Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - 5 Ways to be Mentally Tough | 2 Corinthians 12.9

Episode Date: January 28, 2021

"Mental toughness" may be new term, but it's taught throughout the Bible. Enhance your faith by developing mental toughness with https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/keith-simon/ (Pastors Keith Simon) and https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/patrick-miller/ (Patrick Miller) as they delve into five key traits. Interested in more content like this? Scroll down for more resources and related episodes, including https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/how-to-be-a-better-parent-debunking-3-parenting-myths/ (How to Be a Better Parent) and https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/pride-before-the-fall-1-peter-57/ (How to Give Anxiety to God). Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/thecrossingcomo (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO and @TenMinuteBibleTalks.  Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to Tim Minna Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. My name is Patrick Miller. And I'm Keith Simon. So Patrick, have you ever had a man cold? I kind of love and hate the phrase man cold. So no, I have never personally had a man cold, although I understand that they do exist. I won't deny their existence. I just learned of him the other day.

My daughter, she's 24, was at the house, and she was referencing one of her brothers. and she said that he fell victim to man colds. And I'm like, what's a man cold? And then I found out that it is, I guess, if I understand it right, at least when a guy gets a cold, they act like the end of the world is upon them. They lay in bed, they mope around, they sniffle, they carry boxes of Kleenexes.

And meanwhile, women, at least according to my daughter, they go through all kinds of hardship and difficulty and they never mention it. They never complain. they just do it. I have a different context. I've heard man cold more in the marital child rearing sense. So the man cold comes out when a husband gets a cold. And in order to neglect his husbandly and fatherly responsibilities, he maximizes, he dramatizes his sickness and pretends as though he can't do anything. And so the wife has to take care of the kids. She has to manage his life and everything else.

But again, I want to acknowledge the existence of the man cold because I know men who, 100% do this. Not you. I'm being very sincere. I really don't think I pull the man called. The closest I get to it is I throw out my back occasionally, but that is very sincere. I've become basically crippled for days on end. So maybe someone, but that's not a man called. Man cold is when you're exaggerating. I grant the point. I also know that there are some women who get women cold, so we should be careful here. I don't know. Don't be as sexist. So all that to introduce a topic today of mental toughness, because I think the man cold, either of the way I understand, understand it or the way Patrick does is the absolute opposite of being mentally tough. When I think

of mental toughness, I think of like an old football coach I had who would preach that the game was won by the toughest person and that you had to be able to practice in any element, no complaining, no whining. He was all about kind of a macho version of toughness. When I hear mental toughness, I tend to think someone's talking about, like you said, being macho, or maybe being stoic, you just suppress your emotions, which to me is emotionally unintelligent. You aren't really processing your emotions. You're just stuffing them down. You're acting as though they don't exist. All right, so I have a little bit of a confession to make my kids might need therapy because of this. Every time the winter would come around and flu season would approach,

I would say to the whole family, especially as all four kids are growing up, look, we're getting ready to find out who the mentally tough are and who the mentally weak are. And they're like, well, what do you mean, dad? At least at the beginning, eventually they knew what I meant. But what do you mean? I go, well, here's the deal. Mentally tough people, don't let sickness bother them. Mentally weak people, they skip school, they lay around, they miss sports and practice, they don't do their homework. We're getting ready to find out. God has given us a chance every year to figure out who the mentally tough and the mentally weak are. You know what every other family found out? Keep your kids away from assignments because they are vectors of flu because their father has shamed them into going to school.

Okay, we were the kind of people that gave her kids Advil if they had a fever and sent them to school and figured they'll call it they had a problem. I kind of agree with it though. There's a level where you're going to get sick and you got to grate your teeth through it. It's part of life. You don't just shut things down. Yeah, no, hang on. It gets worse. Wait, it gets worse. I thought the story was over. No, no, it It's a lot worse. It's a lot worse. So when the kids were younger, I would encourage them to sleep to the night. Sleeping to the night is something that Simon's value desperately.

I love my sleep. You might value sleep more than children. I wanted my sleep. So anyway, if a kid got up in the middle of the night because they had a nightmare or something like that, then at breakfast in the morning, they would find their breakfast served to them on a pink plate with a pink fork and a pink cup and everything I could find. in the house that was pink. And I would say to them, oh, little baby couldn't sleep through the night.

