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Good morning. Man, what a great day. Tommy Newberry is here with us uh today. And uh he'll be he'll be sharing in a in a uh a few minutes. I wanted to just really uh let you know uh we got a great May coming up. And so I wanted us to have a little bit of time to uh prepare. But uh May 5th is gonna is one of the best days of the year. It's Baptism Sunday, and it is it is a thrill. We do baptism Sundays in May and um November every time it's between 50 and 100 people get uh get baptized and we cheer, and it's just uh uh such a great thing. And you might have been raised to perceive baptism as kind of a stuffy old ritual that you know it's a to-do to check off on the Christian checklist. And um tell you, it is a statement. You know, it is uh I'm all in. You know, Jesus, we're gonna live life together. And it's such a powerful thing because it's do we're doing what Jesus did and following him, but it's supernatural like so many things with with God. And so when Jesus was baptized, the Holy Spirit came down as a dove. In Acts 2, it talks about baptism. Um and the uh and the Holy Spirit, so when we're baptized, something supernatural happens in that process that God's uh undertaking to transform us and change us uh from the inside out. Uh so it's just gonna be a great uh great day. And it might be even that you've been baptized before as a as a uh you know a child or or whenever, and uh, but you're ready to say now, you know what, I'm I'm all in. And it's just a uh great day. So if uh you'd like to be baptized, um you can sign up at the info desk, or if you just want more information. Last year I spent a Sunday just talking more about baptism and its meaning and those types of things, so you can grab a uh a C D and and uh listen to that. One thing we do a little bit different is uh just uh invite you, encourage you, if there's someone meaningful uh in your life spiritually or a family member, that uh you know, please invite them to baptize you. You know, Jesus didn't baptize his followers, his followers baptized uh each other. And so if there's someone like that, uh of course uh I and Susan and Justin, anyone would be uh honored and thrilled uh to do that as well. But be thinking about that, that's Sunday, May 5th, uh May 12th. We have three big Sundays in a row. May 12th is uh a big Sunday. For one, it's Mother's Day, so that makes it uh big just in its own. But then Tommy's gonna be back. We're doing the 40 days to Joyful Life together, and Tommy will be here on May 12th, will be about 36 days, those of us that started last week. Uh in and so he's really kind of bring it home and give us that boost so we can continue uh just having joy, just a uh uh a hallmark of of our lives. And then on May 19th, it's Bless the Bikes. Uh and so we got a lot of people that that ride, and we've we got a lot of friends that ride, so we'll invite them, and then those of us that have motorcycles will ride them in, and it'll be kind of a regular Sunday, but then afterwards um we will uh hang out and uh listen to music and eat great food and pray for everyone, but specifically we'll we'll make sure and pray for every everyone's uh safety and blessings that uh that rides a motorcycle. So let's bless the bikes. That's May 19th. Um if you weren't here last Sunday, Tommy Newberry wrote a book, uh New York Times bestseller called The 4.8 Principle. And it's uh uh really applying God's Word to our lives, specifically Philippians uh 4.8, and it's a life-changing uh verse. And he then wrote a follow-up uh book, 40 Days to a Joy-Filled Life, which is just a way for every day and a little bit of time to kind of instill that, so it's actually part of our lives. And so that's been meaningful to to a bunch of us here. Really a God thing. Uh it worked out so uh Tommy could be here last week. Uh last week was April 7th, and so we all started on April 8th, which is 4.8. And uh just doing it together. And so we've got books. It it's really a book that you go through, and then there's questions, you know, introspective type questions and things uh um to do, but it doesn't take much time. Last the first time I did 40 days to a joy-filled life, it was really 111 days to a uh joy-filled life. But just knowing that we're doing it together, I mean every morning it's just uh I I can't even wait wait for tomorrow morning. It's just been uh wonderful to do. But if you weren't here last week, you can start um uh tomorrow if you want. And and we'll still be doing it together because each Sunday we're gonna be talking about just different principles and how we can apply it. And the next three Sundays I'll be uh sharing two of them and then and just one of them. But it'll be things that each week that Tommy really feels like it's important that we that we get. And so we'll kind of be um all doing it together. So uh we've got books, we got we got books uh at cost uh uh uh for uh for us, and they're ten dollars each, and you really need one per person uh ideally and uh in a family or or husband and spouse. And we'll have those in the lobby and you can buy those. And I just you know, we have never ever sold anything uh here to make a profit. You know, if there is something for sale, it it's to get a tool or something like that into our hands. And the same here, Tommy's not we're not trying to sell books, we're trying to do this uh together. And uh one cool thing last week, I don't know if I say this, but uh over 700 books were bought last week. And um and so we really are doing this together, and it's just i i it's it's gonna be a part of us as a church. So I'm I'm just thrilled about it. But uh one cool thing is a bunch of people last week said, hey, here's some here's some extra money, or you know, uh anyone that that needs a book, we we definitely don't want the cost to stand in the way. And there's been plenty of Sundays in Susanai's lives where $20 would not have been doable. And so if that's your situation, please just go get a book or books, just wherever the checkout place is, just say, hey, um the uh I can't afford one today, and just just get what you need, because we all want uh to do this together. So uh you ready to go? All right, please uh please welcome Tommy.

