We're in a series, the Fruit of the Spirit. And we've looked over the last couple weeks and a couple different things on it. And I want to mention to you, if it seems weird, if you're a little newer to this and you're like, why are we talking about the Spirit or the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God? What is that all about? I invite you to go back a couple.

Couple weeks. We put all these on YouTube so you can kind of go back and check it out and just kind of see some of the background work that we have done on that. Well, today I want to ask you a question and do you know what. Do you know what the biggest organ in your body is? Your skin.

You saw that commercial too, I guess. I don't know. No. Okay. You just knew that your skin is the largest organ in your body, and every few weeks it is replaced with new cells.

You lose, like hundreds of millions or billions of skin cells every day, and those are getting replaced constantly. Every seven years, almost every single cell in your body has been replaced with a new one. And so you get to thinking about this and you realize that the things that you are consuming, your food, your drink, whatever you're eating and drinking, is what your body is going to use to make those new cells. We wonder sometimes why. Like, why our, you know, sleep patterns aren't very good, why we don't feel healthy, we don't feel rested, why we say, oh, man, I'm working out and I just can't lose weight.

You know, what's going on. The things that we are ingesting are the things that our body is building new cells with. And so often it's not even your fault. Like, you might think you're making somewhat healthy choices on your foods, but the stuff that they are putting into our food to make it, even if you're not buying ultra processed foods, although we, I think we know, like, if it comes in a package where you got to peel it back and stick it in the microwave, that's probably not the healthy food to be eating. You know, if it has processed sugars and things like that, you probably need to stay away from it.

Truly, the older generations, you know, the way they lived, you know, kind of living on the farm, that was some good, healthy living. They grew what they ate, they ate what they grew. It was good times. We found a lot of things in modern medicine that have been helpful, but not everything is that good. And so we find our food supply is somewhat damaging to us and not that healthy.

The things that we eat and consume are the things our body uses to rebuild itself continuously. And so because of that, we find ourselves reflecting what we eat. Remember the old saying, you are what you eat? It turns out they might not have understood that, like, from a, like, looking through a microscope level, but they were right. You truly are what you eat.

And in the same way, I think about these, we've got these plants on our windowsill in the kitchen window because it's got sun coming in from that window faces a southern exposure. And we planted some little seeds in there, and, you know, we were hoping they would grow. One of them is called a sensitive plant. I have no idea what it is, but you touch the leaves and it, like, shrivels up and it's kind of cool, you know. And so we've got that growing, and it's probably hearing me right now, and it's like, I'm a little nervous, you know.

And then. And then we've got the sunflower that's doing really well. And I'm thinking every now and then, though, the leaves kind of turn brown. It's got plenty of water. And I realize that the soil that it's planted in, it might be like a potting soil mix or some kind of peat moss in there, peat growth in there with, you know, they usually have this little perlite, you know, things in there that help absorb the water and keep it for when it needs it.

It's probably got that as its growing medium. But that soil eventually is going to get stripped of all of its nutrients, and we'll have to add some to it for that plant to continue growing healthily. And when that. When that nutrients are stripped out of that soil and we don't fertilize it or feed it, that plant won't really be able to produce very well anymore. It won't be able to continue growing and putting out its beautiful little sunflower blooms that it's doing.

And then there's some other plant. We forgot what seeds we put in there, but it's looking nice and healthy right now. And so I think about those plants and I think, does that soil have what it needs to grow healthy plants? And I've had a problem recently. I had a tree that died.

I had to move it because I put in new sidewalks. And I dug it up and it didn't want to come out of the ground. And I ended up chopping too many of the roots. And I said, that tree's not going to make it. And it didn't.

I replanted It. But it didn't grow. Then I had this other tree. It was an avocado tree that came up from just an avocado, you know, from that little thing that we put in the soil. And it grew up from that avocado pit.

And then it was doing nice in the backyard where I had put it in the shade. But the idea was eventually to move it. And I dug it up a couple months ago and I moved it, and it wasn't doing so well in that same spot where the other tree had died. And I put a shade cloth over it, and it just started dying out more and more. It got me to wondering if that soil somehow doesn't have any nutrition, anything alive in it.

