"Weight Doesn't Matter"

Alert - This is not an episode about weight, diet or exercise! Instead this is a snippet of a quote from a powerful illustration given by a professor to his students. The weight in question was that of a glass of water he was holding. His question: "how heavy is this glass of water?" The answer is surprise and needful!

The imagery of that presentation, mixed with a few others I'd like to make concerning both soda and lots of water... are designed to help you deal with three really, really heavy things: Harsh Life Situations, Intense Personal Temptations, and Unrelenting Spiritual Despair. I genuinely hope today helps you. Maybe the greatest thing to learn today is that you don't have to wait for those things to dissipate. Their weight doesn't matter... if you can learn about how to put the glass down. 

- What is the result of carrying something longer than you should?

- Does our stress more often come from the problem or how we carry it?

- How does a glass of water help us with harsh life situations?

- How does a wall of water help us deal with intense personal temptations?

- How does a pool of water teach us to come up from unrelenting spiritual despair?

Transcript

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Welcome to season five of the Excel Still More Podcast. I'm still your host, Chris Emerson, and I'm here to encourage you and your walk with the Lord, and I'm glad you've joined. The program continues to be sponsored by Cunningham Financial Group. John is a good friend, and he's helped me and my family in everything from stock and mutual fund investing to annuities, life insurance, and retirement planning. I certainly commend him to you if you have needs in any of those areas. You can reach him at 205-326-7364. Thank you again for your ongoing encouragement and support. Let's get started. I think maybe there could be some principal application to such things, but today's quote comes from a short video that a professor used in a speech. I'll tell you all about it in just a minute. Firstly, though, I just want to take a minute and reference back to last week's episode and thank everyone who reached out with encouraging words and shared with me how those simple ideas were helpful to them. I only mention that because I think today's content unintentionally really is very much connected to those things. So if you listened last week, I hope that today is a nice follow-up to help you move forward in it. If you did not catch last week's episode, just let him, then check out what we're doing today. If this is something that's important to you, you may want to go catch that because I think it can help. Just by way of reminder, we talked about three categories of people that you will experience in your life. There are those who do not like you, who do not want to be a support to you, maybe they're entirely focused on themselves. There are others who do like you, who do want to be in a healthy, godly relationship with you, and then of course there is God Himself who loves you unconditionally. You have a part in each one of those categories. If it is someone who does not want to be near you, then you have to learn to let them go. If it is someone who cares about you and wants to be a healthy part of your life, you need to let them be there for you. And the way that you manage all of that, the great peace that keeps you stable in all of those decisions is letting him, letting God be the great light and warmth and support that can get you through it. And all that is really connected because even if we're talking about someone who loathes me, who cannot stand the sight of me, I still have to be at a place of security in my own life where I am not bitter, and I certainly regularly want to go to God who I know is there for me and who I know cares for me, and I want to pray for those people. Nothing will help you handle haters more than a great relationship with a God who loves you and with people who love you. So keep some of that in mind as we get in today's content where I will talk to you about three very heavy ideas. How you handle harsh life situations, how you work through intense personal temptation, and how you find relief from unrelenting spiritual despair. I suppose it would be great never to talk about any of those things, just ignore that sometimes life is really, really hard, or that there are impending temptations that won't seem to leave you alone, or that you have some doubt or fear in your soul, and we could just talk about all of the things that are good and the glory of the God who loves us, and you know I love talking about those things. But ignoring the bad and staring at the good is not the mission. The mission is to use he who we know to be good and how we know him to help us handle that which is not. So as we seek to get into those three categories today, let me tell you about this short video so that the title will make sense. I've probably seen this one-minute clip a half a dozen times over the years. There's a professor in a room with students and he's holding a glass of water. His question to the students is simple enough, how heavy is this glass of water? And they think about it a second, and you hear one student say eight ounces, and then another one says twelve ounces, and one more says sixteen ounces. The