Good morning. Okay, how many of you were here last week? And you came back? Did you know I was gonna be here again? Good, good. That's a good sign. All right, let's recap last week just a little bit and then go maybe deeper in a few spots as well. First and foremost, no area of your life, no area of my life is untouched by our thoughts, right? Not a single area, not our marriage, not our fitness, not our spiritual life, of course, not our parenting, not our work life, our financial life. Every single area of life is touched in some way by the thoughts that we think on a minute by minute, hour-by-hour basis. Now, 4.8, when you think of it, one of the verse or the version that I think is uh probably the coolest verse, the most graphic verse is from the message. And then there's another one from the amplified version, which ends with fix your minds on these things, fix your mind on these things, talking about and emphasizing the importance of determining the right thoughts and then holding on to them. Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is lovely, pure, true, gracious, just, if there's any excellence, if there's anything worthy of praise, think on and dwell on these things. Now the two words that are really important in there are often overlooked. I referred to this very quickly last week, is any. If there's anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things. Which means if there's forty things over here that are not worthy of praise, and one thing over here that is worthy of praise, what is Paul telling us to do? To focus on the one thing that is. Not only focus on it, but in the amplified version, fix our mind on these things, which is very, very powerful. Now, when you hear those words, finely brothers and sisters, or finely brethren, whatever is lovely, pure, brilliant, noble, uh, commendable, of good rapport, praiseworthy. When you hear that, you think, well, that's that's pretty poetic. Um, you might think if you reflect on it a little bit longer, you might think it's philosophical. Um, and it is both of those things. But its primary purpose, I am convinced, is to be tactical. It's to be something that we can use on a day-to-day basis, not something that we simply think about and go, oh, that sounds really nice or that's inspiring. And then we go back to living the way we've always lived or interacting the way we've always interacted, but literally using it as a foundational truth that undergirds everything else that we learn, everything else that we do to try to improve our lives, everything else we try to do to get closer to God. So the verse itself is simple. It's not easy to apply, but it's simple. Um, it's powerful, it's relevant. It is it is relevant to you if you are 12, it's relevant in 2013, it's relevant to you if you are married, it's relevant to you if you are single, it's relevant in your business, it's relevant in this country. Um, and the greatest thing of all is it's biblical, so you can count on it, you can depend on it. Now, I didn't want this to happen, but about maybe 10 hours after I left here last Sunday, I was down in one side of our basement with my son Mason, and we were watching something on TV, and all of a sudden I heard a scream from my wife. I'd heard her walking down the stairs, and she was putting our dog Gracie up, and I heard a scream from her. And we just Mason and I just sort of paused for a second because it was a different type of scream. It wasn't the normal routine scream, if you know what I mean. Um and so we rushed in there, and as we she didn't even say anything, she was standing there looking. We didn't know whether it was a snake, whether what had happened, and we looked in, and there was water pouring out of the roof. Not the roof, the ceiling. Um well, there wasn't really a ceiling at that point. There was there was water pouring out of the floor above, and the ceiling was on the floor in pieces, and it was a stream coming out. So Think 4-8. Thank 4-8. Not only that, that the carpet, it was a carpeted room with a ping-pong table and um uh uh a treadmill and an elliptical and some weights. So we call it our rec room. And it had a carpet that was about four months old with a moisture-proof pad underneath, which doesn't do any good when the ceiling falls through. So it was the uh it was the uh bathroom above that room uh that was used in a uh unconventional way by our seven-year-old Brooks. For some reason, uh he was sort of thinking that one roll of toilet paper, one trip to the bathroom, that one roll of toilet paper, one trip to the bathroom, that seems to work. I mean, they don't have two rolls in here, they have one. I'm just coming in here one. Um so is there what is good about there's nothing really good about that. Well, then there was