We're not very mentally tough. Let's get tough and sleep. Wow. I told you you got worse. You could have kept that one in. We were moving past it. The flu they didn't seem that bad. Wow.

But man, you pink-plated your children. I have some issues, as you can tell. Did your kids or Christine never give you the pink plate? Is there ever been a point where they've retaliated? Well, my kids have retaliated that. way, but they have a way of mocking me. I'm only reaping what I have sown. Yep. So let's talk about what mental strength is. If it's not machismo, stoicism, or Keith's bizarre parenting style. I don't know. I love my kids. We get along. It's okay. You do love your kids. You do get along.

It's okay. They've rebounded. They're tough. What is mental strength? I think of mental strength now a little bit more maturely as refusing to let your circumstances. control your life, refusing to let how you feel dictate and dominate your day. A person who's mentally strong is a person who lives according to his or her values. Hard things happen to them, but they get back up. They're resilient. They bounce back. They don't let a problem demobilize them. Tiny little test you can do to see how mentally tough you are. Just to ask, how do you respond when things don't go your way, when things don't go according to your plan? Are you resilient? Are you able to process the emotions that come up? Maybe you experience fear or

confusion or anger. Well, what do you do with those feelings? Are you controlled by them? I've allowed many of those emotions to control me. I think about times where my children did something and I was angry. And rather than being a mentally strong person who was in control of my emotions, I allowed that anger to dictate what I did next in that conversation with my kids. And so that's what we're talking about. This isn't about being macho. And in fact, to underline the point, one of the best books out there is by a lady named Amy Moore. And she's actually done three or four different books in this little series called 13 things mentally strong people do. She has 13 things mentally strong women do. I don't know. I think she's making some money. But the book, smart woman. She's a smart woman. But the book,

she's a counselor and she has a boatload of experience in helping people to become mentally tough. And the book is excellent. We have a few other recommendations. I would recommend the leader's journey by Jim Harrington. I don't know about you, Keith. I love to read books on history. and I read one recently on leadership by Doris Kearns Goodwin. You might remember her from the book Team of Rivals about Abraham Lincoln's Cabinet. Anyway, great writer. And she recently put out a book on leadership in which she featured stories from Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, and LBJ. So some of the stories I'll throw out today, that's where I got them.

Great stories about how to be mentally tough and resilient. And one reason why we both just brought up leadership books. is that I think most successful leaders have become mentally tough. It's hard to lead if you don't have a certain degree of resiliency. If you aren't able to live according to your values and not be controlled, not only by your own emotions, but by the emotions of others. And our concern talking about this as pastors is actually the Bible has a decent amount to say about mental toughness, but beyond that, I think we're living in a cultural moment where our mental resiliency, our emotional resiliency, is waning. There are a lot of people who have actually been trained by,

our culture to think and thought patterns that make them less resilient, that make them emotionally weak. And the net result is living a less happy life, a life that is not just controlled by emotions, but controlled by others. And so this is an important topic in our current moment. Let's dive in. So we're going to look at several things that make up a mentally tough, mentally strong person. And the first one is that a mentally tough person doesn't feel sorry for themselves. They don't pity themselves. Self-pity is never an attractive quality. Self-pity is the kind of thing where I just kind of wallow in my own bad circumstances. I let that dictate my emotional life, my relationships, my schedule. Okay, Heath, but let's be honest, most of us find

pity attractive, not in other people, but I'm attracted to it myself. I kind of like feeling sorry for myself. Why do you think that is? Yeah, I agree. I've wallowed in some self-pity myself. And I think the reason is because it gives us an excuse. It gives us a sense that, man, my life is hard. I can't control it. I can't really do anything to improve my situation. So I think self-pity is attractive because it lets us off the hook and doesn't require much from us. It's wonderful if I'm having problems that I can blame others or I can blame my identity or I can blame some personal problem I have. I always think about the example of Moses when God is calling him to go set the Israelites free. And Moses goes through a whole litany of excuses. I don't speak well. People aren't going to

believe me. No one's going to listen to me. And finally, Moses just goes, look, God, pardon your servant, please send someone else. Yeah. Is that the ad? Because God gives him all the reasons. Well, that's not a good excuse. This isn't a good excuse. It says that the Lord's anger burned against Moses. And I hear that. And it's a challenge to me and my own self-pity, that my self-pity, that my self-pity doesn't please God. God knows our excuses. And I think he looks at us and says, it's not time to blame others. It's to look at yourself. I think the mentally strong person says this, hard things happen to everybody. Everybody has a different set of challenges. And God has given me these particular challenges in my life. And I'm not going to crumble underneath them.

