Root System

There is a difference between working hard and working from fear. And many of us have crossed that line without realizing it.

In this episode, Alexa walks through a season that began with a sleepless night and one verse in her Bible: "Do not wear yourself out to get rich; be wise enough to restrain yourself." (Proverbs 23:4) What started as a quiet correction in December has unfolded over months into a much deeper revelation about the root system that drives so much of our striving, our anxiety, our inability to rest, and our resistance to receiving.

This conversation traces the story of the Israelites coming out of Egypt and the way God had to renew their minds before they could walk into freedom. It connects manna in the wilderness to Jesus teaching us to ask for daily bread. It opens up Psalm 127:2 and the phrase "the bread of anxious toil." It draws from Philippians 4 and Paul's example of learning how to receive. And it lands on the truth that God is not just teaching us to rest — He is teaching us how to RECEIVE, how to TRUST, and how to surround ourselves with the kind of people who reinforce the new thing He is doing in us, not the old patterns we were delivered from.

If you have been feeling burnt out, anxious about provision, afraid to slow down, or stuck in survival mode even though God has called you out of it, this episode was made for you.

What You Will Learn

• How "Egypt" is not just a place in scripture but a mindset still living in many of us
• What the phrase "the bread of anxious toil" in Psalm 127:2 actually reveals about working from fear
• Why God provided manna daily and would not let the Israelites hoard it, and how this connects to Jesus teaching us to ask for daily bread
• The difference between blessing and provision, and why that distinction matters when God provides
• Why receiving is often harder than working, especially for those who have always been the strong, independent, self-sufficient one
• How fear of people's judgment can hold us back from fully receiving what God provides
• Why the people we surround ourselves with shape our mindset and either pull us into the new thing or back into Egypt
• How Romans 12:2 and the renewal of the mind is the spine of every spiritual transformation
• Why looking back, like Lot's wife, can keep us stuck in patterns God is trying to deliver us from
• Practical encouragement for anyone wrestling with anxiety, burnout, scarcity mindset, or the inability to rest

