Elevation with Steven Furtick - My Joy Is My Job

Episode Date: July 12, 2024

Obedience unlocks the gift of God’s joy. In Mindset MasterClass Session 5, New York Times bestselling author Pastor Steven Furtick sits down with Brendon Burchard to discuss how the happiness we’re looking for is hidden in the things we’re resisting.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, this is Stephen Ferdick. I'm the pastor of Elevation Church, and this is our podcast. I wanted to thank you for joining us today. Hope this inspires you. Hope it builds your fate. Hope it gives you perspective to see God is moving in your life.

Enjoy the message. Welcome back to the Do the New You mindset master class. By the way, if you're this far, you might as well know there were some alternate titles for this conversation between me and my friend Brendan Burchard. Brendan is one of the most sought-after performance coaches in the world. So I thought we should call this segment, Holy Ghost Life Coach. And he was like, yeah, no, what about mindset master class?

I'm like, yeah, yeah. But what if we called it like, what if we called it after amen? You know, because that's my heart. Like, we all say we believe this. And in the book, I'm giving you six truths to say over yourself. But after you say amen, like, yeah, I believe our last mindset. God is not against me. He's in it with me, working through me, fighting for me. I believe with God there's always a way by faith that will find it. I believe Christ is in me. I am enough. I believe I'm not

stuck unless I stop. Now, after I say amen, which means so be it, what action do I take? Right. And we're putting these conversations together as a gift to you to take you deeper into what we shared in the book, the six mindsets to become who you were created to be. And, and, you're And this mindset, I really do need a life coach because I'll tell you what, putting this in the book to me almost felt like an act of hypocrisy because the mindset, this is the shortest one, I guess, and the hardest one for me. It goes, my joy is my job. And it's like, I don't really want to call joy a job. Joy is supposed to be a sensation, right? It overtakes me with a bite of a Hershey bar or with a glimpse of the sunset.

It doesn't have to be something decadent, but joy is this rush that I experience that comes from an event. And the more I study it, Brendan, in the Bible, the more I study it in life, I'm really hanging on to that quote from Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys that I put in the book. And he's had mental health challenges that a lot of people know. know about, but, you know, the Beach Boys music is so happy and so sunny. And he looks at the documentarian in this movie that I saw about his life, and he says, you know, I found out happiness is really hard work. And that hit me. I'm like, yeah, if we're just chasing happiness as an end result and not really taking responsibility to own our emotions, that's what we want

to get into a little bit today with Brendan. How to own your emotions. So you don't run around saying stuff like, they didn't make me happy. Or I left that company because it wasn't making me fulfilled. Well, happiness, fulfillment, all of those things aren't something that someone else can make you. And I think that ownership process of our own joy is a lifelong process, a moment by moment process. You know, in the church people say, they stole my joy. Then what in the world were you doing putting it where they could steal it? You should have locked it up. You should have had it somewhere safe.

You should have put your joy somewhere other than just how somebody else treats you. But really, like I told you, in so many of these mindsets, these are the things that I preach to me because nobody is going to vote me for the naturally happiest human alive. That's not my disposition. That doesn't mean that it can't be my destination, though. I can become more joyful. I can become more grateful. I can practice these things

and that's why I brought the world's best life coach to help me. So make me happy, Brendan. It's your job. Make me happy. Make me joyful. I don't know if I can make you happy. I'll start with the coaching piece.

Yeah. He said a second ago, they stole my joy. And a lot of people say that. I say, no one stole your joy. You gave them your attention. Wow. That's what happened.

That's what happened. That's what happened. That's what happened. No one took it. You gave them your attention. You gave them your attention. gave them your belief. You gave them, you know, your thought pattern instead of owning the fact that you control this.