professor's reply is simple and powerful. He said the absolute weight doesn't matter. It all depends on how long I hold it. If I hold this glass of water for one minute, nothing happens. If I keep holding it for one hour, my arm will start to ache. If I carry it with me all day, my arm will go numb and maybe even suffer some form of paralysis and I'll drop the glass. He noted once again to reinforce his point, the weight hasn't changed, and it doesn't exactly matter if it's eight or twelve or sixteen ounces. Because no matter how much water is in the glass, the longer I hold on to it, the heavier it becomes. Now he went on to make very quick and simple application to what he called the stresses of life. And I do want to do a little bit of that with you today. Firstly, let me just share a couple of observations watching that video a couple of times. The reason it's so potent is we do key in on the objective weight of something, how much water is in the glass. And if he asked something like, what would make this glass easier to hold? Most of us would say, Well, if there was less water in it, or if there was no water in it, we could hold it longer. And that's kind of like saying my life would be better if there were fewer stresses, if things weren't as hard, if everything eased up, I could carry it better. And while there is certainly truth to that, I know I enjoy days with less weight and difficulty than those with more, it often takes the focus off of the more important thing. I mean, think about it, if a glass of water had half as much water, you still couldn't hold it all day long. I haven't done the science on this, but I think a glass might be heavy enough that if it had just one drop of water in it or none at all, if you tried to hold it for 24 hours, you would end up with the same results as if it was full. It would just take a little bit longer to happen. So, what his illustration does is, no matter how you choose to apply it, it puts the impetus on you to understand that blaming the contents of the glass will not make it better. It is your responsibility to put the thing down. And that was the very end of this one-minute clip. Put the glass on the table. I really think this is a valuable perspective shift for people. I'm going to take you through the three categories I mentioned earlier so we cover this wide gamut of things that happen inside of us and outside of us in life that we think makes it less than it could be. And instead, we're going to turn it and go, if I know how to handle these things and I know how to give them to God, or I know how to find the right support to handle them, I don't need them to go away, I can put them down. I don't need them not to exist, I have learned how to practically handle them. But of course, this is super challenging for people, hopefully not you if you're walking the ESM journey with me, but I think for a lot of people it's just so easy to blame everything and everyone else. The weight matters. The weight of the glass, that's the reason my arm is tired. Maybe your arm is tired because you're holding a glass you should have put down an hour ago, or weeks ago, or years ago. So I do want to talk to you about how to relieve some of that. Part of it is believing that you can put that glass down or believing that God's table can hold it. But I still want to work on this idea of taking on the responsibility of trusting in the Lord instead of waiting for circumstances to change. So I know I'm mixing up figures and stuff today, and trust me, you ain't seen nothing yet, but let me move away from the glass of water for a moment and talk to you about a couple of soda cans. I may have talked to you about this before, but I started sharing this little illustration with young people in a couple of camps and stuff that I've had the opportunity to do, but I pull out an empty sprite can and I ask them basically the same question, how much weight can it carry? Who can step on this thing and it not be crushed? So then I go ahead and grab a volunteer from the audience, kind of the biggest, strongest guy that I can find, and I ask him to stand on that can. And of course, it goes straight up flat right away. And of course, if I ask them why that happened, they would say because he's such a big and burly guy. So then I pull out another sprite can and I ask him to step on it. And he steps on it and nothing happens. I ask him to kind of bounce up and down on it and nothing happens. And then I pick up the can and show it to them that this one is filled and sealed. And I don't know if you know this or not, but you can put a tremendous amount of weight on a Coke can if it has not been opened. And then, of course, I make a similar point. I tell them, look, the can is is you, your body, your life, and this guy represents some weight or burden or trouble that you face, and we're very quick to blame two wrong culprits for what's happening to us. One is we blame the outside source. It's just too heavy. I crushed under the weight of it, or in an even worse way, we just blame ourselves. I wasn't strong enough. I wasn't made out of the right stuff. But if that's true, then why did the other can made out of the exact same material under the weight of the same guy not falter at all? Maybe it's not about you and how you were made or the weight that