something good about it. Well, it was a drop ceiling. Okay, so I was trying to think um what is good if there is anything? Well, it's a drop ceiling. Um so the repairing the roof's not that big of a uh repairing the ceiling's not that big of a deal. Uh it actually missed the ping pong table and the treadmill over on the other side. Um the woodwork all around the baseboard was has already been ripped out, it was ruined, the carpet's ruined, the whole thing's gonna have to be replaced. Um, but we have insurance for it. Um but just imagine if it landed right on the middle of the table or on uh the treadmill that we got at Christmas, you know, electronics it would have been completely ruined. Uh we do have insurance, so we pay the deductible, we had the a group come out there and clean it up and dry it up. So that's an ex- that's sort of like a routine, sort of everyday example of what the 4.8 principle can mean to you. Instead of dwelling on it, which we really didn't, um, the cleanup process, when you start doing something about something that's bothering you, you you start practicing the 4.8 principle almost automatically. In other words, you can sit there in your room and you can contemplate what's good about the flood in your basement. But once you start cleaning up the flood and you call whoever you need to call and you start cleaning up the things that got wet and so forth, taking action displaces a lot of negativity. So that's sort of a routine thing. Probably half the people in here have dealt with something like that before. Then, minute by minute throughout our days, we've got to deal with uh kids and the problems and challenges that they face and our spouses and financial matters and so forth. So there's the daily grind of thinking through and trying to apply Philippians 4.8 to the everyday components that everybody has to deal with. What about those more unusual moments in life? Well, there was another one that involves Mason. Last fall he got into trouble, pretty big trouble related to his school. And when I found out about it, and and then I, you know, that first night after we found out that he was in trouble, um, I wasn't so much concerned about joy in the house. I was actually wanting to make sure that we were actually still a Christian household at all. But again, 24 hours passed, and Chris and I started thinking, well, you know what? It's actually good that he got caught. Literally, it came to um if you want your son or daughter to grow up and be a high character individual, uh a godly young man or young woman, then you really one of the things you ought to be praying for is pray that uh when they're doing something they ought not be doing, that they get caught. As weird as that is, even though it may be pain for you, it may be pain for them. So literally, that's what we we that was our really our first prayer uh was not help Mason get out of this, but um thank you for letting him get caught. And then he didn't share that sentiment. Um but I told him, I looked at him, uh, this was probably two days later, and I said, Mason, uh, you know we still love you. You know God loves you perfectly, your mom and dad love you. There's nothing you can do that would make us stop loving you, but I want to tell you that I'm more confident about your future than I was before because you getting caught tells me that God has great plans for you. And I really believe that. Um and that's why he that's why he got caught and was put under the spotlight and held accountable for what he was doing. And then then once we were on to sort of some more productive thinking, it occurred to us that there were a few more things that were good about this. Well, once um once that he has now been in trouble and he's sort of, you know, you know, people are he's on alert or on probation and so forth, um he's gonna have a good excuse not to involve himself with what his friends were getting involved. And he has a good excuse because they know that. And we told him that any friend that keeps trying to pressure him toward drinking um was what it was, that uh that that's not a real good friend, knowing that you've already been caught and that you're in big trouble. And then, of course, we have a seven-year-old, so we were thinking, hmm, he's almost he's 15 essentially. Older brother seven, hey, you know what's good about this? We now have a full-time Friday and Saturday night babysitter. If if you look, if you look, there is always um a way that you can find something good. All right, so roof, roof falls in, or ceiling falls in, Mason gets in trouble. I had I had a uh a situation with a good friend, a good client, a dear friend of mine. It's now been um let me see, almost seven years, six and a half years. Well, it was it was election, the day after the election, 2006, and I got a phone call on my mobile from my friend Bo, and I could tell his voice was distressed, but the connection was awful, and I could only make out bits and pieces. And long story short, he was calling me to tell me that his son Parker had died in a car accident the night before. He was sixteen. And aside from the fact that we were friends, um, I had been working with his son uh as a coach uh for the last few months, helping him lay out the plans for the rest of his life. That was his he got two 16 birthday presents. Um one was a uh six-year-old Volvo to get a safe car for his son, and the other was to work with me as he had seen his dad work with me, uh, laying out a plan for the rest of his life. But