You're the gatekeeper up here. You're the generator up here. You're the commander up here. And when you know you own this, you start to own your emotions. And I always love to tell people there's a difference between emotion and feelings. Different. A nice way to think about is we have impulsive emotions and we have ongoing feelings. feelings. And let me give you a difference. If you go into a haunted house, right, and someone jumps

out from the corner, that fear that hits you, that is automatic, it's physical, and it's impulsive. Fear just hits you. You get scared, right? But if you go home at night, and now it's 7 o'clock at night, you're safe in your house, the doors are locked, your husband or your spouse is there, things are good, and you still, you start kind of getting spooked. I feel like something as bad is going to happen. that ongoing feeling, you're generating that with your thoughts. The first one, immediate fear, scared, that's impulsive, that's automatic. An emotion is like that. It just happens in your body. A psychologist found emotions pass. Usually in 90 seconds to three minutes, the emotion actually

pass. Now our thoughts really do take over, and our thoughts are forming a story. Our thoughts are telling us what something means. Our thoughts are either taking command of us or we're going to take command of them. Because we can say, wait, I'm in the house. Everything's okay. Oh, I just got scared earlier. And I'm holding on to that. Unhappiness is very similar. Something can happen.

It's an unhappy situation. Someone was mean to us. You know, something awful happened. It makes me feel bad. There's grief there. There's hurt there. And we can feel that. Like, in that immediate emotion, I'm just like, oh, that I, I

feel bad. But if later on, it's an ongoing feeling of happiness, I promise you're architecting your thoughts in such a way that's creating the ongoing happiness. So think about it. Is the situations of your life, the bad events of your life, are they still dragging on in the feelings of today? That's where we say, oh, I got to take back command of the architecture of my thoughts here because that's what's really screwing me up. That's what's stealing my joy. is I'm not architecting the thoughts it would give me that. And then you hear me teach all the time. I'm always sharing this idea that my dominant metaphor in my life is about a power plant.

I love this. You'll listen to the power plant. This change your life. This crazy. This changes my life every day. Yeah. And the idea is, you know, the power plant doesn't have energy. It actually generates energy.

So technically, a power plant. takes energy from one level of resource, a rushing stream or solar or whatever, it's taking energy from one level, lower level of utilization, it's transforming that energy into a higher level of utilization, and it's transmitting it. And I love it because the power plant doesn't have energy. Oh, it's taking energy from one lower level. It's transforming it and transmitting it into a higher level. That means I can do that in my own life. You know, I'm feeling a low level of energy today. I don't have motivation. I don't have joy. I don't have love in my heart. Actually, I woke up kind of grumpy. Well, that's a low level of utilization. It's my job.

How do I take the energy, the world, or my situation, my life, my relationships, and how do I take ownership as a power plant? And how do I uplevel that? Why do I do that with my thoughts? My thoughts are my turbines. My thoughts are the thing that can spin that energy up into a higher level. And now I can be a person of goodness. I can be a person of cheer. I can be a person of joy. And is that choice to be the power plant of the feelings of my life that has made my life more fulfilling because before that, I was at the whim of everybody else and everything else. Because see, most of the world right now, it's a pretty low level energy. There's a lot of division and vitriol and hate and us against them. It's low level.

But you can say, I'm not going to live in that mud puddle. I'm going to take the water out of that mud puddle. I'm going to turn it through these turbines of joy and faith and reasoning and logic and a desire for an extraordinary life. I'm going to spin that up and boom. I'm going to feel different and transmit different. Yeah, see, man, now you make me want to be in church. I want it to be 10 o'clock on a Sunday morning. I want him in B3 Oregon because I want to talk about the power plant.

and Jesus said, you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria. What's that? That's taking the power and then transforming that power into a witness. So you see what he just did? He said, I'm going to give you power from another place. And then I want your faith to be the turbine by which you take what I've given you and take it to the world. And that's so much more empowering to me than it is to sit there and go, Lord, give me joy. I'm trying to get people out of this pattern that we have, Brendan, sometimes of going, Lord, give me joy, give me joy, give me joy. And the Lord gave you somebody to help that would have brought you joy if you would have helped that person.

And I also think that we should talk about this. Isn't the happiness. that we want often hidden in the thing that we resist? Yeah, and you said earlier about peace, and our friend Trent Shelton talks about protecting your peace. So I think the first part of our conversation today has all been about generating it, about generating joy, generating the emotions we want to feel, being the power plant.

But there's another job we have. So the first job we have is being the generator. The second job we have, which is really important today, is we've got to be the gatekeeper, the gatekeeper of our joy and our happiness. He talked about the enemy, and sometimes the enemy is taking that, and we constantly continue abusing ourselves

and taking away our own happiness by engaging in things that we know are bad for us or are not good. I'll give you a convenient example right now about social media. A lot of people don't understand that all of social media research is shown it doesn't make us feel good.