I'm going to embrace them. I'm going to see that these challenges, even if they're really difficult, are going to shape me to be a better person. I can learn something from them, and I can persevere through them. So FDR had polio. You might be familiar with that. He was in a wheelchair. This is, of course, in the 1920s when medical advances weren't nearly. Of course, this is in the 1920s life for a person with that kind of illness was very, very difficult.

He couldn't walk, but he had this future in politics. He's the governor of New York. In 1928 election, Alfred Smith, who's the Democratic nominee, who goes on to lose to Herbert Hoover, he asks FDR if he will give a speech for him at the convention, at the Democratic National Convention. This is going to be the first political speech, or at least the first, if I remember right, the first political convention broadcast live on the radio. Well, here is FDR. He's got to stand up out of his wheelchair and walk to a podium and deliver a speech.

in front of the nation. And he practices over and over and over walking. He takes a crutch under one arm and grabs one of his sons with his other arm, and he tries to get his legs to walk. He has to build up his strength to do it. Finally, it's the day of the auditorium is packed. There are 12,000 people watching him as he gets up out of his chair. And with two crutches, he walks over forces, wills his body to the podium where he hands someone else to the crutches, grabs onto the podium, and delivers a fantastic speech for his friend Alfred Smith. Now, when I read that, I think that's a challenge that I have never experienced, but I admire and respect him because he didn't say, I can't do this. He said, I will do this, and he worked hard and he made sacrifices for it.

Doris Curran's Goodwin says this about FDR. He was good-natured with everyone, conserving his strength by never complaining about small things or wasting time over trifles. Okay, just stop there. How much time do I waste? How much energy, emotional energy, time, do I waste complaining about small things? And then she includes this quote by FDR. Remember, polio in a wheelchair, can't walk.

He says this, if you can't use your legs and they bring you milk when you wanted orange juice, you'll learn to say, that's all right, and drink it. Everything is relative, right? If you can't use your legs, then who cares if they messed up your order? You just drink it and you push forward. That's part of being mentally tough. One of the things I love about the story you just told is he needed a crutch to get up onto the stage. And being mentally tough doesn't mean that you don't need a crutch. In 2 Corinthians 11, Paul gives this incredibly long, list of terrible things that happened to him. He was stoned, shipwrecked, imprisoned. His friends and kinsmen went after him, tried to murder him. He faced down robbers. He had to be lowered out of a window

in a city just to save his life. He goes on and on about all these terrible things that happened to him. But as he continues, he makes it clear that he is able to do anything through Christ who strengthens him. 2. Corinthians 12, 9 to 10 is worth reading. He says this. This is what God said to him. My grace is sufficient for you. For my power is made perfect in weakness. So just pause. Being mentally tough does not mean being a strong person. No one's probably strong at all. We're all weak. Being mentally tough means admitting, yes, I am a weak person, but I know what my crutches. I know who I rely on. I know where I get the grace and strength to do exactly the things that Keith is talking about here, to not get over-wired about trifles and little problems. Jesus is the one who is our crutch that can help

us be mentally resilient and mentally strong. Yeah, if you believe that God is in control of all things, that God is sovereign over your life, then every challenge, every difficulty, every setback comes from him and is for your good. So instead of complaining about it, the mentally tough person just embraces it and say, okay, what's God doing in my life? I want to grow. I want to learn from him. So if we stay on this idea that God is in control of our life, I think that's one thing a mentally tough person does, a mentally strong person knows the difference between what they're in control of and what God is in control of. Have you ever thought about what are things that I can't control? It was funny. Reading Amy Morin's book, I stopped and I started thinking about that. So things I'm

not in control of, despite what you've told me at times. I am not. Forgetting things? Your calendar? Those are actually things it should be in control of and sometimes don't execute a high level control over. No, things I'm not in control of. of, I'm not in control of whether my kids sleep at night. I don't get to pick, which has happened for the last four nights, bizarrely, that my children are just going to wake up. There's nothing that I can do to change that. Have you thought about the pink plate? I might have those around if you still want abuse your children the way I abuse mine. My daughter would be thrilled to have a pink plate. My one and a half-year-old son would also probably be thrilled. So, I mean, they really have no idea.

