Your Physical Flashpoints

Let's keep digging in on this flashpoint idea. Firstly, let me share with you a little more about how emotional experiences of all types and spiritual experiences collide. There is a powerful sense in which the two, in the heart of a believer, are not separable. Finding God in all emotion and reaction and change - that is crucial to transformation.

Secondly, let's talk about your body and health. I don't want to give you a workout routine, but I don't want to explore why you feel like your body is worth the effort. What is the reason for losing weight? What is the purpose for having better health? Once again, none of this can exist with strength if it is not considered in the light of the Father. A physical flashpoint IS a spiritual flashpoint when approached rightly. This can mean tremendous heart and soul effects from even something simple like intermittent fasting. I'll share my story on that today.

- What is the relationship between emotional and spiritual flashpoint?

- What aspects of your life include God?

- How many areas of your life should be viewed with God in mind?

- How are physical eureka moments actually subsets of spiritual awakening?

- What are the benefits of placing God in the middle of your diet and health?

Transcript

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Welcome to the Excel Still More podcast. I am your host, Chris Emerson. I'm here to encourage you in your walk with God. Thank you for joining in. Today's podcast is sponsored by a wonderful company, Creation to Revelation. This group of Christians believe it is extremely important that we teach the Word of God to our kids. They have original graphic illustrations from the beginning of the Bible to the end, featuring the beautiful and consistent presence of Jesus throughout. You can explore all of that at CreationToreation.com. I'm so thankful you're here, so let's get started. Hey, welcome back and thanks for joining. You can see very clearly that today's episode is a continuation of something that we started last week. We began by introducing the concept of flashpoints as it relates to your spiritual walk. And while I don't think I'll rattle off three or four or five straight flashpoints episodes, there are a couple of intentional reasons I wanted to revisit it again this week and kind of strike while the iron is warm. Firstly, there are just a few more things I want to share with you about that spiritual, internal, emotional movement within you. Those eureka moments, those moments of change that can send your life in an entirely different direction. Particularly, I want to talk about the connection between the words spiritual and emotional. I really want to invite you not to separate those two things. I mean, spiritual flashpoints in the strictest sense have direct and obvious connection to God. You are at church and decide to change everything about your life. You read a Bible passage and immediately change what you do with your money. There are these spiritual moments that unmistakingly are connected to God. However, there are times when you will feel things emotionally that don't immediately seem like they're related to God. They didn't happen at church or right after a prayer or during a Bible read. They're just really incredible feelings within you about changing life's direction, about taking ownership of your life or no longer feeling sorry for yourself. As we get going here, I will share with you a couple of examples that fit into that emotional category. But instead of dismissing them because they don't have God written all over them, I want you to see God in them. In fact, for the believer, there are no emotions that are untethered from God. God is somehow behind what you are feeling and experiencing. God may be supporting the change that is growing in strength within you. And at the very least, the product of an emotional awakening can and will service the will of God somewhere down the road. I will illustrate that connection between spiritual and emotional in a moment, but the second reason why we're continuing with an episode on flashpoints today is because I want you to begin to see that every kind of impactful, incredible moment of awakening in your life is designed to be a subset of your spiritual walk. Specifically today, we will talk about your physical flashpoints. And I promise you this is not an episode on diet and exercise, though a couple of things will get mentioned. It is, however, about your body. Moments in your life when you decide you need to be treating your body differently. An unmistakable flash point where you realize that if you don't change the way you're using or abusing your body, you will fall well short of the life that you could have lived. This can be as simple as seeing a weight on the scale or a medical diagnosis. Listen carefully. Those moments are not divorced from God. I'm not nearly as interested today in giving you some strategy to losing five pounds in the next 30 days as I am asking you to consider why you need to lose that weight and take control of your life. What is behind that need? Do you see the care of your body as an extension of your relationship with the Lord? This is kind of like that noom program everybody's getting into for taking care of your body and weight loss. It's more about modifying the psychology that leads to differences in the way that you treat your body. I'm here today to trump the psychology aspect and go straight to faith. Okay, so physical considerations are coming in the second half of the episode, but walk back with me to the unmistakable connection of emotional weight and change and your spiritual walk. I did an episode on this a year or two ago, but the clearest, most absolute flashpoint of my entire life came over 20 years ago. The short story is I had quit college to work for my father-in-law, invested everything in it, I was married and I had a child, and he and I had a huge fight. I don't know if he fired me or I quit, but it was ugly. All of a sudden, I had nothing. No prospects, no future. And so I laid in bed for three days. And to be quite honest with you, I was not in a very good spiritual place in my life at the time. That third morning, my wife came into the room and said, You need to get out of bed and come and check out the television. It was those wild west old days where you only had one TV and it was in your living room. Anyway, the first airplane had hit the tower. It was September 11th, 2001, and we sat there together and we watched it all unfold all day long. And I will never forget saying to her that this is the last day I will ever feel sorry for myself. It was an