If you're generating and you're the career, or you're doing it to create relationships, it can be a very positive and entertaining thing. But for most people, actually creates a low level of anxiety and stress. Because here's what happens when you're scrolling. This is really important to understand. If you're in a bad mood, be careful about disengaging from the world and going to social media. Here's what they found from the research. This is amazing.

When you're scrolling, every time you scroll past something, the brain has to do three things. First, as you're scrolling, the brain has to make a judgment, a decision. Is this worthy of stopping and paying attention to? Is this worthy of my attention? So immediate judgment. Is it worthy? Is it good? Do I like it?

Judgment. Second thing is comparison. Am I like that? Do I do things like that? Does my house look like that? Does my kitchen look like that? Did I wear that thing like that? So we compare.

And then the third thing is we end up having what's called contempt. which is division. We go, well, they're like that, I'm not. And so think about that. Most people scroll past over 1,000 posts a day. So a thousand times, you just wired your brain for more judgment and for more comparison. Now, would you ever go to a teenager and go, here's what I want to do. I want to train you all day to be more judgmental.

Wow. I want to train you all day to compare yourself to more people. people. We know those are negative behaviors, but we do them. And most people are on now social media an hour to two hours a day consuming, not generating, consuming, just like blindly scrolling through. And you have to understand you're not being the gatekeeper of your own peace and your own mind. Every time you're scrolling through, you're training yourself. This is not scrolling passively. This is training. You are training yourself to be more judgment. judgmental. That's why you're unhappy. You judge everything. Why is everyone so judgmental today?

Because they train themselves a thousand times today. Why is everyone comparing themselves? Why do we have us versus them? Because we're comparing ourselves all day. We're not gatekeeping our mind. It's just like when you hang around bad people. And I know that's a bad phrase, you know, to say bad people. But you know people whose behaviors cause negative results in your life, the more you hang around them, the more you become like them. Well, the more you live in a land. of judgment and comparison, the more you become that, and it steals your joy. You're like, well, it's stealing my joy. It's like, no, you scroll the way you're joy. And so I really want you be attentive to that. Pay attention to the news you consume. Pay attention to the people

you're hanging out with. Pay attention to the quality of what you are consuming. Pay attention to the quality of your entertainment. Because all of that is either poisoning the well or it's empowering you. It's lifting you. And I think that that's the number one reason most people aren't happy is because we live in a consumptive society. And we're in that consumer mindset and we're just taking everything in and now we're comparing ourselves and we're judging everybody.

It's hard to be a happy person if I got to judge all day, if I got to compare all day. And I'll say this last piece about it. It's mentally exhausting. Remember, it's a thousand decisions. I just made a thousand decisions. Am I like them?

Is this worthy of my attention? No wonder. no wonder you get at the end of the day and you're like, I just don't know why I don't take more action. I don't know why I didn't decide to write that book. I don't know why I didn't decide to write the song today. I didn't know why you didn't decide to do anything.

Your decision bank account is bankrupt. Yeah. Because you gave away all your decisions to each scroll. And you didn't even know it. You're mentally fatigued. You're not unhappy. You're exhausted. And I think it's a thief in the night.

In other words, we don't see it happening. Right. It doesn't break in in the middle of the day, hey, here I am to steal your joy. I had so many, many thoughts about what you were saying that I will not possibly be able to recap it as well as you just said it. But let me ask you if I heard this part right. Judgment destroys joy. When I'm wired for judgment, it destroys my capacity for joy. And number two, sometimes I don't lose my joy.

like, oh, I've lost my joy. What happened? No. I leaked it. Little by little. Scroll by scroll, swipe by swipe. Thing that I took to heart by thing that I took to heart. Why that's important to me is I don't want to just approach this like a crisis management situation when really it's about decisions in the moment and training yourself.