Soil usually needs a healthy bacteria in it that helps microbial growth to grow so that plants are healthy and can uptake nutrients in the soil. But if the soil has no nutrients, the stuff's going to die. You get what I'm saying? What those trees were rooted in, what those seedlings are rooted in, is what is going to help it to form itself and to continue growing. In the same way, the fruit we bear in our lives is going to be borne out based on what our lives are rooted in.

So here's the question I wanted to ask you today. I wonder, what are you growing in? What are you growing from? What is. What is giving your life?

I'm not talking food now. I'm talking spiritual things. So I wonder, as I think through this, I was spending some time kind of contemplating this week, and I wonder how much of our lives. This isn't just a you thing. I had to think a lot about me.

How much of our lives are spent on what we might call illicit pleasures. Illicit pleasures are those things that are intended to bring you joy. It's things that you seek after because you think, well, I'm going to enjoy this. This is going to be something really good for me. And yet it kind of ends up leaving you empty in the long run.

Now, I'm not talking necessarily about food, for instance. I mean, like, food is good. You need food. Don't stop eating food unless it's a short time where you're fasting or dieting in some way or something like that. But food is something we need.

And yet so many times, especially me, this is one of my. This is like if you looked at my. If you look at your bank register, you know, and kind of see where you spend your money, a lot of times it's going to be, you know, one thing or the other, and for me, it's like too much of it gets spent on food. I enjoy it. That's like my vice, you know, and I'm like, ah, you know, I really want this certain thing and so I'm going to go and get it, I'm going to buy some of that.

And so we look at food as necessary. It's good. And yet at the same time we find ourselves sometimes chasing after whether it's a dining experience or a certain type of food. And we're saying, oh, this is going to be great. How long before that meal is gone and you're not even thinking about it anymore?

It was very temporary and short lived. And so there's other things along those lines that might start out even good, but they're very temporary in nature. Now food, of course, will always leave us hungry again, but really good and healthy food actually keeps you satisfied longer. Eating junk food, eating sugary foods, eating foods that are just empty of nutrients, it fills your stomach for a moment, it satisfies your hunger for a little bit, but a few minutes or an hour or two later you find yourself wanting more food. It's designed that way not to get onto this whole thing, but our food supply, the things that they're selling you in the grocery stores are made to leave you hungry and wanting more and more and more.

And that's a problem that we need to address in our country that you and I can't really do too much, except maybe voting for people who talk about making it better. If they're actually going to follow through on that or not, I don't know. So we look at how many of our desires are things that are somewhat temporary in nature. And then we just kind of think, well, that's going to make me happy, that's going to fulfill me. And yet it doesn't.

Sometimes we do things like we go to social media and I'm not trying to just totally dog it, social media can be very good. For instance, there's hurricanes and there was people sharing information about it beforehand. There was people sharing help for supplies and needed, you know, just kind of aid after that that they could, you know, where they could go find different things. And so they're looking at the social media and saying, well, hey, you know, we, you know, we can find help here, you can lend your assistance there. And social media can fulfill needs like that that are very good.

And yet at the same time it's also designed to suck you in, to take all of your time and just keep you there. How many times have you found yourself just mindlessly scrolling, clicking on videos, playing games, whatever it is, and you say, my goodness, how much time have I spent on this? And so it begins to be this thing that there's this chemical in your mind that gets released, dopamine, that is just kind of this reward center in your brain where you know, it's like something in your mind enjoyed that thing. And so it drops this little dopamine that trains you to come back for more of that. And it's like it just keeps training you to get more and more and more of this as it's released into your brain.

And so whatever it might be, I mean, I don't care if it's things like Facebook or X, which used to be called Twitter, TikTok, watching the news like Fox or CNN or news sites and discussion sites like Rumble and Reddit, whatever it is. For me, it's podcasts. I listen to podcasts way too much. But when you marinate your life in these things, I don't care if it's online, if it's food, I don't care what it is. You find yourself kind of being fed by this.