that ended on on the day of uh November 6, 2006, and I write about this in the 40 Days to a Joy-Filled Life that it absolutely amazed me um how Bo and his wife Lauren were able to go through this process and get through the process. Uh as he told me, you never get over it, um, but you can get through it. And at Parker's funeral, they read Philippians 4 8, and as the months went by, I had a chance to sit down with the dad, and he said it was a car accident, a single car collision in uh Milton. Uh no other cars involved, no witnesses, no alcohol, no drugs, no coffee, no mobile phone, uh going under the speed limit. Freaky, cannot explain it, sort of a thing. Um and he explained to me, to my true amazement, here's how we were able to use Philippians 4.8 to help us get through this. There was nothing good about the accident. That's how he started off. So I want you to think about something similar to this or less than this. How it how it helped me was hopefully I don't have to deal with something like that. But it puts everything else in perspective. That if you can apply the 4.8 principle to that kind of situation and experience God's peace, then you can certainly apply it to uh your child getting in trouble, to the ceiling falling through, to uh being irritated with the people that you live with in the same house and so forth. So we said, Tommy, um, there's nothing great about park, there's nothing good at all. There's not one thing, even a small thing, that is good about the accident itself. It was awful, it was catastrophic. Every night we have to walk by his his bedroom on the way to our bedroom. Um but if we thought about what could God be doing, how could there be good around the situation, then one thing we knew was that his brother, he they had a holiday the day before, and he and his brother Ben were able to spend the whole day together. It was very unusual. It happened to be a school holiday for sort of a random reason, teacher meetings or something, and they spent the whole day. So that was a good thing. And then he said, Well, you know, we had we had 16 years with Parker, and um we wish we could have had a whole lifetime with him, but we had 16 years, and he got to do a lot of fun things and had some cool experiences and great memories uh with his dad. One of the things that I did with him is I laid out his entire helped him lay out his entire life on a whiteboard that was um almost the that length, three-quarters of that length of the screen behind me. And he put the highlights of his life up to to that point, and then he put what he thought the rest of his life would look like, and all the highlights had to do with he and his dad and the rest of his family, but it was highly concentrated on his dad. So he got wonderful great experiences, and then they took great uh joy, uh if you can imagine that, knowing that they'd be reunited with Parker uh in eternity. Uh Parker was a Christian, he had he had been saved earlier in his life, he was uh not only a model and a mentor for other teenagers, but after his death, in the week uh to three weeks after his death, over 40. Teenagers from his high school also came to Christ. Pretty powerful. So there is nothing good about the accident, okay? So you, but good came from it. And here's how they helped get through that, even through this day. Is Tommy, this is Bo speaking again. When Lauren and I focused on all we would miss out on graduation, marriage, seeing how he grows and develops and uh what career he goes into and how his passions unfold and grandkids and that sort of thing, when we focused on that, we lost God's joy and peace. When we focused on what we had, what we will have, and the good that can come as a result of this horrible tragedy, then we started experiencing God's peace again. And so he said it it rem it made me understand that while peace and joy are gifts from God, we have a role in that. We can't expect to think stressful, turbulent, agitated thoughts and experience God's peace. Nobody at all would have thought poorly of this uh dear family for being broken and defeated forever almost. But they took a different course imperfectly, focusing on not only the seen, the obvious, the overt positives, but those things that were unseen as well. So as you go through your day-to-day life, you know, I certainly prayed that you don't have to deal with something like that, but you can use that model as I have as a reminder that you've got to keep the big picture in mind. And the big picture isn't just the next 10 years or the next 20 years, it's the next a thousand years, and so on. And when you do that, it allows you to be a little more laid back, a little more relaxed, a little more loose about the things that are going on in your life with the daily grind. Uh, in the time that we have this morning, I want to touch on three things pretty quickly, and they seem they're gonna seem odd to you. Golfballs, wolves, and sponges. So, where should I start? Well, given that um given what's going on a few hours away from us uh in Augusta, this is probably a good place to start. So if you're in the back, you may not be able to see this totally, but this is a uh container, a clear container of golf balls, and there's a lacrosse ball in there too, maybe a little marble, but they're white and red. Okay? This is symbolic of our life. The white represents the things that are good with our life, the things that are lovely, pure, true, gracious, just, worthy of praise, the things that are