Transcript

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Don't wear yourself out to get rich. Be wise enough to restrain yourself. Proverbs 23, 4. I came across a scripture back in December. I couldn't sleep one night, so I got up, walked to my living room where I spend my quiet time and opened my Bible. And there it was. I was just sitting there feeling anxious because my business had slowed down. And I realized that is exactly why the verse came to me. Because I had become so addicted to the cycle of pushing, building, scaling that God had to slow me down himself. It was like he was saying, Since you're not going to stop yourself, I'm going to have to do it for you. I had a vision once, a clear one. But somewhere in all of the doing, I had lost sight of what I was built even building toward. I was just building, executing, moving. And that scripture stopped me in my tracks. I sat with it for months. And the Lord has been peeling back the layers ever since. And what he has been showing me is more than anything else. It is that this is about the mind, about the root system, about the deeper things tied to the belief that if we do not work, we will not have what we need. Romans 12, 2 says, Do not conform to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. That by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. Paul is saying that the way we walk into the will of God is by having our minds renewed, meaning we cannot walk in the new thing God is calling us to, which is the same old mindset we carried before. The thinking has to change first. Yesterday he took me to Exodus 20, 8 through 10. Remember to observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. You have six days to each week for your ordinary work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath day of rest dedicated to the Lord your God. And on that day no one in your household may do any work. And a few chapters later in Exodus 31, 17, he calls it a permanent sign of my covenant with the people of Israel. For in six days the Lord made the heaven and earth, but on the seventh day he stopped working and was refreshed. And as I was reading, I started thinking about who God was actually speaking this to. These weren't random people. They were the Israelites, people who had just come out of slavery in Egypt, people whose worth had been tied for generations to what they could produce for Pharaoh, people who had never been allowed to stop. And God doesn't just lead them out and say, You're free now, figure it out. He commands them to stop one full day every week. No working, no striving, no producing. But here is what is so beautiful. Before God ever commanded them to rest, he first taught them how to receive. Because when the Israelites were in the wilderness, they had no food, God dropped manna from heaven every single morning, fresh enough for the day. And he told them in Exodus 16, each day the people are to go out and gather enough for the day. He told them not to hoard it, not to gather it up for tomorrow, because if they did, it would rot. And the only exception was the day before the Sabbath when they could gather double so that they wouldn't have to work on the day of rest. Do you see what he's doing? He's teaching them day by day how to receive from him. He was teaching them that he would provide fresh provision every single morning. He was teaching them that they could not store up enough to live independently of him. He was teaching them dependence. And only after they had learned to receive his daily bread did he command them to rest one day a week. Resting on the seventh day was the natural fruit of trusting him for the first six. It was them saying, God, I trust you to provide for me even when I'm not working. God wasn't being controlling. He was healing them. He was teaching them how to receive, maybe for the first time in their lives. He was renewing their minds. Because the truth is, a lot of us are out of Egypt physically, but we are still living in Egypt in our minds. And Egypt for us today isn't a place, it's a mindset. It's the belief that our worth comes from what we produce. It is the pressure to keep going when our bodies are screaming for rest. It is the fear that if we stop, we will be left behind, forgotten, replaced. It's the constant survival mode that doesn't trust anyone, not even God, to come through for us. We have become slaves to our work, slaves to our striving, slaves to the belief that if we stop, everything will fall apart. We are free and still living like we aren't. And here is what is so wild. Thousands of years later, Jesus picks up the same lesson when he teaches us how to pray in Matthew 6. He says, Give us today our daily bread, Matthew 6, 11. Daily bread, not yearly bread, not five years from now, bread, not enough to never need him again bread, daily, because the same God who dropped manna in the wilderness is the same God who still provides for us one day at a time. And just a few verses later, Jesus says, Look at the birds of the air, they neither sow nor reap, nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not more valuable than they are? So do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. Matthew 6, 26 and 34. Did you catch that? Do not be anxious about tomorrow, because we were never built to carry tomorrow's weight today. That is exactly where anxious toil is born, in trying to live tomorrow in our mind before tomorrow has even arrived. Then I sat with Psalms 127, too. It is vain for you to rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil, for he gives to his beloved sleep. And that phrase, the bread of anxious toil, stopped me. I felt God was exposing my inner being. That for years I have been working from a place of anxiety, believing that if I do not work, I will lack. But the truth is God says we lack no good thing. He provides for the birds of the air, he dresses the lilies of the field in more splendor than Solomon. He tells us not to worry, and yet here I was, freaking out because for almost five months I was making half of what I was used to making. And this time it wasn't just me I had to worry about. I had a company, I had people depending on me, I had bills that didn't pause just because the income did. And still God carried me through it. And he is still carrying me. He is still teaching me, and what he is teaching me more than anything is how to receive. Because receiving is so uncomfortable. It is hard. It pushes against every scarcity mindset that has lived in us for years. Receiving means we have to believe that as long as we put our part, God shows up and does his part too. Receiving means trusting that he is not going to drop us. Receiving means we cannot earn our way out of every hard thing. For a lot of us, receiving has come with strings. Receiving has come with guilt. Receiving has come with disappointment or instability of the unspoken pressure that now we owe someone something. So somewhere along the way, our hearts learned, I'll just do it myself. It's safer that way. But God is not like the people who have hurt us. He is not handing us something only to hold it over our heads later. He gives us because he loves us. He gives because we are his. He gives us daily fresh mana for the day we are actually living in. And there is another layer to receiving that we have to wrestle with too. Because when you have spent your whole life earning, the moment God starts to give you something freely, you are scared of what people will think. You worry about how it looks. You wonder if people are judging you for being blessed without visibly working for it. You feel the need to defend it, explain it, justify it. You catch yourself making sure people know you got a good deal. You catch yourself explaining how someone else covered this part. You catch yourself adding the footnotes so no one will think you were reckless or wasteful or greedy. And right there, God exposes another root, the fear of people. Because here's the thing: when God provides for us, yes, it is a blessing, but we have to learn to see it as provision because blessings can sound like luck. Provision is covenant, and it is God being faithful to who he is, not because we earned it, but because he promised it. Ephesians 3.20 says, Now all glory to God, who is able through his mighty power at work within us to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think. Notice how that verse starts. Glory to him, because when God provides for us, it is not just for our comfort, it is for his glory. Our lives are living testimonies of what he does. So when we hide his provision, when we downplay it, when we add the footnotes so people will not judge us, we aren't just protecting ourselves, we are hiding his glory. Galatians 1 10 