It's what you're rooted into, if this is what you're spending your life in, and if it's what is constantly feeding your mind is what you're growing out of. So our scriptures talk about the fruit of the spirit, and our scriptures are talking about what the fruit of the Spirit is, and they're showing how we can be rooted in the spirit of God. And what bears out in our life is this fruit. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self control. If we root our lives in spiritual things, in the spirit of God, in the word of God, those are the things that grow out of our lives.

But if we're rooted in other illicit pleasures as we defined earlier, then those are the things that we tend to bear, not necessarily fruit out of, but that's what bears out in our lives. But you know, it's not just like, it's not just those illicit pleasures. It's not just those things that we might seek after for fun and enjoyment. It's other things that can poison your soul if you spend too much time in these things. Like when you look at other people, do you see them just as kind of there to benefit you, like a means to an end?

If you constantly are doing that, then you see, you see these things bear out in your life in the types of relationships you have or don't have. If you look at people that are there, like in traffic, and they're just in your way. You know, like traffic is there just to harm you. It begins to just kind of like marinate in your life in that way. What about, like, if you're, you know, you're just looking at like a yield or a stop sign, and instead you kind of see a yield sign, you know, like, I just have to slow down and cruise on through it.

That's usually a symptom of somebody that's overcrowded their schedule with just too many things on it. And you're like, okay, I'm just going to pack everything in. And then if I show up late, I show up late. I've really been painting a picture of my faults and my things here for a while. Speed limits, you know, they're just kind of a posted minimum suggestion.

And not like, you know, not like the limit. It's just like, that's the minimum suggested speed. I was driving the other day and I was talking with Amy on the phone, and she had it on speakerphone, and Emma's in the background, and she. She ends up saying, like, she says, dad, you weren't speeding, were you? And I said, yes, I absolutely was.

Like, I'm not going to even sugarcoat this. I was definitely speeding pretty much everywhere I drove, but just a few over, not like exorbitantly fast, you know, so that makes it okay, right? When we start to live our lives in these patterns like that, you know, all of a sudden it's a rushed life. It's a. It's a use someone and move on kind of life.

Are you there? Just for. For what I need at the moment, but then after that I move on and just go beyond that. You see these things. I mean, it's not just that it's our money too.

Like, the way we look at our money, you can look at money as if it's yours or as if it's something God has blessed you with but entrusted to you as his, but you're the manager of it. You see, the whole biblical idea of this, it's not like, how much did you give back to God, it's how much did you understand that everything you have is God's anyway, and he has entrusted it to you as a steward or manager of it. And so when we give in the offering and when we tithe or when we give offerings is really. I actually heard a message on this. I think it was just this morning.

We were listening to the way that he phrased it. It was so interesting. Cause I'm like, I'm gonna talk about that for just a second. And he said his phrasing was, you're not really giving it to God, or you're not really giving it to God, you're returning it to him what was rightfully his. Anyway.

It's like, if I loaned you a vehicle and then you said later, like, oh, I want to give you this car, and it's like, dude, it's my car already. You know, like, you're returning it back what already belonged to me. You're not giving me a car. You're returning my car back to me. And so I thought, man, that's a great example.

When we look at the funds that we have at our fingertips or in our bank accounts, if we look at that and say, well, this is God's money, I'm just holding onto it for a little while, and if he requires some of it out of my hand, it was his anyway. So I'm not giving him something of mine. I'm returning or yielding to him that which already belonged to Him. That's what we're doing when we put money in an offering plate or in the tithes that we return to God is his anyway. And so when we look at it that way, that's healthy.

But when we look at our money and say, well, this is mine, I'm going to do whatever I want with it, and I'm going to spend it on what I want, we find ourselves constantly needing more and not having enough when we look at it as, well, this is my money to spend on what I want. I'll always have more wants than I have the ability to cover now. It's a problem in an economy where all you can do is, like. You're like, I just want food, shelter, lights. Like, air conditioning would be really nice.

You know, running water, be great if it was warm, you know, when I want to shower. Like, those are good things. And when you're just looking for that and you're saying, God, that's my daily needs, I don't feel like there's anything outlandish or unselfish or selfish about that. It's pretty much just when Jesus talked about his prayer that it said, father, give us today our daily bread. You know, that's kind of the thing he's talking about.