beautiful, commendable, noble, and of good rapport. Uh these are our blessings, these are our strengths, these are our recent victories, accomplishments, uh, signs of progress. These are the people that love us and care for us and pray for us. Uh the white golf balls are the things we're looking forward to, excited about, our passions. It's the good stuff. Say good stuff. Okay? Now the red represent the things that haven't gone so well. Maybe it's our blunders, um, our screw-ups, uh, the people that we're having difficulty with in our life, um, the things we haven't accomplished but wish we did, the relationships that haven't worked out like we wanted, um, areas of weakness, mistakes that we've made. And the the interesting thing is, for as long as we shall live, this won't really change. I mean, what the specific red golf balls are in your life will change, and what the specific white ones will change a little bit, and they'll shift around as you grow older and so forth, but they won't really change. There'll never be a point in your life where you've got a marriage jar full of white golf balls. There'll never be a time in your parenting or family life where it's all white golf balls. There'll never be a time in your financial life or even your spiritual life where it's all white golf balls. Could it be that that's by design? The good news is it's not going to be all red either. Will it sometimes maybe feel like it's all red? It will, but that is an indicator to us that we've been putting our attention on the wrong things, putting too much of our attention on the wrong things. So, what are the red things? The red things are the screw-ups, the goof-ups, the regrets, the things we wish we could buy back, the time we've wasted, the times when we haven't used our energy or our talents in a good way, the hurts, um, the tragedies, the mistakes, and so on. That's what the red is. Here is what I want you to remember is that we've got these, all these blessings, and there are really so many of them, and we've got the hurts and the pains and the buybacks. But if we focus too much on the red, what do you think starts to happen? When we focus too much on the red, this is a really good blessing. Don't know what that is. When we focus too much on the red, even the good stuff that used to be white starts to take on a different color. It's like we put on our eight-four goggles and we start seeing a skewed version of the world that we happen to live in. And that should be a huge selling point for why you want to follow Philippians 4.8. Not only will you notice more good, but you will keep the stuff that truly is good from turning colors on you. And so in a relationship, you can think, well, you know, there's these wonderful things, and then you decide to focus on the thing that's broken or missing or deficient. Well, even those things that were really good that you acknowledged three or four years ago, even those things aren't so good anymore. Same thing with all the different areas of your life. So we have this in all areas. This will never change. Our experience is going to depend on whether we choose to focus on the red golf balls or the white golf balls. And anytime we want, we can pick up one of these red golf balls and work on it and try to make it better. How do we improve it? How do we take this from red to pink? Some, I mean, wouldn't you rather have pink than than red? I mean, if if you're on a scale? Some people go, hey, well, I can't make it white, no point in even trying to get it to pink. But it's it's not an all or nothing uh dynamic there. So that's the golf balls. You may not remember anything I said, but you're gonna remember these golf balls, and you can sort of make it a joke, that it life is good and bad. Life is a mixture of good and bad. That'll never change. Now, the Apostle Paul, who crafted and authored the verse in Philippians 4.8, knew something that we didn't necessarily know, but we can probably figure out now, and that is that we are not automatically positive. If we were automatically positive, that verse would not be what? It wouldn't be necessary. Why waste that great language, that great poetry, that great philosophy on something that is not even necessary in the first place? But he also knew that we were not, we were not automatically positive. So we're not automatically positive, and we're not hopelessly negative. Therefore, humanity needs some instruction on what to think about. They could think about the red golf balls or they could think about the white golf balls, so I'm going to make sure that they understand that it's a natural human tendency after the garden that we minimize our blessings and we exaggerate our blunders and our mistakes. So therefore, I'm going to tell them very, very specifically wherever your attention goes, there goes your life. In fact, you can think of that really as the principle of attention. Whatever we pay attention to tends to grow and thrive. Whatever we stop paying attention to dies. I mean, if you want to, if you want your plant to grow, you pay attention to it. If you want it to die, you ignore it. If you want a relationship to grow, you pay attention to it. If you want it to die, you neglect it, you ignore it, you stop giving it attention. And when you stop giving something attention, it begins to atrophy. So fix your things, fix your gaze on those things in this world that are positive, that are encouraging, that are uplifting. And if you can't find anything at the moment, imagine future moments. If