They're a little young. So that's one thing I don't have control over. I don't have control over the emotions of other people. The people that I work with, I can't control if someone gets angry at me. I can't control if someone is frustrated with me. I can't control any of the things. I cannot control their emotions. I can't control their decisions, how they spend their time. The vast majority of my life is actually out of my control, the more that I start thinking about it. It really is true. You can't control the stock market. You can't control the economy. You can't control whether people respond well to a sermon. You can control how much work you put into it and how much you pray over it, but you can't control their response to it. You can't control the weather. So many people I know sit and-

And trying to control the weather? Well, they just sit and fret and worry about it. We're going to go on vacation. It is what it is. The weather is either going to cooperate or it's not, but we're going to have a good time regardless. But that's not how I think a lot of people think. They think the weather is going to dictate whether they have a good time on vacation. The Apostle Paul understood that there was a lot of things in his life that were outside of his control. And he took it in stride. Listen to Philippians 412. I know what it is to be in need. So apparently, even his level of economic welfare, he sees as being to some degree outside of his control. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in every situation, even if it's

raining or snowing or whatever other weather may be happening outside, whether well-fed, whether living in plenty or in wands, I can do all this through him who gives me strength. What I find interesting about this passage is that Paul didn't fixate on the things that were outside of his control. He took them in stride. And instead, he, I think, fixated on the one who was in control, which was Jesus, the one who could give him strength. So imagine that you don't get a job that you wanted. You'd send in your resume, you got an interview opportunity, but they choose another candidate. And you're asked, why didn't you get the job? Well, how do you? How do you you answer that question is going to say a lot about your perspective on what you can and can't control.

Are you going to blame them? Well, they didn't realize. The employer didn't realize what a great candidate I would be. They're just too dumb to see it. Are you going to blame circumstances? Well, if you're Patrick, you might. You might say, my kids didn't get enough sleep than that before. So I wasn't at my best.

Are you going to say, look, I need to get more experience. I need to improve my skills, maybe my interviewing skills, maybe my work skills. But I'm in control of my skills so that another company will want to hire me. If you blame others, that's probably a sign that you're not mentally strong. And just to be crystal clear, what we are not saying is that your statements about others may be false. It might be true that the employer didn't give you a fair shake. It might be true any number of things that you would say, this is why it happened. So our point isn't to say that there are things outside of you that cause you personal harm. That happens to

everybody. Our point here is saying if you get fixated on those things rather than the things that you can control, you will become a mentally weak person. If you focus on things that you can control, then you're going to be mentally strong. And if you don't waste time trying to control things that you have absolutely no power to control, again, you're going to be able to be a mentally strong person. I think it was Amy Moore in that book you referred to earlier that said that gratitude leads to mental strength. It leads to the sense that I have a lot to be thankful for. There's a lot good going on in my life, and that there are certain blessings that I've been given that not everybody has. So one of the things they've found is that you'll be a lot happier in your life if you'll take

a few minutes at the end of each day and write down two or three things that you're thankful for in that day. And the Bible would affirm that. The Bible affirms that gratitude is an important part of a happy life. Psalm 136, give thanks to the Lord for he is good. We have a lot to be thankful for. So what can you be thankful for? That small act of gratitude will help you see that you've been blessed and that you don't really have a lot to complain about. And just compare the mental habits of gratitude to the language that, to be honest, I find myself using. My wife, I'm grateful for this. she calls me out on it and that's helped me stop using this kind of language. But when you start hearing people say things like, this always happens to me, something bad