says, obviously, I'm not trying to win the approval of people, but of God. If pleasing people were my goal, I would not be Christ's servant. That verse is a knife because how often do we say we are serving God while secretly bowing to the opinion of people who never paid our price? Receiving fully means letting God provide for us out loud in front of people who might not understand it, without needing to explain or defend it, because his provision is his testimony in our lives, and testimonies are meant to be seen. And then today he took me even deeper to Philippians 4, where Paul says, I know how to live on almost nothing or with everything. I have learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it is my stomach is full or empty, with plenty or little. Then he goes on, you Philippians were the only ones who gave me financial help when I first brought you the good news. At the moment, I have all I need and more. I'm generously supplied with the gifts you sent me. And the same God who takes care of me will supply all your needs from his glorious riches, which have been given to us in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4, 12, 15, 18, 18 through 19. And right in the middle of that he says, Don't worry about anything. Instead, pray about everything. Fix your thoughts on what is true and honorable and right and pure and lovely and admirable. Philippians 4, 6 and 8. Did you catch that? Fix your thoughts. He is talking about the mind again. And here is what hit me about Paul. Here was a man out there spreading the gospel, doing the work, giving his life to it, and yet God was providing for him through other people. He was receiving from the Philippians, from believers along the way. And put yourself in Paul's shoes for a moment. If we were the ones out there preaching and someone came up to offer to fund us, what would our first reaction be? For a lot of us, it would be to reject it, to say no, thank you. We've got it. To not want to feel like we owed anyone anything. And that is exactly the part of the mind God is putting his finger on. Because if Paul, the apostle, knew how to receive from the body of Christ, then who are we to think we are too strong, too independent, too capable to receive what God is sending our way? Receiving is not weakness. Receiving is faith. It is letting God provide through whatever vessel he chooses, whether that is through our own hands, through someone else's, or through a miracle we did not see coming. But it requires a renewed mind. And here's the thing I'm wrestling with right now in real time. There are things God has been calling me to step into that require me to trust him for provision in ways I have never had to before. And in my spirit, deep down, I know he will provide. I know he will not let me fall. I know that he has never once dropped me in all the years of walking with him. But my mind, my mind freaks out. My mind starts running the numbers. My mind starts saying, what if you run out? What if you can't work enough? What if everything falls apart while you trusted him? And that is the very root system he is exposing. Because if we really believe he provides, why do we freak out? Why is there still a part of us that wants to grip and control and figure it out all on our own? That is the mindset shift he is asking us to make, to trust him for daily bread, to gather tomorrow's manna today. And it is so uncomfortable because comfort to us has only looked like control. And he is teaching us that the real comfort is surrender. And here's what really got me about the Sabbath. God didn't just give it to individuals, he gave it to the whole community. Everyone rested parents, children, workers, servants, even the animals. Because God was not just delivering individuals out of Egypt. He was renewing the mind of a whole people. He was building an entirely different kind of society. One that said, you are more than what you produce. And he took it so seriously that anyone who refused to honor the Sabbath was put out of camp. Not because God was harsh, but because one person clinging to an old mindset could pull the whole community back. One person normalizing the old mindset could undo the renewing God was trying to do in everyone else. Which makes me think of Proverbs 13 20. Walk with the wise and become wise. Associate yourself with fools and get in trouble. Because the people we surround ourselves with shape our minds, they shape our peace, they shape our rest, they shape what we believe is possible. And there is something else too. The people around us have the power to speak life or death over the dream God has placed in us. If someone cannot see what God has showed us, they will discourage us from it. They will tell us to be realistic, they will speak fear into the very place God was trying to grow faith. And words have weight. Proverbs 1821 says, the tongue can bring death or life. Whose words are you letting take root in your mind? That is also why through the entire Bible you see God moving people. Abraham had to leave his country and his family to walk into what God promised him. Moses had to leave Egypt twice, once to wander the wilderness and again to lead people out of it. Ruth had to leave her home and her people to follow Naomi into the land of Israel where God was setting up her redemption. The disciples had to leave their nets, their families, their entire lives to follow Jesus. There's barely a story in scripture where God's people are not on the move because sometimes we cannot step into the new thing while we are still planted in the old place around the same people, around the old voices speaking, the old patterns over our lives. And speaking of looking back, God says in Isaiah 43, 18 through 19, but forget all that. It is nothing compared to what I'm going to do, for I'm about to do something new. See, I have already begun. Do you not see it? Do you see what he is saying? Forget the former things. He is doing a new thing. But how often do we miss it because our minds are still living in the former things? Think about Lot's wife. God was pulling her family out of Sodom into something completely new. And one look back turned her into a pillar of salt. One look back at the old locked her in place. She could not move forward because her mind was still behind. Think about 1 Samuel 16:1 when God says to Samuel, You have mourned long enough for Saul. Fill your horn with oil and be on your way. Samuel was grieving the old. God interrupted that grief and pointed him toward David, toward the new, because mourning the old kingdom too long would have kept Samuel from anointing a new king. That is the same thing God is doing with us. But he is calling us forward and we have to be willing to renew our minds. We have to stop looking back. We have to stop carrying Egypt with us. We have to stop performing for the audience we left behind. We have to learn to trust him for the daily bread. And we have to let him pull us into a new thing when the new thing requires us to trust, to rest, to receive, to surround ourselves with different people, to think differently than we have ever thought before. I'm a work in progress. There are still days I have to fight the urge to prove I am worth something by what I produce. There are still moments when receiving feels harder than working. There are still days where I catch myself looking back, but I am learning that rest isn't laziness. Rest is trust. Rest is me saying with my body, what my mouth keeps saying about God, that he is faithful, that he provides, that he is in control. Rest is where I remember what he actually called me to build. Don't give up. Plug into God and let him renew your mind so that he can lead you out of the Egypt that is still living inside of you. Let us not become weary and doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we don't give up. Galatians 6 9. Father God, thank you for this day. Thank you for this moment and this message. May we just rest in your arms and know that you are a provider, that you want what's best for us, that you know before a single word is even on our tongue what we need, Father God, and that you go before us and that you do make a way for us, Lord. And I thank you that even in the midst of how hard it can be sometimes to trust, that you are renewing our mind. And I remember a vision that you gave me one day of a woman's hair being tied to the branches of a tree. And I remember you speaking to me and saying, What root system are you tied to? And that is what I pray that you would ask yourself today, what root system are you tied to? And begin to allow God to expose the areas that need healing in your life so that you could be completely and whole in the person that He's called you to be. In Jesus' name we pray, Amen.