Like, I need shelter. I need food. I need the clothes on my back, and maybe then some. Pat and Lynn are talking about Linda, I think it was you that said you have two shirts right now because yours got trapped in the House that's flooded, you know, so she's like, I got two shirts. I got to wash clothes, like, daily, you know.

But anyway, you know, sometimes, like, praise God, you got two of them, you know. So we see these things, and if we look at our money as not something to provide illicit pleasures for us or those pleasures that are fleeting and fading, but we're looking at it as saying, this is God's money, and I want to use it as his blessing on providing for my daily needs and also a way that I can in turn bless others. Then you'll have more than you can know what to do with. That's a promise from God out of the Old Testament scriptures, by the way. He says, if you return to me the tithe that belongs to me, you'll have more than you know what to do with.

God says, test me out in this. He's like, try me. And he just like, if he had a microphone. It's like that mic drop moment, you know, that they do on certain things. They're like, I got nothing left to say.

Prove me wrong. That's a challenge that God challenges us to prove him wrong. And he's like, you won't anyway. We look at all these things, whether it's our money or the stuff we spend in our time and the stuff that we're feeding off of, we look at all these things and we realize that that becomes the environment in which we are rooted. Just like those trees or those seeds that are in that soil, and that's the environment or the growing medium that they sprout out of the things that we've surrounded our life with, the motives and mentalities that we have towards other people, or towards speed limits and stop signs and calendars, for that matter.

The way that we look at what consumes our time with news and social media and all things, that is the environment in which we are rooted. That's what we're going to feed ourselves out of. And so these are what gives us the basic building blocks for what we might consider the fruit that we bear. A tree that is a fruit tree but doesn't have good nutrients in its soil will not be able to bear good fruit, or any fruit, for that matter. And so the fruit that our lives bear is the things that we are soaking up from where we are rooted.

What does that help us to create in our lives? Now, our scripture has a list. There's a few lists in scripture. None of these lists are complete. And none of these lists are meant for us to, like, look at that and say, well, I failed, so therefore I'm trash, I'm no good, I'm unacceptable.

It's not saying that at all. It's giving us a cautionary list of things that says, when you look at these things, when you look at this list of things, what you're going to see is that there's stuff that you might get involved in or embroiled in in your life. And when you do that, here's what happens. So what I want to do, and we're going to read a scripture from Galatians 5:19 through 21. That's going to be, if you want to use one of the blue Bibles, in the rack in front of you is page 1315.

But I want to pray first before I read that. And I want to kind of preface it just a little bit to say these things are called not fruit of the flesh, but deeds of the flesh. In other words, when you do certain things based on seeking those, as we defined, illicit pleasures, when we do those things, these are the deeds that people living by their flesh or their human nature. These are things that people living by human nature will do. But it contrasts later.

And this is what we'll look at next week as we kind of, you know, work to conclude this message series. When we live life rooted in the Spirit of God, there's those fruit of the Spirit that will appear in our lives. So I want to pray over you, and then we're going to read this scripture. God, we just thank you today that you give us a good place to root our lives, that you give us not only your word, that even though it was written so long ago to a people that were in some ways so different than us, they still struggled through some of the same things that we do, we still see some of those desires for the things of this world, the fleshly things, the earthly things. And yet you have so much more for us than that.

God, I pray that everybody that's here would not hear these as words of judgment or words of condemnation, but rather as words of encouragement. That we would root ourselves in the right place, that we would seek the right things, the things that we were designed for, the things that you created us for, and that God, through that we would leave today, as we've contemplated this message, as we've looked honestly at this and found where we might fall in line in this list, and that we could confess to you our need for you, our need for more in this life, that we might live solely dependent on you and your spirit in Christ's name we pray. Amen. I want to read this list.

