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Today, I want us to look at a foundation for effective living.
The foundation for effective living is integrity.
A lot of people think integrity is just being honest. It’s far more than being honest. Integrity means living by my values. It means living in a way where my walk and my talk match.
Last week we started this new series called “The Life Guided by Cosmic Mission” and we said that God has a “Cosmic Mission for every person.”
Today we want to lay the foundation by taking step one:
Clarify your Values!
You don’t realize how much your values really do affect your life but they do.
They control everything in your life. In the first place your values affect your Stress. When your values are unclear, we get confused. When your values are in conflict, it’s called a dilemma. Either way, you produce unnecessary stress in your life if you haven’t clarified what’s important in your life and what’s not important.
James 1:8 (NIV) “…a double-minded man is unstable in all he does.
Your values control your Success in life. If you tell me what your values are, without even knowing you we can accurately predict an enormous amount of the direction of your life. If your values are lasting values, then lasting success will be the result because lasting success is built on values that last. Every time you make a decision in life, you’re filtering that decision subconsciously or unconsciously through your values grid. If your values are right it will lead you to growth, success, development. If your values are wrong, you’ll eventually crash and burn. What you think is important in life not only effects your stress, it also effects your success.
Proverbs 4:23 (NIV) Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.
Your Values also affect your Salvation. Jesus said that it is possible to be outwardly successful – financially, socially and every other way – and be spiritually bankrupt on the inside. He said…
Mark 8:36 “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?”
So today, I want us to look at how you lay a foundation of values for your life. How do you have a value based life? How do you clarify your values?
There are four things that are a must: I must choose my sources, I must clarify what’s important, I must change my lifestyle to match what I say is really important and I must check myself regularly to see if I’m lining up to what I say is true, to see if I’m lining up with what I say is important in life.
1. CHOOSE YOUR SOURCE
I must decide where I’m going to get my values. This is very important because the source of your values will determine the quality of your values.
New Idea, Women’s Weekly, Who, Cleo or Sports Illustrated?
How about TV talk shows – Dr Phil, Oprah, David Letterman, and Rove McManus?
Where do we get our values? We get them from a lot of places. We pick them up from our parents, peers, magazines, books, music, TV, radio jocks etc.
Just take TV - If you’re the average Aussie you watch at least 1000 hours of TV a year. That means if you’re an average Aussie by the time you’re 65 you will have amassed 9½ solid years of TV viewing.
On the other hand, let’s say you went to church once a week for your entire life, that would only equal four months of spiritual teaching. Four months compared to 9½ years – tell me where you’re getting your primary values?
The World or the WORD
1 John 2:15-16 (Living Bible) “Don’t love the world’s ways – the lust for physical pleasure, the ambition to buy everything that appeals to you and the pride that comes from wealth and importance – these are not from God but from the world.”
It’s amazing that this was written about 2000 years ago but it’s still relevant today. Why? Because the world’s values have not changed.
The world has always had three basic values in life. You need to be aware that this is what the world says is important.
1. Pleasure – Number 1 industry is Entertainment…
2. Possessions – What we can buy…
3. Prestige – or power or position or popularity or image.
The problem is this the media so bombards us with these 3 values over and over that even Christians get seduced by it. We buy into it. We think like everybody else that those are the ultimate values of life.
Honestly, for many Christians their values are very little different than those of an atheist. They’re just as hedonistic. They’re just as materialistic. They’re just as status conscious.
Romans 12:2 (Living Bible) “Don’t become so well adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking.”
If you buy into the world’s value system, that the ultimate value in life is pleasure, possession and prestige, you will miss God’s Cosmic Mission for your life. I guarantee it.
World or Word – Journals…
So the first step in building a foundation is Choose your source…
2. CLARIFY WHAT’S IMPORTANT
Job 34:3-4 (Living Bible) “We should choose to follow what is right but first we must define what is good.”
Make a list of your values. Make a list of what you consider to be the most important things in your life. Write them down so that they’re not vague, fuzzy, that you’ve actually thought them out.
Do this for a couple of reasons:
1stly – you need to do this because most of the values that you have you didn’t choose. You just assimilated them without thinking because you grew up in Australia.
2ndly – you need to write out your values because we rarely think about our values until we have a crisis & we hit a wall.
When you’re cruising through the world, going through life and everything’s going great, you don’t stop and ask the tough questions.
You don’t stop and ask things like, “What are my values?” and “Where are they leading me?” and “What’s going to be the end result of these values?”
What happens is we wait until a crisis occurs and one day we hit the wall and we go bankrupt, a divorce, a spouse is unfaithful, you get fired, you face a major illness or crisis or a loved one dies or a promotion you’ve been planning on getting doesn’t come and, all of a sudden, you start asking questions like, “What is really the purpose of life?” and “Are my values really leading me in the right direction?” We don’t think about it until the pain occurs.
Nobody who starts snorting cocaine ever says on their first snort, “I wonder where this is going to take me in eight years?” We don’t do that. We wait until the pain comes and gets our attention. Then all of a sudden there’s a wake up call and we start thinking, “Maybe my values are off a little bit. Maybe I’m too much of a workaholic. Maybe I’ve been investing all my time and energy in a person or a relationship or a job or a goal that I’ve wasted way too much time on.” That gets our attention.