you can't find anything that you can touch that is tangible, then look for the unseen, which is simply faith. Because all joy is, it's an outward sign of the inward promises or the inward faith and the promises of God. So would you knowingly let a thief into your house? You don't even need to answer that. You know? I'd like to come in and take your DVD player, your laptop, and your car. Come on in. Nobody would ever do that, but we are not so picky about the thoughts that we let circulate and incubate in our head that actually will end up stealing our dreams. Why would we let thoughts into our head that smother our future when we wouldn't let somebody in our house that just takes our things? I mean, if we were going to do something stupid, which one is more stupid? To use a scientific term. You know, let somebody take our stuff or let somebody steal our joy, you know, including ourselves with the ways that we think. So how do you activate 4-8? Well, one way to do it is you ask 4-8 questions. An eight-four question might be what's awful about this day? What do I hate about my job? What just annoys the heck out of me about my spouse? What what what can I not stand about this teacher? That kind of thing. Those are eight-four questions, upside-down questions. Four-eight questions are, what am I grateful for? And how can I express that appreciation in the next 24 hours or 48 hours? Um, what are my strengths and how can I use them more often? What are my recent victories or little signs of progress? Who are the people that love me and how does that make me feel? Who are the people that are praying for me? And how does that make me feel? What am I looking forward to and excited about? Those are four eight questions. So if you if you put them up, we have them on a bookmark, let's say. You can write them out, they're in the book. Put them where you'll see them. Put them on your into your screensaver, put them on the bathroom mirror, tape them to your steering wheel, put them on the center console, uh, make your homemade bookmark and put it in your Bible, put it in a book that you're reading, uh, tape it to the outside of the fridge, the door on the microwave. If you don't remind yourself of what you know to be true, then you'll start to think on the red golf balls. Not because it's you or me, but it's because of our human nature. All right, so two ways to activate 4.8. First, ask 4.8 questions. Second, look for, like a detective, look for evidence of good stuff in your life. In law enforcement, they have a term called bolo. Be on the lookout. You know, essentially, a crime happens, an officer arrives on the scene or somebody calls 911 and they get a description out for there's a white male 5'10, wearing a brown jacket with a green baseball cap, and he's running south on blank blank blank. And it's a bolo. Be on the lookout for. We start thinking eight four, in other words, upside down, when we tell our brain the wrong things to look for. We give ourselves an erroneous bolo. It's like we're making something up, we're saying, hey, here's what we want you to look for. We want you to um think about your life, but instead of thinking about the blessings, we want you to think what's broken with it. I just gave you a $100 bill, um, but does it have any wrinkles? You just had your kitchen redone, but is there a tile that's out of place? Sure, he's a great guy, but you know, he doesn't have all that much hair. What is that, why is it that we like to zero in on the things that are missing to the exclusion of the things that are present? So train yourself to look for acts of caring, acts of kindness, acts of nobility, acts of strength, or signs of strength, or progress, or even worst-case scenario, you can't think of anything positive about maybe a relation. Look for signs of a positive intention. You know, that's almost funny to think about. If all else fails, can you at least say that she or he had positive intentions? Well, that's something to latch on to because I've worked with couples for years and years and years. Sometimes they can't come up with anything if they're in a certain mental place or space about their spouse without a little prodding. And then with a little prodding, they go, reluctantly, yes, I'll acknowledge that you know he's a decent dad. You know, I said, Well, dwell on that. That's the mustard seed. You know, get a call back from this uh young mom in Kentucky, and she tells me, you know what? I I really disciplined myself to think about what a good dad he was. Um, and I started noticing that he really was a good dad. And when I encouraged him about being a good dad, he started doing a couple things that I really liked, and I saw that there were the seeds there for him being the kind of husband that I thought he was gonna be. And that's how it works. One thought leads to another thought leads to another thought, but it works on an upward spiral, but it also works on a downward spiral. Okay, so we have to be careful of something called the law of familiarity. The law of familiarity says that we tend to take our blessings for granted. Here's the catch. Are you listening? The longer we've been exposed to them. So a brand new blessing, like a present on Christmas morning, we're very glad about, we're very uh appreciative of, we're very grateful. Six months after Christmas, maybe not so much. Which is okay with Christmas presents, I suppose. It's not good, but it's okay. But with relationships, we tend to forget the things that we're grateful