The training piece is huge because I'm not. not only taking responsibility for my emotions, but the fact that if I'm not in a good place, I am not going to be any good two or four of those around me that I'm called to serve. So for those who think it's selfish, yeah, I get it. The idea of just be happy at all cost or just make yourself happy or after all you deserve to be happy, yeah, that can start to get kind of empty for those of us who know that there's a bigger purpose. and sometimes I'm supposed to be sad because what I saw was sad, what I went through was sad. Sometimes I'm supposed to have seasons where I don't feel the most excited.

And some of those fallow seasons in my life led to the more fertile seasons. And I have to learn to embrace that. So my joy is my job doesn't mean I'm always reaping blessings and singing praises. No, sometimes it means I'm sowing in tears. But guess what the Bible also teaches? those who sow in tears will reap in joy. Now think about that. What is sewing?

It's work. And what is the consequence? Joy. I reap in joy when I sow in tears, which is why I want you to work on this. That's why I go to therapy. Yeah. Yeah.

That's not a confessional. I'm actually saying that, like I tell you that I do physical exercise. Of course I work on my mind. Of course I have to use that thing all the time. I don't have to do bicep curls to live, but I have to think to live. I have to think to speak. I have to think to process my life to decide what to do to figure out how to respond. So of course I'm going to find a gym for my mind. As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. You owe this to the the God who gave you life to take the mind he gave you and manage it. And just get this as a

baseline. It's mine to manage. It's mine to manage. You hear this saying sometimes in physical exercise, you can't out-train a bad diet, right? Let's take a real popular thing. I just heard this in our conversation, Brendan. You can't out-gratitude a bad gatekeeper. If you're just Letting stuff in, letting stuff in, letting stuff in. You ain't go fix it with a journal for two minutes, even if it does have a cat on the cover. You poison yourself all day and you're shocked, you're not healthy? So let's stop letting it in and then just trying to pray it out, let it in, pray it out. Of course we all have to deal with negative things.

Of course we're all from time to time going to watch something, see something. Of course this is not black and white. But what is important is that you make a decision to own it. And I just want everybody who's a part of this. I feel like this do the new you mentality, it starts out sounding service like, okay, yeah, I'll do the new me. I'm going to run in shoes. I'm going to get after it.

You know, new me, new me, new me. I've heard it before. And then you start to realize, oh, it's not just that I'm going to start doing things different. It's that I am going to discover the me that was there all along. And I just want to give you hope for this that I believe that. I believe there is great joy in your future. I believe there is great joy in your present.

I believe that there are amazing things happening in your life right now. It's okay if you can't see them. I get to a place every once in a while where I feel like I can't find anything that goes right. But the difference is, what do you do when you find yourself there? Do you stay in it? Do you blame it away? I want this to be a pivotal moment in your life where you make the decision, my joy is my job. And it's very difficult to have breakthrough and blame at the same time.

And I want you to get through this. Whatever the sadness was, whatever they did to you, whatever caused it, I want you to see that there is life beyond it. And so for all of us who don't wake up singing the hallelujah chorus, for all of us who don't wake up wanting to even see a human being, for all of us who feel like our mood does this and that and the other, just know that God is with you and all of it, and he wants to bring forth joy, even if it means you have to sew in tears.

I want you to get your hard work of happiness mindset. Stop thinking as something that's just either going to happen or it's not, is something that's going to come from somewhere else. Be a power plant, baby. You got power from on high. The power of the Holy Spirit lives in you. And the turbine, that's your tools. Whether it's gratitude, whether you're going to put on headphones

and walk through exactly what Brennan did, bringing gratefulness for people in your life into your movement until you realize God has been good to me, that you'll do it and do it and do it again until it becomes a part of you. The Apostle Paul said, rejoice in the Lord always. I'll say it again.

Rejoice. And again and again and again. It's not a one-time decision. It's a commitment in every moment. I hope this helps you today. I hope you feel happy right now. But if you don't, you know a few things to do

to help you get there a little quicker and stay a little longer. I'll see you next time. Thank you for joining us. Special thanks to those of you who give generously to this ministry is because of you that this ministry is possible. You can click the link in the description to give now or visit Elevationchurch.org slash podcast for more information. And if you enjoyed the podcast, you can subscribe, you can share it with your friends. You can click the share button. Take a screenshot

and share it on your social stories and tag us at Elevation Church. Thanks again for listening. God bless you. Guaranteed human.