This series of a Life Guided by a Cosmic Mission is not going to help you a whole lot if you just come every week and sit and listen and go home and do nothing.
So I’ve planned a homework assignment for you every week. By the end of this series you will have a written out life plan and better discover why God put you on this earth in the first place.
Get alone with a pen and paper and ask yourself these questions and then make a list of the ten most important values that you want to build your life on.”
You need to come up with a personal definition of success. That’s the end result of this. Success to me is … and have it written out.
Why is that important? Because if you don’t come up with a personal definition of success, other people will define it for you. And that’s a big mistake. Don’t ever let anybody else define success for you.
Success is a word we use all the time in our society. It’s probably a very overused word. But nobody ever stops to define it. Let me give you a definition of success: Success is the feeling I get when I live out my values.
It’s a journey, a progression. Success is not an achievement. Why? Because if your success is based on an achievement, somebody is going to outdo you eventually.
If you build your life – “Success will be when I achieve…” somebody else is going to top it.
Real success is when you decide what values are really important to you in life and bring your life in harmony with them.
When you have a personal definition of success based on your own values
1) Nobody can ever take that feeling of success away from you and,
2) You can be successful at any stage of life. You don’t have to say, “Once I get to 40 or 50 or 60 or retirement, then I’ll be successful.” You can be successful at any stage of life as long as your values are being lived out in your life and you feel the satisfaction of that. That’s what success really is.
The starting point is you have to decide what’s important to you.
I hope you’ll do this assignment this week. Decide what matters most. The key is perspective.
Look at your life ten years out, twenty years out, thirty years out. Look at it from eternity, standing at the judgment day and looking back on your life. Ask this question (this question sifts through values faster than any other question I know): “What’s going to last?”
What’s going to last ten years from now? Twenty years from now? For eternity? How much of what I’m doing right now is going to matter in twenty years?” The things that don’t matter, maybe I shouldn’t spend so much time on them. Maybe I shouldn’t spend any time on them.
When you take that question – “What’s going to last?” – And you apply it to the world’s value system of pleasure, possession and prestige notice what the Bible says…
Pleasure isn’t going to last:
Hebrews 11:25 (Living Bible) “The pleasures of sin last for a short time.”
Sin is fun. Nobody would do it if it weren’t! You have your kicks but you also have your kickbacks.
Possessions aren’t going to last.
1 Timothy 6:7 (Living Bible) “We brought nothing into the world and we can take nothing out.”
You never find a hearse pulling a furniture van! You’re not going to take it with you. It’s not going to last.
The next time you hear about some millionaire dying and someone says, “I wonder how much he left?” – He left it all! He didn’t take any of it with him. Possessions aren’t going to last.
Then the Bible tells us Prestige isn’t going to last.
Mark 10:31 (Living Bible) “Many people who seem to be important now will be the least important in eternity, and many who seem least important today will be most important in heaven.”
If you want to see the end result of building your life around the world’s value system of pleasure, possessions and prestige - I have a book for you to read. It was written by the wealthiest man who ever lived and he was also the most powerful man in the world at that time. His name was Solomon and he wrote a journal called Ecclesiastes. If you read Ecclesiastes you’ll find the end result of living a life based on the world’s value system. He says, “I have the money, the power to do anything, I held back nothing, I experienced every pleasure, I amassed every possession and I gained all the prestige in the world that I could gain. I did it all, tried it all! I tried food, sex and achievement.” Solomon had 300 wives. How would you like to have 300 mother-in-laws? But it’s useless, worthless. My conclusion is it’s all meaningless.”
If I don’t have a Cosmic Mission in life, none of this stuff counts, none of it matters.
1 John 2:17 “The world and its desires [the values of the world] will pass away but those who do the will of God will live forever.”
You choose your source – where am I going to get my values, the word or the world. Then you evaluate what’s important and you make a list of the things that you really believe are valuable. Obviously if you build them on the values in the Bible, these are eternal values. They will last forever.
3. CHANGE MY LIFESTYLE
That means I have to match what I value. I need to start working on bringing my life into line with what I say I believe. That’s called congruency.
“In the late 90’s George Gallup took a poll. After polling all kinds of Americans, he said that the number one source of stress in America is not, not having enough time. It’s not, not having enough money. It’s not relational conflict. His conclusion was that the number one source of stress in America today was what he called incongruent values. What is that? It means when I say I believe one thing but I live a different way. That causes stress in my life. When my walk doesn’t match my talk. When I say this is important to me but my lifestyle says it’s not really important to me at all. That causes stress.”
Ask Aussies…
“What’s the most important thing to you?” - My family…Time, input?
What else?
“My health is most important to me.” Do you exercise? No. Do you eat right? No. Do you sleep right? No. Do you take days off and rest? No.
Are you materialistic?”
They’d say no, everybody else is but I’m not! Are you going deeper and deeper in debt? Yes. Do you have unpaid credit charges? Yes. Are you saving anything? No. And you’re not materialistic?!? No. I don’t have any savings, I’ve spent it all. That’s called materialism.