emotional marker that I have never forgotten. Honestly, and this is a big part of Flashpoints, I have never let myself forget it. Every year I go back and reflect on it. I want it to continue to be a fire that never stops burning. I don't know that I would have described that in the moment as a spiritual awakening, but I know a lot of spiritual things started happening. I prayed more that day and in the days that followed than I had in the months of turmoil before it. I spent the next year at home not working, taking like 50 hours of college, which also gave me more time for reading my Bible. I started preaching for a guy who had back problems at a church right up the street. And now, over 20 years later, I don't own a sand and gravel pit as was the original design when working for my father-in-law, but I believe God has used that emotional moment and our willingness to do something with it to accomplish his work in my life and family, and I pray in the lives of others. So if you feel something strongly about your life, even if you didn't get it as the result of a Bible read or worship service, I promise you that God is there. You can take it to the Lord in prayer. You can look for his support of what it will mean, and there's really no telling what he can do with it. This made me think of the Triumph Village Guys. I've talked a lot about them. There's a drug rehabilitation center, a 10-month program in Tyler, and we've had great success in teaching the gospel there and converting people to Christ and welcoming them into our local fellowship. It's really been transformational for us all. But several of them tell the same story. They went to that place without spiritual consideration. They just had an emotional moment. If I don't change my life, I'm going to die. Or I'll never be anything for anyone. Or I'll be in jail before it's all over. They did not let that moment pass. It started a fire in them that started to affect everything around them, and they joined this program. Again, note, many of them were not looking for Jesus. They were looking for a better life, and Jesus is what they found. It turns out God was using a natural emotion like I don't want to die. And he turned it into an opportunity to convert them to Christ. And you get this sense that God was a part of it from the very beginning. So as we move our attention to flashpoints related to the body, I'm just inviting you to see God working on you in a variety of ways. And maybe more than that, I'm pushing you to think that every single aspect of your life, whether it's an internal emotion or an external stepping on the scale, or a troubled relationship, or coming face to face with a job that you loathe, none of those experiences are separated from the Lord. God's grace and presence and involvement in your life, his love for you and desire to bless you and use your life includes every part of your life. In that way, even physical flashpoints are just a subset of the spiritual. And when it comes to cleaning up your diet or 30 minutes of activity a day, putting in the work to get off of medication that's negatively affecting you, or just making any number of obvious changes to improve the quality and duration of your life, if you are pursuing those as important in the moment because of something that the doctor said, but not ultimately vital because it has nothing to do with God, you're making a mistake. And if you're a Christian and you're living for heaven, you've already given that flashpoint physical moment the justification it needs to fizzle into nothing once you feel a little bit better or just get used to your pain. I believe that God made your body, that he has gifted it to you. The Bible teaches that God made that vessel and has put an eternal spirit within it. He has put in some form or fashion his holy spirit within you, and he has very clearly said that your body is a vessel that he has created to carry out very important things on his behalf. This begins to change everything about the way you see yourself in the mirror and the way you feel as you live every day. In fact, I'm truly hopeful today that this moment is the physical flashpoint that is actually spiritual. Feeling a little bit better, looking a little bit better, living a few more years. Maybe none of that has really done it for you. But what about the concept of standing before the Lord in the judgment, asking him to provide for you a perfect, eternal spiritual house? And the Lord, Second Corinthians chapter five, saying, Let's go look at your tent. You know, that body that I gave you. Let's look at what you did with it, how you valued it, how you prepared to use it for me, to use it up for me. And let's just go ahead and see how that went. Let's see to use Jesus' language from the parables, how well you did when entrusted with a few things or a little thing to see if you are ready to be entrusted with a beautiful and eternal thing. Now, as you listen to this, there are a couple of things I need you to do, no matter how that hits you. I need you to understand that we have to start from here. Whatever mistakes you've made in the past with your body, however lethargic you may or may not have been, that's past and we can't go back and fix it. And it won't do us any good to say, really wish I'd have heard this 10 years ago. So please don't do that to yourself. Also, it won't do any long-term good to take a cup of water and pour it on this growing flame with things like arguments related to your genetics or other things that are totally out of your control, but serve as pre-packaged excuses to mitigate optimism and put limits on progress. You might be like, Chris, I want to get excited about this and I want to make changes, but I'm just being real here. Well, let me be real with you. The body you have today is exactly what you have to work with, and today is the day you have to work with it. God sees you, he knows your past, he knows your limitations, and yet he believes in you anyway. He has work for even the clayest of pots to do incredible things for him. So, what I'm asking you to do is to take something as simple as changing your diet and seed it first in the gracious kindness and patience of God, letting that initiate a passionate faith and love for him, and then using the beauty and intimacy of that fatherly relationship as your motivation to make the very best of the days that you have left. Now you might come back and say, Chris, I did let the fire start and I am changing everything, and it has more to do with wanting to be around my kids or my grandkids, or to get to enjoy extra time in my retirement, or simply because I'm in a lot of pain and I think