is against you. Maybe it's about what's going on on the inside, how much trust you've put in the Lord, how often you have gone to his throne room, how consistently you feed on the Holy Spirit's wisdom and fruit. And of course, I think most fundamentally the level of faith, belief, dependency, trust, and allegiance that you're willing to put in the Lord Jesus Christ. So let me get back to that glass of water. I just wanted to add the extra story because it helps to emphasize that maybe we're looking to the wrong places for solutions to our problems. If you're staring at the problem, waiting for it to solve itself on your behalf, then you probably won't see great results. So let's talk about this in three categories. The first one, as I mentioned earlier, is harsh life situations. I'm not saying there aren't things you can do to make some of those burdens easier. What I'm saying is you don't have to wait on that for things to get easier. You just have to stop holding on to things that only God has the strength to carry. The real secret in all of this is once we learn to stop carrying things and let God carry us, sometimes passing that test leads to actually changed circumstances. But in that way, some of the harshest situations in life related to health or relationships or economy, well, they may exist for the very purpose of us understanding that professor's point. Instead of really breaking down all of the practical things you can do, what I really want you working on today is just accepting the fact that you can do this. Beginning to believe in the idea that a relationship with God is more than just religiosity or how things will work out in heaven. God, through his providence, through passages of scripture, through wonderful people, will put a table right in front of you, and his message to you is I'm not going to take the glass away or the water right now, but I will give you a place to set it down. But the next move is yours. Let me give you a practical example that's a little bit different than the usual suspects that is very real in my life right now. I live in a neighborhood that's been built up over the last ten or fifteen years, and the person who owns all the property is just not a very good man. And the other day we get letters put in our mailboxes. The letters were typed up on July the twelfth. They didn't even put them in our mailboxes until July twentieth, and it said very simply, we're shutting down the sewer system. On August the 1st, your sewer will no longer be taken from your home through the pipe across the street into the plant. We are shutting it down, you cannot buy it from us, you're just going to have to get an aerobic system put in. Well, that's a pretty big deal for us with 10 days notice. You can't even get something like that done within 10 days. It costs thousands of dollars. It affects 22 of my neighbors and myself. And I expected our neighborhood Facebook page to go crazy because they go crazy over the tiniest of things, and I have not been disappointed. Their arguments are legitimate, it's unfair, we have people fighting for our rights, which I hope works out well. It is certainly a bit of a harsh or at least a stinky life situation that in just a few days we may have some very real personal issues. But you know what else? We've got a teen weekend coming up. I've got stuff going on with my family and church and with friends, and I'm going to manage it the best that I can, but I decided to give it over to God, try to be wise, look at the options, and not carry this glass of particularly dirty water with me everywhere that I go. And in that way, seeing this video recently was a big help to me, and that's probably one of the reasons why I'm sharing it with you. Now you may have heard that story and said, Chris, you're way too chill about this. You need to pick that glass up because this is going to be a disaster. You know what? Maybe, or maybe not, but I'm not going to be stressed out in the meantime. Okay, with just a few minutes to go, I'm going to continue to mess up the simplicity of this episode and the basic illustration by changing the imagery a bit to help make these last two points. Because while holding the glass and putting it down applies to harsh life situations, I also want to talk to you a minute about intense personal temptations. That is a different kind of life stress that connects directly to sin and consequences. And to me it doesn't connect too well to the imagery of setting the temptation or glass on the table, so I want you to think about a wall in front of you that's being pushed on by water behind it, and you're holding it up. You're trying to hold those temptations back, those testings inside of you, and all you really want is for them to go away. This wall will stand fine, and I can take my weight off of it if the water will dissipate. But that's my point today. You cannot wait for the water to dissipate to figure out how to handle it. When you are feeling intense personal temptations, whether it be lust or greed or lethargic behavior, God will help you, God loves you, the them of last week who are in your corner are there for you, but you have got to figure out how to build reinforcements for that wall even as you maintain it. Because waiting on the water to go away or just believing that you'll always