happens. Instead of focusing on what maybe you could be thankful for, they fix it. This always happens to me. I can't catch a break. No one else has to deal with this. My wife is great, but she'll be like, really, this literally always happens to you in every single instance. I go, okay, well, now that you put it in that light, no, it's false. In other words, when I get fixated on the bad things, I begin to catastrophize. I begin to think that every bad thing that happens to me is a sign that the universe is against me, that this kind of thing is always happening to me. When I change my focus and I'm giving thanks to God and I'm grateful for the good things in my life, I stop staring at the catastrophe, which isn't really a catastrophe,

and I start focusing on the goodness of God and his promises for me. Again, that is a key to mental strength. One thing mentally tough people do is they don't give up when confronted with failure. do you see a difficulty as an obstacle that you have to overcome or as a roadblock that causes you to give up? How you interpret the obstacles of life? Well, it goes a long way to saying if you're mentally strong or not. For example, if you back out of a parking lot and run into someone else who was simultaneously backing out, what's your response to that? How do you interpret it? One person might get out and just say, this always happens to me. I can't believe it. I'm so late.

The other person gets out of their car and says, man, we're fortunate. Nobody was hurt. So they've each interpreted the same event in completely different ways. One is thankful and sees the good in it. The other person now sees this is another way that the world is against them. Keith, have you ever heard someone say the phrase,

I peaked in middle school? Oh, yeah. Kind of way of saying, like, I was at my best moment when I was in middle school. I've been on the downhill. I was cool as I could, or maybe I peaked in high school. I for sure peaked physically in high school. Well, hopefully you didn't peak entirely in high school. Hopefully there's been some other high points in your life.

Other high points, but not physically. Here's my point. I, beyond a shadow of a doubt, did not peak in middle school or high school. Those were all down hills. Maybe you haven't peaked yet. Who knows? I don't know if it's happened. We'll see.

But when you're a middle school or in a high school, you think this is the worst thing ever. Why is it, you know, my case that girls don't like me? Why when I run for student council does no one want to vote for me? You just start going through these questions, but I've reflected. A lot of the people I knew who peaked in middle school and high school have struggled in an adult life. I think part of it has to do with the fact that when they were teenagers, they didn't deal with failure very much. Things came easy for it. Things came super easy.

I didn't find learning easy. I wasn't the smartest kid in my class. I didn't find really much of anything easy. And so I was failing constantly in high school and middle school, which at the time was absolute misery. But I've looked back on it and I thought, you know what? That was a gift from God because those failures taught me. You know what? You got to get up and keep going because you're going to keep failing. And it's given me the strength in, I think, adult life to fail forward rather than just getting

stopped in my tracks. Can you all imagine how difficult the private school that Patrick went to that he was one of the dumbest people in his class? I mean, wow. You're super smart. And if you were struggling in middle school and high school, that must be quite the, man, elite education. First of all, I went to a public school. I did not do well in school.

I didn't do well early on in college. either. And there were lots and lots of people who were more intelligent. This actually goes to a different thing, which is related. I've heard this actually has something to do with the difference between Western parenting and Eastern, like Asian parenting. That Western parents, when their kids do something really well, they say, wow, you are so talented. I've heard the same thing that they say that you're really gifted in math or something like that. So you put them in the gifted program because they have this innate talent and math, whereas in Eastern cultures, they tend to affirm the work ethic. You've worked really hard to become good at math. And so they don't see intelligence as innate. They see intelligence as something

that you develop and grow. And to be totally honest, I 100% agree with the Eastern perspective. And I think that mentally tough people, that's actually how they think. They don't look around and say, well, gosh, you're there because you have all these talents. They look and say, wow, that person's there because they've worked hard. And maybe if I worked hard too, I could experience something similar. I think they've found, if I remember the research right, that if you tell a child that they've succeeded because they're gifted at math or piano or whatever, they will be less likely to take risks because they don't want to be exposed as being quote unquote ungifted, I guess. But if you tell them that hard work, that practice has paid off, they will be more likely to take risk to keep

working hard and develop that. So our family has a little dog, a little multi-pooh, a little 12-pound dog. What's the dog's name, Keith? Do you want me to say it? Is it just too embarrassing? I'm going to spell it. Boog. I'm just going to say it, boog. It sounds like you're saying something you're not.