there's a way to alleviate it. Chris, I'm not sure it's as holy and spiritual as what you are describing, to which I would say everything for the life of the believer is holy and spiritual. Like I was setting up in the first half, those emotional changes for other reasons, maybe for, like I said, pain alleviation or time with family, all of that can be, may even be yearning to be connected to God's will for your life. If God gave you more time with your family, what would you do with it? If God gave you the chance to travel for 10 years, where would you go and why? If you weren't dealing with that daily pain, what could you go out and do? At the very least, you connect God to the back end of that. God, I want to feel better for my kids, but I promise I will show those kids how to love you. God, I want to travel and see the world, but I make a vow to you that I will use that life, spreading the gospel and encouraging Christians. I would say this about your body, your job, your lifestyle, your money. If you want God's help, then make God a part of it. I love how all of this begins to come together for the glory of God if we're looking for it. And when you start combining things that are important to you, they become even more important. Specifically, as we've said, introducing elements of your relationship with God. Let me give you a personal example in the last few minutes. I made a decision the day after Christmas to start intermittent fasting. I couldn't exactly tell you why. Probably had a little bit more to do with the scale than it did holiness. And so I kicked it off about a week before New Year's just because I'm kind of honory about starting on New Year's Day and like fitting into the typical box. I like to start things a couple of weeks before or after, which might service you well here as we get to the end of January. Anyway, I did a little research and I consulted my primary care physician, my wife, and I committed to a month of 16 to 18 hour durational fasts each day. But something occurred to me in the first few days, and it was simply this if this is just about 10 pounds, I will probably give it up soon and do it another way. Or worse yet, I'll lose the 10 pounds, congratulate myself, and head back to the box of Cheez-Its. This experience, if it's going to truly be beneficial and maybe even lasting, needs some additional layers of value that sustain it. Now I don't want to underestimate the flashpoint moment. I mean, December 26th, I got out of bed, I felt like the worst person ever, and I didn't want to feel like that anymore. But if it's just about feeling and weight, it will pass. So I started doing a couple of things that I thought would help. I read some of the passages that I've alluded to with you today about why God made my body and what he might have in store for it. I did some visual forecasting of what good health could look like if everything works out okay in the future, not only with my family, but in work that I really would love to do for the Lord. In other words, for me as a Christian, physical benefit was not enough. Serving a spiritual cause was vital. What I didn't see coming were a couple of other really cool things that I'm still very excited about. One of them is my prayer at breakfast. You know that word, break fast. Try not eating for 18 hours and then break fast. It's almost like I ate so often that I just kind of stopped thanking God for it. It was just a natural part of my day that I was constantly getting whatever I wanted whenever I wanted it. But when I was intentionally putting it off, the emotional connection to the moment of breaking fast started to have some really awesome spiritual implications. These have been the best breakfast prayers of my entire 44 years of life. And I don't mean I'm terribly hungry crawling to the table. This process of eating to live instead of just living to eat has somehow helped me address God as the gift giver with more gratitude. And then, of course, connected to that is this spiritual feeling of self-control. I am denying my flesh for a benefit that I am emotional about. I am exerting a level of self-control. And when I go into that breakfast prayer, that sense of taking control of this body which he has entrusted to me, of directing what it does instead of just following its impulses, well, somehow, in ways I really can't even explain, it's created this spiritual sense of connection with my maker. Also, really cool side benefit is it kind of turns out that self-control is contagious when you prove you can do it in one thing, you start doing it in other things. For me, I started initiating a Facebook fast for a certain number of hours per day. And I think I've been doing that for about two weeks. And I don't think I have to make a whole episode telling you that a decision like that has very real and incredible spiritual benefits. It's one of those things that's motivated by what pleases God and has helped me to be more pleasing to God. Today, I guess I want you to see that there are many different flashpoints in all kinds of aspects of your life that can ultimately fit in that same space. Pleasing to God, born out of recognition for God, or at the very least, something that you keep burning because it produces outcomes for God. Listen, we may not talk about flashpoints for a while, so let me finish with this basic description. The race can be long and difficult, but the starter pistol is unmistakable and immediate. Look, those pistols can go off in all kinds of places in your life. From negative things like a bad day at work or stepping on the scale to positive things like a hug from your kid or discovering a new talent you can't wait to explore. You want to keep those fires burning, remember those moments, and let change happen. But I am convinced now, more than any other time in my life, that running the entire duration of that race to achieving its intended outcome is entirely dependent for the believer on tethering everything about that experience to the Lord. Every part of my life is from the Lord, sustained by him, and intended for him. And this is not just true of typical religious awakenings, it also includes your physical flashpoints. Thank you so much for joining in today. If you enjoyed this program, consider sharing it with your family and your friends. As always, you can go to excelstillmore.life to sign up for the email, order the three-month journal, or just catch up on old episodes. And also, if you are looking for financial advice or future planning, give John Cunningham a call today, 205 913 1720. And remember this whatever you choose to do today, in the name of the Lord Jesus, excel still more.