topeka, Kansas, being in a one-room schoolhouse, and his teacher, seeing the possibilities in Kenny, said to him one day, where would you like to go in life?
34:31
SPEAKER_00: How high would you like to go?
34:33
SPEAKER_00: And Kenneth McFarlane pointed up, he said, I'd like to go as far as I can.
34:37
SPEAKER_00: And she said to him, Well, the ladder to where you want to go starts where your shoes are, right there on the floor.
34:44
SPEAKER_00: Be realistic.
34:46
SPEAKER_00: Start where you are, be honest with God, get that piece of paper, get a pen, say, here's where I am, here's where I want to be, where God wants me to be, where my friends and family would like me to be and need me to be, and make those decisions.
35:01
SPEAKER_00: Listen, it's never, somebody said this, not me, it's as famous, it's never too late to be who you might have been.
35:11
SPEAKER_00: We're in a 15 to 20 day interesting window right now.
35:16
SPEAKER_00: Every year for 15 days in May, about 15 or 20 days is when everybody climbs Mount Everest.
35:22
SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, the storms are too bad, the winds are too high, it's too cold, and so forth.
35:27
SPEAKER_00: So this year, more than more people than ever before paid their$11,000 to the government there in Kathmandu to have the right to do this.
35:36
SPEAKER_00: It's 378, so quite a few people just in these 15, 20 days, are going to try to summit Mount Everest.
35:43
SPEAKER_00: And not even half of them will get there, it'll storm as they're going up.
35:48
SPEAKER_00: About half a dozen die every year on the average.
35:50
SPEAKER_00: One's already died a couple days ago.
35:54
SPEAKER_00: But it's kind of a sweet story.
35:55
SPEAKER_00: He it was in his seventh trip, and he's he was an older guy, you know, late 60s, early 70s, something like that.
36:02
SPEAKER_00: And got about halfway up, and they looked in his tent the next morning, and he just he was just dead.
36:08
SPEAKER_00: I tend to think he was probably happy.
36:11
SPEAKER_00: That's that's what he liked doing in life.
36:13
SPEAKER_00: But I just am amazed at a guy who would be that adventurous, you know.
36:18
SPEAKER_00: I did a wedding uh outdoors yesterday evening.
36:21
SPEAKER_00: Uh their names were Angie and Earl, really sweet.
36:25
SPEAKER_00: And as they were taking their vows, I said to them, is there anything else that you'd like to say to each other?
36:30
SPEAKER_00: They'd said we'd like to say more stuff.
36:32
SPEAKER_00: So I put it in, they're typical, you know, you put the mic in front of the guy, he says about four words, and the girl has about four pages.
36:39
SPEAKER_00: But so anyway, he shares and it's really sweet.
36:42
SPEAKER_00: And then and then she read her four pages, and it was great.
36:45
SPEAKER_00: She listed all those great qualities.
36:48
SPEAKER_00: And she talked about how she either shared or wanted to be have all those qualities, but she said, There's one of your qualities that I don't want to have, and I don't share.
36:59
SPEAKER_00: And she says, that's that you're adventurous.
37:03
SPEAKER_00: I'm that's not me.
37:05
SPEAKER_00: She says, I'll let you be that.
37:08
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's the way I feel, especially when it comes to something like Mount Everest.
37:13
SPEAKER_00: I'm not adventurous like that.
37:16
SPEAKER_00: But then I was uh driving home and I thought, you know, there's a greater adventure even than climbing Mount Everest, and that's climbing inside your own soul, being realistic with who you are, and saying, here's how I'd like to change.
37:30
SPEAKER_00: That's not something that comes naturally to us, and for some of us that's like climbing Mount Everest.
37:37
SPEAKER_00: But that's what I think the Lord wants us to do.
37:40
SPEAKER_00: And if you'll do that, if you'll join me in that journey, then I think we can become better people.
37:47
SPEAKER_00: For the Lord's sake and for the sake of those that we love.
37:51
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
37:53
SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, thank you for your Son Jesus Christ, for the fact that he came down from heaven, for the fact that he died in our place, for the fact that he rose again to give us a brand new life, and some aspects of this new life were a little scary to us, and scary to think about changing.
38:16
SPEAKER_00: I ask that you'd give us the courage to climb that Everest, the courage to trust you for that, the courage to write down where we think you'd like us to be.
38:28
SPEAKER_00: Lord, bless these people as they do that.
38:30
SPEAKER_00: Bless us as we become better Christians, better husbands, better wives, better parents, better in every possible way.
38:39
SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name.
38:40
SPEAKER_00: Amen.