B-O-O-O-G is how you spell the dog's name. I guess there was a film called Open Season, and there was some bear on it named Boog. I don't know. That's what my kids named them after. Just keep going on your story. Sorry. Boog is afraid of the craziest things.

He's afraid of air vents in our house. So if you throw some food or a toy or something, near an air vent, he will walk very cautiously up to it and look at it, and then he will stretch. He will stay as far away as he can. He will stretch and just get the snack and then pull back and run over by me away from the air vent. And it's hard to figure out in his mind what's the calculus he's doing that says that that air vent is scary. And sometimes I think that applies to our life, that we've come up with some calculus that something in front of us is really scary. But it might not make any sense for us to be really scared of it. Our fear meters are not always reliable.

Sometimes they go off when we're not really in danger. If we go down the road of if it feels scary, then it's too risky, well, I'm afraid that that's going to leave us living in a bubble and unwilling and unable to take on the challenges that life gives. Just look at how the Apostle Paul failed forward. That's a phrase I used to have a seminary professor say that I thought was good, that failure shouldn't stop you. But listen to how he responded. This is in 2 Corinthians 4-7. We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure, which is the gospel. This makes it clear that our great power is from God and not from ourselves. We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we're not crushed. We're perplexed, but not driven to despair. We're hunted down, but never abandoned by God. We're knocked down, but we're not destroyed. our suffering, our bodies continue to share in the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus might also be seen in our bodies. Paul faced failure after failure. Sometimes we have this idea in our heads of

Paul that he was planting mega churches across Europe. The reality is he was planting lots of little 10, 20 person churches that had a lot of issues, I mean a lot, a lot of issues. And he didn't see those things as failures. He had failures. Instead, he put his trust in Jesus, and that allowed him to move past those failures, to not be knocked down in a fashion that he couldn't get back up from. One of the stories I love about Abraham Lincoln is that he lost his first race for state Senate. And he just said, look, I've had a lot of disappointments in life, so this doesn't bother me that much. In fact, he said he would probably have to be defeated five or six times before he would deem it a disgrace and be certain to, quote, never try it again. So there was this resiliency

see built into his life. He'd had challenges. He'd overcome a lot of those challenges, and he expected that his future would be filled with challenges. And that commitment to not give up in the face of failure has characterized a lot of leaders that have really made a big impact on the world. LBJ, Lyndon Baines Johnson, lost his first Senate race. He kind of went into this depression, but then he said, you know what, I'm going to get out of this. I'm going to. I'm going to to relaunch my career. He became an incredibly important senator. He's the one that pushed through the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s. Of course, he also had his faults, but we all do, don't we? So LBJ had to overcome difficulty. What difficulties do you need to overcome?

Now, there's one time he let his failure hold him back. It's the 1960 election. Eisenhower is retiring, and on the Democratic side, it is going to be either LBJ or J.F.F. Kennedy. And Kennedy said, hey, look everybody, this is LBJ's turn. But LBJ was so paralyzed by fear of losing and embarrassing himself that he didn't do what he needed to do to campaign for the Democratic nomination and JFK took it. It was right there for him to take and he refused to do it because of fear of past failures. Don't let past failures keep you from taking you from taking risks to do what God has called you to do. If we're going to quit after one failure or two or three or four, well, you might as well give up now because I have failed so many times. Steve Jobs, you think

of his career as kind of always being upward to the right? No, read the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson and what you encounter are his failures. Everybody fails. The most successful people, they fail. They're just not held back by them. They're just not held back by them. them. So if mentally strong people aren't held back by their failures, they also don't give away their power through people pleasing. I don't know how to break this to you, but you cannot say yes to everyone. I will never forget having a conversation with a pastor down in Nashville. We took a team of people down there to go meet with him. And his whole thing that he talked to this about, he says, what do you guys say yes to? So we start listing off all these things that we say yes to the ministry.