for. The law of familiarity. The longer we've been exposed to a particular blessing, the more likely, it doesn't have to happen, the more likely it is that we're gonna take it for granted. See, as humans, we are designed for joy, but we're programmed for distress. And we're programmed by the things that we expose ourselves to on a regular basis. So, two wolves. Golf balls, you got it? Two wolves. Well, there's a fable that goes like this A grandfather was telling his grandson that there are two wolves battling inside his heart. One is wise and kind, and the other is vicious and cruel. Curiously, the grandson asked, Well, which one will win? And the grandfather replied, The one that I feed. And in the mental realm, feeding is dwelling. Dwelling is thinking deeply, it's replaying, it's contemplating, it's pondering, it's holding on to a series of thoughts and not letting go. And worry, for example, is the opposite of 4-8. So we feel what we dwell upon. We feel what we dwell upon. Our emotions of joy or dread or passion or fear, get this. Our emotions allow us to feel our thoughts. You almost want to highlight that or draw that out somewhere where you can see it. Our emotions are the bridge from thought to feeling. How is it that we feel our thoughts? Through our emotions. So when we feel scared, we've been thinking fearful thoughts. Maybe legitimately. I mean, you know, if if we're in a dangerous situation, if we are feeling resentful, then it means at least one thing that we've been harboring and holding on to thoughts that are negative, maybe jealous thoughts, maybe bitter thoughts, something like that. So negative mental momentum is when we don't notice that we're on a downward spiral, because it's okay to be on a downward spiral for just a little bit, as long as we acknowledge it, notice it, or have people in our life that'll hold us accountable and nudge us or something, and then we get back on the positive spiral. You don't need to be a perfect 4-8 thinker because there is none. You can't be perfect with it. You want to get better and better and better. But the downward spiral is not a problem if you catch it early, but the upward spiral is what you can feed over and over and over again by dwelling on the things that you are wanting to be present in your life. The quality of God includes the characteristics that Paul wants us to focus on in Philippians 4.8. Lovely, pure, true, gracious, just, excellent, and worthy of praise. When we think on those things, we not only experience more joy and more peace, but we actually notice more of the good stuff. Our bolo changes. And we start to bring out the best in others because we see others as God sees them, not as we can see them or tend to see them only with our normal eyes. Sometimes we have cultural blind spots, and one of the greatest is failing to make the connection between the stuff that we allow in our mind and the quality and quantity of our joy. So the things that we let in our mind is what we read, watch, listen to, and view on the web. Sometimes we really, really want joy. We want to have the peace that surpasses and transcends all understanding, but but we keep putting stuff in our mind through our senses that is incompatible or in conflict with joy. It'd be sort of like saying, you know, hey, um, I want to get really lean and fit. And the first thing you do is you put you know bowls of MMs out all around the house. Now, you probably do want to be lean and fit or more so, but if you set yourself up to fail, you're gonna fail. So a lot of 4-8 is getting ready for joy. Everybody wants to be joyful, you know, at 2 in the afternoon, but do you want to be joyful early, you know, enough to get up in the morning and prepare for joy? All right, and then the last thing you remember it was golf balls, wolves, and what? And a sponge. Very good. So we are sponges. This means that we soak up our surroundings. Everywhere we go, our pores are open, and we're soaking up the messages, the values, the attitudes of the people that we spend most of our time with. When I speak to teenagers, I always tell them I say, if if you and somebody who does not share your values spend a lot of time together, one of you is going to change. We take on the attitudes, the mannerisms, the body language, the beliefs, the habits, sometimes even the facial expressions of the people that we spend most of our time with. When I come back on the 12th, I'll go into this in a little more depth. But in Proverbs 13, 20, it gives us a great warning. It says that you become wise by walking with the wise. But that that's the positive uplifting part of the verse. The backside of it is sort of the slap, and it says, because even the companion of the fools is destroyed. Okay, so you want to be wise, walk with the wise. You want to be joyful, walk with the joyful. But then the back side is perplexing and scary, but helpful in the sense that it's saying that if you're wise, but somehow you get in the back seat when the fool's driving, even the companion of fools sitting in the back seat will be destroyed. So we've got to be careful about the inputs, the mental inputs that create our emotional outputs. Guard your heart. We talked about that a little last week, with all diligence, for out of it flow the issues of life. And then from 1 Corinthians, bad company corrupts good habits. So there are toxic people in our life. There are some that we love and live with. If not, if you can't get away from them, there's no nudging right now, by the way. If