be strong enough to hold it back are both very oftenly proved to be failed strategies. So it's not just about giving it to God and walking away. That doesn't work so well with temptations. Or quoting 1 Corinthians 10 13, that God will never give me more than I can handle. Well, that is a great verse and a true verse, but you've got to, you know, handle it. And you might be like, Chris, that's not helpful. This temptation is pushing on me because I can't handle it. If it's just you directly opposing it, you're probably right. But I believe God has given you the strength in yourself and in your faith and in your friends and in the word and in him to help you figure out how to build structure and reinforcement to hold up that wall so that you might even be able to back away from it and the temptation does not flood you. I'm not filling the episode with practical ways to do that. I don't even know what's behind the wall for you. I just want you to understand that there is a better way, and yes, it's filled with grace, but it's also going to take some important personal behavior. I always think about that old movie Fireproof, where the guy had a terrible pornography problem and it was ruining his marriage, and he tried everything in the book and nothing worked until he took his computer out in the driveway and smashed it with a baseball bat. And that move, along with confiding the truth in his wife, those helped set up parameters and structures that separated him a great distance from that temptation and ultimately helped him change his life. Let me give you that third and final category of burden to discuss today, and I don't have much time to deal with it, but if I get the kind of feedback I'm expecting, maybe we will find a place for it in the future. This time I'll change the water imagery just a little bit more. This feels more like a pool of water where I'm underneath it, where I can't breathe, where I'm suffocating. I'm not talking about harsh external life situations or even temptations. I'm talking about unrelenting spiritual despair. When I don't feel worthy, when I'm not good enough, when I don't believe that God will save me. Sadly, some people are raised in religious cultures where that's kind of built into the way things are taught, that you've just got to learn to hold your breath for your whole life. Otherwise, you'll give in, suffocate, and spiritually die. And this very maintain works proof system is, well, suffocating. This one is easy in terms of what to do. It's not quite like the first two stories. In the first story, the weight doesn't matter if you just put it down, and the second story the weight against the wall doesn't matter as long as you build reinforcements. And here, it's more about that weight inside of you holding you under the water, and the thing that you need to do is obvious. If someone is suffocating under the water, you would tell them to come up for air. You don't have to stay down there. You're not designed to prove yourself down there. There will be times of testing and pressure on your lungs and reasons to swim underwater to accomplish some feat, but you can't live there. You have to come up to the surface and breathe. Breathe fresh air. You haven't failed. You're just seeking energy in life. I just wish more people understood how much God loves them and how much his grace has done and is doing for them. I have in years past let go of spiritual despair, but admittedly, it's always trying to pull me back under. I just can't let God save me. I'm just not good enough. And here's the thing: the truth of how God saves me doesn't make that second statement any less true. I'll never be good enough. I'll never get everything fully fixed. That's not the part that has to be fixed, not fully. And again, that's kind of the point I've tried to make with all of the different images that I've built for you today. It's not about the glass needing to be empty. It's not about the can needing to have someone lighter who steps on it. It's not about the water behind the wall having to dissipate or the pool being empty. In comparison with God's way to give you relief, those things don't matter. He matters. Set down the glass of the anxiety of harsh life situations. Let God's hand help hold the wall that keeps back impending temptation. And please let him lift you out of spiritual despair and breathe of his spirit into your lungs. Listen, the weights may lift, the water may dissipate, those things do happen. But for children of God who live by faith and entrust in his power over their own, they begin to live joyful and peaceful lives in all kinds of situations when the weight doesn't matter. Thank you so much for listening in today. If you enjoyed this program, will you share it with someone you care about? One thing I've learned over these five seasons is that there's nothing as powerful in advertising as word of mouth sharing between friends. Speaking of friends, let me once again commend you to give John Cunningham a call. He and his team have a wide variety of tools to help you use your present budget in life to build towards a more secure and hopeful financial future. Once again, you can reach him at 205 326 7364. And always remember whatever you choose to do today in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, excel still more.