Now, the works of the flesh are obvious. Sexual immorality, impurity, depravity, idolatry, sorcery, hostilities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish rivalries, dissensions, factions envying, murder, drunkenness, carousing and similar things. I'm warning you, as I had warned you before, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Now, as I look at that, I find a few things interesting. One, there's things on there that hopefully none of us have ever been involved in, nor ever will be. Like murder. You know, we'd say that one's really bad. Nobody's going to say, like, well, murder's, you know, good sometimes.

No, nobody's going to say that. Right, right. Okay. Yeah, it's not just me. Okay.

And yet at the same time, there's other things that are listed on here. You know, envy or just, you know, impurity. Like, we. Sometimes we need like a Bible, dictionaries. Like, what does they even mean by impurity?

Like, what is impurity? Like, what does that simply mean? Or, you know, selfish rivalries. Like when you're just kind of having this war with another person or another group. There's churches, entire congregations that are guilty of that, where they have rivalries with other congregations.

I mean, you look at these things and you're like, those are in the same list as, like, murdering someone. You know, that's crazy. Outbursts of anger. Maybe there's a couple of you that never deal with that. I've had plenty of outbursts of anger, and it's usually towards the people I love the most.

To be fair, sometimes they just won't ever go away. Like they're right there with you. I mean, it's my family. They live in the same house and they feel the same way towards me. Don't act like I'm the only one, guys.

You know, like, you've been there before, you know, and so it's like, did somebody say daily? Did I hear that? No, I'm just kidding. And so anyway, you look at this list and you see a lot of things on there, and they're all in the same list. And they weren't listed from, like, worst to not worst.

They're all in the same list. And it's not a complete list. It's not meant to say this is every possible thing that might come from the desires of the flesh, but it's giving you an idea and saying it runs the whole gamut from being a little Bit envious of someone to, to like being ready to kill them or from abusing them by the way, that you might steal from them or misplaced worship in idolatry or trusting in evil spirits and things like sorcery. You know, all these types of things are in this list. We could spend an hour in a class setting just talking about the implications of each one of these.

I'm not doing that here today. You're welcome. You don't really want to spend time. That'd be kind of boring and annoying. But I think there's this thing that really kind of helps put it in perspective.

The man, C.S. lewis, was a writer and an author, speaker, a great Christian thinker from the 1900s. And he had this quote from a book called the Weight of Glory and I'm going to read it to you. It says, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and with sex and with ambition when infinite joy is offered to us.

We're like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slums because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. You know, when C.S. lewis says this, what he's showing us is first of all that he's British. Like holiday at sea.

We don't talk about that. We say vacation, they talk about a holiday, that's fine. But he's showing us that we're like this kid that all he ever knows is like, I'm making mud pies and this is good entertainment for me today, you know, like, I'm happy with that. When I was a kid we had this. I don't know, there was like, it wasn't a spring, but it was just this water that was always coming up.

Maybe there was a drain that went there, I don't know. But it was just. We had this clay and there was this hole that was dug out of there and frogs loved it. We would lay on our stomachs in the mud catching frogs and just holding them and releasing them. We didn't do anything with them.

It was just, can you catch a frog? Like that was fun for me. My dad talked about this thing where they had like a wooden wheel and a stick and they would just see how far they could roll that down the road. That was their entertainment. So I guess what it means is we all grew up poor.

But anyway, those were the fun games that we had. And so it's like, you Know, we're content to do that. We're content to enjoy those things. And God is like, hey, I've got this whole vacation for you on the beach, like a nice place that you can stay and all this stuff, like, I've got infinite pleasure for you here. And you're just kind of sitting there in the mud, just making a little mud pie.

That's fine. It's fun, it's passing the time. But he's saying, I'm offering you so much more. And what C.S. lewis is getting at is we have these ambitions or these desires that what I termed earlier illicit pleasures.

And we think that those things are going to be what brings us some kind of satisfaction in life. But they turn out to be feeble attempts at illicit pleasures. There's another guy that I want to quote is Pastor John Piper. And he says that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. For John Piper, he is saying that the highest goal that we can have as human beings is to find our ultimate satisfaction in God himself.