you can't get away from them, then look at it as a challenge from God that instead of trying to work on them for being so toxic and negative, work on yourself. Become a stronger fortress, develop more faith, become more joyful. Take it as a challenge that they can't bring me down. I'm not going to play along with that. Okay. Nothing comes out of your mind other than what you first put there. All right, let me close up with something real quick that I think is, it comes from chapter 40 in the new book, the black cover book. But it's about the presence of God. And this is deserving of an entire message in and of itself, but it's something maybe for you to run with over the next week or two weeks. And that is there's the highest and greatest application of 4.8 and 4.8 thinking and the 4-8 principle is putting your mind on God, uh, dwelling in the presence of God. And while we often think of maybe that of you know the presence of God as being something mystical, it need not be that way. There are things you can do to get yourself in alignment with God's thoughts and God's thinking that's available to all of us. And as we grow and mature and so forth, our experience changes a little bit. But it's it's number one, we've got to contemplate God. We've got to think about God. We've got to remind ourselves, whether it's in an early morning, deliberate ritual, early morning joy ritual in the morning, or just randomly throughout the day, we have to remind ourselves of what we know to be true about God. He's all-loving, all-powerful, ever-present, um, merciful, and so forth. And then think about what are some examples of that in the Bible in my own life? And you're you like lose yourself in thinking about God. If I ask you to think right now about my neighbor Jim Stevens, who lives three houses down from me, would you think about Jim Stevens for a few minutes? You're gonna look at me like I'm another like you're doing now. Um you don't know him. How can you think about him? So one of the barriers I had when I first tried to start thinking and meditating about God is I realized I didn't know enough about him to really be able to think about him. So therefore, it was a very shallow exercise. I started and it's like, well, I'm done. Um so you learn a little bit more about God, or you make up your own list of things you know to be true, and you just replay them over and over and over and over again, like I used to do with a sports page when I was in high school. I would read the brave stats over and over and over again. And they were not good. When I was um, we're talking about the braves of the 80s, okay, not the 90s. All right, so contemplate God, communicate with God throughout the day. What does that mean? That doesn't mean anything fancy. Nobody has to know you're doing it. How do you communicate? You confess when you say something you wish you shouldn't have, thought something you wish you hadn't, just confess it right there. I'm sorry I shouldn't have said that. You can say it inside your head, you don't have to say it aloud. But so you're thinking about God as much as you can, the true character of God, and we start to take it on, then you're communicating through confession and constant conversation. Almost people think you're crazy, but that's okay. So contemplate, communicate, saturate yourself with the word of God, memorize Bible verses. Uh in Isaiah it says, uh, Thou shalt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee, for he trusteth in thee. When you pour yourself, when you pour God's word into your heart, it starts to come out eventually. We're sponges. So we can soak up God's word just as much as we can uh soak up the cultural word. And then finally appreciate what you have. Appreciate, go on a gratitude spree. And not just, you know, a Thanksgiving binge, you can think of stuff in your face, but you could have a Thanksgiving binge every day for 120 seconds, or maybe 48 seconds, and just think, what is everything you can write out or think to yourself that you're grateful for, or glad that you have in 48 seconds and then be done with it? Or as I heard, I listened to that the satellite radio station, the message, and they play these little sound bites, one stuck out with me, which was what if you woke up tomorrow with only the blessings that you thank God for today? It's a that's a powerful thought. So Paul said, Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is lovely, pure, true, gracious, just, if there's any excellence, if there's anything worthy of praise, think on and dwell and be mindful of those things. So today we talked about the goth balls, we talked about the wolves and which one is it you feed. And then finally, we talked about the sponge, so that you'll constantly get a sponge and put it in your car for the week. Just leave it on the center console. So you remember we're I'm a sponge. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for our free will. Most especially, thank you for giving us the freedom, the liberty to think about whatever it is that we want to think about. Help us to use the words of the Apostle Paul to think on those things that are lovely, pure, true, gracious, just, and worthy of praise. Help us to think about you, help us to confess, help us to converse, help us to appreciate all that we have. Pray that you give each and every one of us a fresh dose of your Holy Spirit so that we can go out this week and live out and live up to the standards in Philippians four eight. In Jesus' name. Amen.