People say, “God’s number one in my life!” But we give Him the leftover of our time. We give Him the leftover of our money. We don’t tithe (we rationalize this one away! We don’t put Him first in our schedule. So He’s not really first.
Incongruent values causes stress.
If you want to focus on changing your life, you’re going to have to focus on three key areas, bring values into three areas: My schedule, my budget, and my relationships.
mY schedule. You need to say, My schedule needs to reflect what I say is really important. If God is really important in my life, I should have a daily quiet time with Him. He should get the first day of every week – Sunday – in worship.
My budget should reflect that He’s first in my finances and I’m giving back to Him first before anybody else gets paid.
My relationships. I need to look and see that I’m making time for the relationships I say are really important. Are my husband/wife/children getting a short end of the stick?
Psalm 119:37 “Turn my eyes away from worthless things.”
That would be a good verse to put on your TV.
He’s simply saying that what you need to do is eliminate the things that don’t matter.
Once you know what does matter and you’ve got a list of those values, the first starting point is to stop doing what isn’t important in your life, what you don’t value, so you’ve got time and money and energy for the things that do count.
The life guided by Cosmic Mission starts with a shift in your values.
Ephesians 4:17-24 (The Message) “Stop going along with the mindless crowd. That’s no life for you. Get rid of it. Then take on an entirely new way of life, a God fashioned life, renewed from the inside [it starts on the inside] and working out into your conduct, [it comes out in your behavior] as God reproduces His character in you.”
He’s saying it starts with a shift in values.
A lot of you are thinking, “I’d like to change but I can’t.
You’re right. That’s why you need the power of God in your life. That’s why you need Jesus Christ. God gives you the power to do what He wants you to do. You can’t do this on your own. You’ve tried to change dozens of times and it will last a week, two, three weeks at the most. It doesn’t work. You need God’s power.
Philippians 4:13 “I can do everything God asks me to do with the help of Christ who gives me the strength and power.”
You get that power. You get the power to choose the source, to clarify what’s important and then to begin changing your lifestyle.
The tragedy is most of us never get serious about changes in our lives until it’s too late. Please don’t wait until it’s too late to start looking at where the values you’ve been living by are taking you. Don’t wait until you hit the wall, until you look back and regret and say, “I wish I’d done that different.” Start now. Start building a foundation right now for the rest of your life based on values that really matter.
To do that, you have to do more than just choose your source of your values, clarify what’s important, make adjustments to lifestyle and that is
4. CHECK MY VALUES regularly
Proverbs 4:23 (Living Bible)“Guard your affections. They influence everything else in your life.”
What are your affections? They’re the things you love, the things you value, the things that are important to you. They’re your values. Ask…
- Is my life in harmony with what I say is important?
- Is my schedule?
- Is my budget?
- Are my time and money and relationships in harmony with what I really believe God wants me to do with my life?”
Start up – computer / phone
1 Timothy 4:16 (Living Bible) "Keep a close watch on all you do and think. Stay true to what is right and God will bless you and use you to help others.”
If you’re serious about changing, you’re going to have to review and test your values on a regular basis.
The fact is, nobody knows what the future holds. We’ve begun moving into the 21st century. This is uncharted territory. Nobody in this room knows what the future is going to be like.
You don’t know what the future holds but God has given you a compass. It is the values that are in this book, His word. They have been the same for 2000, 3000, 4000 years.
Since I don't know what the situations are going to be how can I help the people, the children, disciples, family, grand children in my life?
I can help them establish some values that are unchanging. So that in the changing situation they will at least have a basis by which they can make their decisions. That’s what it means to have a value base for your life.
There is a term that is used for God’s value system. God’s value system is called the Kingdom of God. The kingdom of God simply is the Kingdom based on the values that God set the world up to be run on.
The Bible says that if I seek first His Kingdom, that means put His values first in my life, He’ll take care of all the other needs in my life.
Do you realize what we’re talking about this morning? We’re talking about worship.
Worship simply means to give highest value to something.
That means you’d better worship something that can never be taken away from you. That is a relationship to God. You were made to know God.
1 Timothy 6:21 (Living Bible) “Some have missed the most important thing in life. They don’t know God.”
What do you worship? What do you think about the most? When you mind goes blank, what does it naturally go back to? Whatever you think about the most in life is what you really worship. Show me how you’re spending your time and your money and regardless of what you say is important I’ll show you what’s your God.
Prayer: The Life Guided by Cosmic Mission starts with realizing that life isn’t working out without God. If you’ve gone through that crisis recently want to say this could be the turning point in your life. If you haven’t gone through the crisis, I urge you to take the steps now to save yourself some pain. Pray this prayer in your mind, “Father, I want my life to count. I want to build my life on values that last. Help me this week to clarify what really counts and start heading in that direction. Turn my eyes away from worthless things. Help me to eliminate what isn’t of value in my life and to begin living for You, for the mission you made me and the values You intended me to live by. Most of all I really want to get to know You. So Jesus Christ, come into my life and make yourself real to me.
In Your name I pray, Amen.”
