Priorities Matter

How are you doing, Salt Church? Good morning to you. Good morning. There you are. Glad to be with you today.

I'm sure you're glad to be here as well. What a joy it is to be in the presence of the Lord every week. I just want to, if you're new with us today, and whether you're online or are here in person today, please do fill out a connection card. If you're new with us, we'd love to connect with you, get you a gift. Also, today is our small group launch, our Salt Group launch.

We call our small groups Salt Groups. And when you leave today, we'll have some sign-ups. We'll have some leaders out there to be able to talk to you so you can connect with somebody. We're going to get that going this week for this season. I'm pretty excited about that as well.

Also, if you're new with us and want to have lunch with me today, we have that directly after the service. You can connect with our next steps table. We meet over at a pizza place around the corner. They'll give you all that information and, you know, just find out more about the church and what we're about today. So, and here's the biggest thing that's coming up.

October 8th. Write that down. October 8th, or 9th, rather. October 9th. 8th is a Saturday.

9th is a Sunday. October 9th, we're having a family day. It's going to be like a fall fest type family day. I want to invite your family out. We're going to have things for the kids.

We're going to have like a pumpkin patch. And we're going to have games. And we're going to have a lot of fun things for the whole family. So, I want you to invite somebody. This is a new season.

Jump on board with us. Invite some people. We're a growing church. Get some people connected. And we've got a new series starting then as well.

But I'm really excited about this series, Stressed Out. Man, y'all have these things in your hands? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Stress balls.

Mine says don't give up. Okay? Don't give up. What does yours say? Little positive things here as we go through this series.

But how many of you have been stressed? How many of you are stressed now? It's okay to be honest. Stress is a part of life. And a lot of people are stressed out.

In fact, according to the APA American Psychological... People are stressed out about four things. Time, money, work, and relationships. Time, money, work, and relationships. And we're going to dig into some of these things in this series, Stressed Out.

And I believe that this is going to have the power to, if we go to God's Word, if we understand stress from God's perspective, perhaps we can find some peace. Because here's the deal. Stress steals our joy. And we are meant to be people, believers, followers of Christ, who enjoy Christ, right? We want to live lives of joy.

But what's happening is the enemy is stealing away our joy by causing stress in our lives. And we buy into it, the things of life. Everything's going on. My family, my friends got stuff going on. My kids, you know, they've got this sport, this sport, this sport to do.

And my work is demanding this. And you have these urgent, important things. And you're trying to figure out how to do them and how to line them up. And you're just finding that life is very stressful. I'm getting stressful just talking about it.

It's very stressful. But many of us live that way. And the way the world is right now, I think we experience more stress. We're kind of post-traumatic stress happening, you know, from what's happened in the last few years. And now we're entering into another stressful period where things are back and running and going.

But life just seems so fast. It does seem so fast. You wake up and you're like, oh, last week I turned 44 years old. And I don't feel 44, but I'm 40. I feel 24.

But, you know, life, where did it go? My kids are getting older and things like that. So we're going to talk about that. How do we reduce our stress in life? So the theme verse for this series, if you'll follow along with me, you can open up your Bible.

com app and find our events. And you'll have all of our notes there. Or if you're just a Bible person and want to take notes in your Bible, that's fine too. But we're going to turn to Luke 21, 34. And it says, Be careful or your hearts will be weighed down.

Meaning, don't let the outside stuff that stresses you out get in the inside. Because it can affect your spirit. It might be things that are happening practically outside, but they can mess us up on the inside. You don't want it to affect your spiritual life. You don't want it to affect your soul.

We don't want our souls to do this, to be weighed down with this dissipation. What is dissipation? A slow evaporation away. Like we're slowly evaporating because we're allowing all this stuff in life to get in us. Dissipation and drunkenness.

And drunkenness. And this is literally talking about drunkenness, being drunk. But figuratively, we can be drunk on anything. Anything that we medicate to take away the pain, the stress. Don't trust those things, right?

And all the things in the world that we put in place, so, oh man, maybe this will reduce things. It could be stuff. It could be just stuff. If I buy this, if I take this, if I do this, it will help reduce distress, but don't, it's just temporary solutions, and you find yourself fading away, and the anxieties of life, that day will close on you suddenly, unexpectedly. It's like, what happened?

Where did my life go? Why am I so stressed? Why am I this place when I should be in this place? And it happens. It sneaks up on you.

This stress, this life, it sneaks up on you, and it's like a trap. And we don't want to be trapped. We won't want our joy to be stolen from us, right? And God doesn't want that for you either. So today, I want to start off by talking about schedules, okay?

Schedules. It is a very practical message, but very spiritually in-depth, too, because what God tells us in the Bible about our schedules is important. And this week's verse, if you're with us, Job 9, 24 says, My days go faster than a runner. My days go faster than a runner. They fly away without me seeing any joy.

Our days, when we fill it up with stuff and schedules and all the things that aren't necessarily important, but we think they're important, it takes away the most important things in our life. Joy. Joy. So, I love that song from Alabama. I'm in a hurry to get things done.

I just rush and rush till life's no fun. How many of you have felt you were there at one time or are there now? I mean, life just gets so, so, so busy. You can't even enjoy life. And too much of a good thing can be bad as well.

Too much of doing good things, they might not necessarily be bad, but too much of it, it can steal your joy. Did you know that 38% of pastors in ministry face burnout because their schedules and their time and everything they do is so busy and they don't take time to schedule? Because that's a good, it's a good thing to be a pastor. Everybody would say, what an awesome, you know, calling. You get to help people, you get to teach the Bible, you get to serve people, just all those things.

But too much of something, and when you're not taking care of yourself, and that's what us pastors do, we tend to sin ourselves and not take Sabbaths and things like that when we should be. And it causes us, our joy, the joy that we have, the purpose we have to be minimal. And did you know that panic attacks even, panic attacks don't happen when you're busy, busy, busy, going, going, going. Panic attacks happen when you actually settle down. And your body goes, whoa, what's going on?

And your body goes, whoa, what's going on? You know, because you've been working out of whack for a long time. You've been imbalanced for so long. When you stop, your body says, wait a minute, I need to give you a warning sign. You need to read the writing on the wall because something's going on in your life and you need to slow down.