Not in the gifts that God gives us or the provisions that he provides for us or any of those things, but in just dwelling on God himself. Now, does that mean that you have to sit like some mystic, you know, just sitting there by yourself in silence and contemplation? Absolutely not. But like C.S. lewis was saying, God has infinite pleasures for us to enjoy as we go about the earth he has created.

And yet so often we are too feeble minded or too weak in our desires to want to desire the greater things of God. We see the commercials on tv, on social media, that everywhere you go, you're bombarded with advertisements that tell you what you should be wanting and what you should be living for and what you should be spending your money and your time on and the kind of people you should model your life and your attire and your, you know, hairstyles and makeup and whatever it might be. This is what you need to look like. This is how you need to live, how you need to act. We're bombarded with those things.

The person who becomes immune to those advertisements not only finds themselves with more money, but also more pleasure and satisfaction. Because you probably have already found yourself rooted in the things of God. You found yourself enjoying him and taking pleasure in living how God would call you to live. John Piper further kind of explains that by talking about a relationship that somebody might have with their spouse. He talked about if he's having a date with his wife, he might plan this date so that he could Spend time with her so that he could enjoy that time with her.

And as he does that, that does not mean that somehow it's misplaced or that she should say, well, you're just doing this because you enjoy it. No, you see, if he has properly planned this date where it takes her into account and takes her concerns to mind, then what he's doing is working to actually lift her up, to glorify her in the process, to revel in the joy that he has in being with her. She benefits from that. He benefits from that. It's this relationship where she is satisfied because he's satisfied with her.

It's this mutually beneficial way of going through that relationship. And John Piper says that that's the same way that we find ourselves treasuring God is when we say, God, I want to find my enjoyment in you. And as we do that, God is pleased by that. And God has already given us blessings. And when we recognize that, we live by those things.

So I want to read this list briefly again. See, these are things that are opposed to the way of God. Sexual immorality, impurity, depravity, idolatry, sorcery, hostilities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish rivalries, dissensions, factions, envying, murder, drunkenness, carousing and similar things. That's his way of saying, et cetera. You know, like, there's more.

He's not being a legalist here as he writes this. The apostle Paul, writing to the church in this town called Galatia, is not saying, like, okay, here, I'm going to give you a list of things. Now, make sure you don't do these things or live this lifestyle, and you're going to be good to go. Paul had lived a life of legalistic perfection. In fact, he had attained it.

He said, he says, I knew the list. It's like, for me, if I'm playing a game and I know the rules, not only am I going to know what's expected for how to play that game, but I'm also going to know where can I, like, where can I find, like, the way to win within those rules? We've got this game at the house. Many of you might have played the game Clue, you know, like, who did it in what room and with what weapon. Well, this one is just like, it's a kid's version, a junior version is like, who ate the piece of cake and with what drink and in what room or whatever it was, I don't know, like, or at what time they did it.

And it's just it's made for, like, young kids, and my daughter loves it. I hated it until I actually read the rules myself, found out we weren't playing it properly. And then I figured out how to win at this game. I found out how you can, like. Oh, I see.

And I could see it all of a sudden, like, now the game made sense. I know how to win, like almost every time. And the problem is when you're playing with a seven year old, you're not allowed to win, right? I mean, Amy found this out yesterday when she was about to beat Emma at checkers. And when we got an ice cream cone after the Harvest festival and we're playing checkers at Uptown Creamery.

And they, she was, they were both playing pretty well. And then Emma made a couple bad moves. Amy had to take the move, you know, and Emma was about to tip the table over. I'm like, nope, we're leaving right now. We're not doing this in this building, in public.

No way we're leaving. And so now I have to act like I don't know the answer, include Junior, like, I don't know who ate the cake at what time and what drink or whatever, you know, they had with it. I have to act like she got there first. But I still win every time. Now I know what the rules are.

Paul, as he's writing, he had experienced the rules. He knew the rules for leading a holy life according to what he believed was the way the Old Testament was telling him. And so he says, I know how to do, like, legalism. Well, that's not what I'm talking about here in this list. What I'm telling you is that this list is an example of what's going on in the lives of people who don't understand the kingdom of God.