And it was just enormous amounts of things that we were doing. And then he said, okay, tell me what your mission is. And so we wrote our mission on the board. And he said, how many of these things actually help you achieve that mission? Well, we very quickly realized it was a small number of things on that list. And he said, you are saying yes to so many things right now. And they're all good things. They're all wonderful things. But that's not what you need to be asking. You shouldn't be asking what do we need to say yes to next? You need to ask, what do you need to say no to so that you can get focused on the right things? And the reason why we said yes to things was because we were people pleasers. Someone, you know, wanted a little ministry for this little, let's have a cooking

ministry for the cookie bakers. Let's have a motorcycle ministry for the motorcycle guys. It's so easy to say yes, and we were giving away our power. And what ended up happening was that we became unfocused. We couldn't say no to anything. Mentally strong people, they don't give up their power by people pleasing. No mentally strong people know what they're committed to. They know their strengths and their weaknesses. They know their objectives. They know where they're headed. I think of this line by Stephen Covey and I'll paraphrase it, but there's nothing worse than quickly climbing up a ladder that is leaning against the wrong building. You don't want to hurry up and get to the wrong place. You've got to know what you are aiming at so that your efforts, what you say yes to,

and what you say no to can help you take steps in the right direction. Remember this. Every time you say yes to something, you're saying no to everything else you could have done with that time. Jesus had to say no to people. In Luke 442, we read this story. At daybreak, Jesus went out to a solitary place. The people were looking for him, and when they came to where he was, they tried to keep him from leaving them. But catch what Jesus says. He tells them, I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that's why I was sent. And he kept on preaching in the synagogues of Judea. So here's a story. Jesus has needy people who he most assuredly could have helped. But when they come and they beg him, stay with us, please, he says,

no, I've got a bigger mission. Saying no was the only way he could say yes to the mission that God had called him on. I think this applies in a lot of places, whether it's your workplace or your familial relationships. Being able to say no, being able to set boundaries is incredibly important. In fact, I'll ask you this question. When is the last time you told someone important, no. I can't do that. If you don't have an answer to that question, it's a good chance that you aren't living for a mission and purpose. You're just responding to other people's needs. If you don't have a mission and purpose, that's exactly what will happen. Other people will set your priorities for you. Other people will tell you what's important, and you'll accomplish

their priorities, not your priorities. You'll live out their values, not your values. It's okay to say no. John the Baptist said, look, guys, I'm not the Messiah. And maybe that's good for you to say. I'm not the Messiah. I can't solve all the problems. I can't meet all the needs. This can be incredibly challenging setting boundaries. I think right now, as an example, I've got a lot of friends with young kids. And this weird thing happens when you have young kids. You take them to go see your in-laws. And some in-laws, thankfully not mine, they don't follow any of the rules that you lay out for them. you say, hey, please don't feed my kid gluten or milk or something like that. And of course, they're like, well, when they're at my house, they're going to eat all the sweets. Or, hey,

would you make sure they don't stay up super late? Well, when they're at my house, they're going to stay up until 10 o'clock. And then I even know in-laws who will say negative things about the parents. Well, I know your mom says X, but this is what we think. I thought this is called, like, being a grandparent. I'm not a grandparent, but I've always been told that that's grandparent privilege. So let me say this. If you're just an uptight parent who can't let your kids have fun, that's a different issue. But when I'm talking about our in-laws or people who refuse to parent alongside your style. They're undermining you. They're undermining you. Yeah, that's different. And that's a very, very different thing. Guess what? You have to say no. You have to be able to say, you know what, we're going to limit the

amount of time that our kid is able to spend at your house. You know what? When you're here, if you start saying negative things about our parenting, we're going to ask you to leave the house. And it's going to be hard for a little bit, but you will be shocked how quickly people will get into line. Once you stop giving away, your power. Once you simply say these are the rules, this is how we're going to do it. You can play along, but we're the parents, you're not, we love you, we want you to be around, but that's going to be how it is. I admire that in you is that you're willing to say hard things and let other people own their response, that you're not in a position where you're taking ownership for how they respond. You say something that you think is right in a loving kind way, and then they can

choose their response, just like you got to choose yours. One last thing that mentally tough people don't do. They don't think that the world owes them anything. Now, my point here is maybe obvious. Low expectations are the key to happiness. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I am surprised how many people believe that they are owed something. I've seen so many examples in the last few weeks. I watched just someone cried because their Instagram account got taken down by Instagram because they were saying lies that were somewhat dangerous. on their account. And they were saying, Instagram owes me this platform. I go, no, no, they don't. People owe me a job. They owe me a job. I think of another example. They owe me playing time. Someone crying because they lost a publishing deal. Well, you know what? That's free speech. Publishers can do