Notice that last thing he said. Those who practice these such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. He's saying, you can live life, you can do all these things. It might not. I mean, some of them are pretty clearly a sin, you know, but some of them, like, there might not be a direct command that's like, hey, you know, don't.

I never read one that said no carousing. You know, just picking one out of the list. I'd have to look that one up. I think I have a pretty good idea. But he's like, don't be a carouser.

Seriously, you guys can look this up. I don't know, like, maybe you can help me later. But he says, you know, there's no law against that. And yet, by the very nature of things, if you're living this life that's rooted in Christ, living by the Spirit of God, you naturally won't do those things that are on this list. You'll naturally avoid them because your heart and your mind and your desires are set on God.

But if they're not set on God, then you're going to be living these things. And you don't understand the joy that is available to you to live this kingdom life. You don't understand the joy that's available for you to live life the way God intended life to be lived for human beings. So when Jesus talked about the kingdom of God or the kingdom of Heaven, what he's describing is the way that we would live when we show the fruit of the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit is the one that enables us to live that life.

So I wonder where you find pleasures in your life that have been misplaced. Where have you found yourself feeding your mind, your body, and you've come up empty from that? Where have you found yourself dwelling on stuff that you thought was helpful to you and it turns out to really just be leaving you empty over and over again?

I was reading a book this week that talked about, well, the name of it is called the Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, like being in a rush. And for me, that's a lesson I keep learning over and over again in my life. And I found myself in a cycle of falling back into that again. The last few weeks, there have been a lot of people that needed a kind of help that I was able to offer since the storm, since the hurricane. And I've been happy to be able to help in those ways.

And yet at the same time, I found myself saying, I just need to stop and take a break. I need to take a rest. And I found myself listening to this audiobook, and it was convicting on me. And then he gets down to it and he talks about these things in our life, these things that we end up spending our time on. And it was just what I needed to hear to be ready for this message today.

Because I found that I was rooting my life in things that weren't filling me, they weren't providing good spiritual building blocks. And I might be able to rationalize some of them away and say, well, these aren't bad. These aren't terrible things. One of the things that I found that I've spent so much of my time doing is I have podcasts that I listen to because I have this thirst to learn more. Just about a Broad number of topics.

But I find that I get more excited when I open up Spotify and I go to the podcast tab and I see that so and so has a new episode out. And I get so much more excited about that than I do about waking up in the morning and opening the Word of God and seeing what God has for me today. Because every time that I do open up the word of God with an earnest heart and I say, God, just speak to me today. Show me what you have for my life today. Show me how I can use this for building up a healthy spiritual life, but also to be a blessing to others.

And I find that when I do that in earnestness, God always comes through. And the food that he feeds me through his scripture, through His Word, through that time spent with him is always much better than anything I'm going to find on Spotify and for sure on social media, which I always think, I wasted so much time on that. Why did I do it? And yet here we go. And I look at this and I say, why am I chasing after these things?

Oh, knowledge isn't bad, and learning about new subjects and new things isn't bad. But when my life becomes consumed by that and that's all I'm chasing after, I find myself becoming more and more empty all the time. And for somebody whose job it is to be able to visit somebody in a hospital and share words of encouragement with them, or to pray with them over the phone, or to come here on Sundays and to speak, or to show up on Wednesdays and teach Bible study or whatever it might be, I'm expected to be able to bring you the things of the Word of God. But if I've just been dwelling in the. The illicit pleasures of this world, I'm empty and I have nothing to offer.

You might not be preaching or leading Sunday school or whatever it might be, but yet at the same time, God has called you to be a blessing to others. What are you rooted in? And is that providing fruit in your life to be able to offer that to others who are in need? Or do you find yourself empty and unable to be a blessing to others? So today is a little bit of a reflection time.

Today is preparing our hearts for next week as we talk about how the Holy Spirit fills us with good fruit. So my final question to you for this morning is, what needs to go away in your life? What things need to move out to make room and desire for the spiritual things that God wants for you? The good things. The holiday at sea versus the mud pies and the slums.

What is it that in your life is taking up so much of your focus and the thing that your life is rooted in that needs to be replaced with good spiritual things?