what they want to do. The world doesn't owe you a publishing deal. And it goes into our actual day-to-day I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it for those with the years. I'm going to be going, Let's go. Anyone I know, they got 41 minutes it. They deserve it. Good little. Let's keep pressing in here, though. You aren't owed a certain salary. You aren't owed a certain set of job responsibilities. Again, I know people who say, oh, I hate my job. I don't get to do all the things that I want to do. And I go, that's strange because I don't think anyone gets to do that. And no one is owed that. I know a lot of young people who have first job blues. And when you ask them, why do you hate your first job? It's because they thought that they should walk into the building. Everyone would realize that they are, Steve Jobs incarnate, ready to run the ship. And when no one listened to their bright 22-year-old ideas, their self-concept came crashing down. They said, I am owed a position at the table. Probably a lot of parenting in that, right? I mean, that's probably the way they had been parented, that they were, every idea they had was the greatest, the best, the most wonderful idea. And now they get into the quote-unquote real world. And they're just another person with an

idea. Exactly. If that's you, if you've come into a workplace and you've been there for six months and you think you know everything that's wrong with that workplace, that is a good sign that you actually probably know nothing about what is wrong at that workplace. The world doesn't owe you a C at the table. And I'm not saying all this to tear people down. I'm saying this because you will be much happier. For years, I thought I was owed in office. You're laughing because you know it's true. You thought you were owed in office and now you ended up sharing an office with me and now you probably wish you could go back. I thought it was owed in office and I went through a lot of what I think anybody can admit were probably cruddy office situations. I was up in an eagle's nest thing.

Then we were out in the trailer without a bathroom. And then we were stuffed in like Sardines. And I thought, you know what? I am a pastor and I deserve an office. And about a year and a half ago, I finally realized I may never have my own office. I don't need an office to be happy. The world doesn't owe me an office. Lots of people don't have offices. And that mental toughness has made me so much happier with my situation. I am really. believed and freed of my office envy. Again, this is about mental toughness. I like the way you said, though, you're freed of it because as long as you think you're owed something, that thing controls you. So I see a lot of people in our 20s who think that they should be able to live

like their parents do, their lifestyle. But their parents are maybe in their 50s or in their 60s. They've worked their way up. They've saved. They've maybe bought a house, sold the house, made some money. and so now they have a nicer house. And these people are really disappointed that they don't have the same things that their older parents have. And that thing, the right kind of house or the right vacations or whatever it is,

controls them. They're always disappointed. They feel like they've been let down and screwed over by the world. Whatever it is you feel like you're owed will control you. Until you get to a point where you go, you know what, God's been pretty good to me.

I mean, God has been pretty good to me. I mean, God has been pretty good to me. I got good health. I have a relationship with God. I've got some family that I love. I got some friends. I've got some money in my pocket that I can do a few things. I don't know. This is probably to quote Dave Ramsey, although I don't think he's the first one to say it. He's treating me better than I deserved. That's freeing. It's worth ending with gratitude because in some senses we started there. And gratitude is one of the keys to mental toughness. If you can be thankful for your life, if you can fight against the self-pity, if you can fight against the fears of failure and change,

if you're able to say no to others and not give up your power because you're controlled by people-pleasing, if you stop expecting the world to give you everything, you will not only live a happier life, I think you will live a more obedient life to Jesus, which he, by the way, says, is the key to a happy life. So I hope you're like me. I haven't figured all these things out by any stretch of the imagination. maybe there's one area where God's calling you to grow in mental toughness. And so I would encourage you, talk to a friend, talk to a spouse, about what that area is, and come up with a really simple plan to start changing that, to change how you speak to yourself, to change how you speak about others, and see if that begins, like we're saying, to help you live on mission for Jesus,

live obediently to him, and live a happier life. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps other people find this podcast more easily. Also, ask yourself, who could you share this podcast with? Texting an episode to a friend or a family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.