Focus on the Family

John Fuller: The following program is sponsored by Focus on the Family and is made possible by the heartfelt support of listeners like you. This is John Fuller, and please remember to let us know how you're listening to these programs on a podcast app or website.

John Burke: If you fall, if you do wrong—just like in the Lord's Prayer—he said, "forgive us our sins as we forgive others." He already has paid for that sin 2,000 years ago, which means he already knows the ones you haven't even done yet, and he paid for those too.

John Fuller: That's Pastor John Burke, and he's with us today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. Thanks for joining us. I'm John Fuller. John, these can be tough questions, but do you know someone who's 100% in tune with God?

Jim Daly: This is a tough question. I'd have to say I know people who are really close and they hear God a lot. I've never known anybody that's 100% in touch with God. It's kind of like who got a perfect score on the SAT? But Jesus.

1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 tells us, "Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances." I love that because I think we fail to do that so often. Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. What a great reminder.

It does get difficult, I have to admit that. We get into squabbles maybe with our spouse or our kids. Things chew at us to where we ask, "Did we really get an A+ in how we reflect God's character?" Maybe not always. But the good news is he makes a way for us to repent, to try again, and to do over those things that we don't do so well the first time.

Today we're going to give you a clear picture of what it looks like to do life with God, to challenge yourself actually to deepen that relationship with the Lord so that more often than not you're responding exactly the way you should.

John Fuller: I like the way you put that. John Burke is the right man to help us unpack this. He's the pastor and founder of Gateway Church in Austin, Texas. He's married to Kathy, and they have an adult son and an adult daughter. He's the author of a number of books. One that we're going to be talking about today is called Soul Revolution: How Imperfect People Become All God Intended.

Jim Daly: John, welcome back to Focus.

John Burke: Thanks for having me back.

Jim Daly: It's so good to have you in from Austin. Listen, obviously you're a pastor, but there was a time—maybe even when you were a pastor, which is probably the core of my question—but there was that time when you really struggled with God over trusting him. I think that's every believer's challenge. Seriously? If, then, those kind of questions. If you're so good, then why is this happening to me?

I love that refreshing idea that even pastors have that challenge sometimes, even though they know the Word really well. So what was the battle for you in trusting God?

John Burke: Well, there hasn't been one.

Jim Daly: I appreciate that.

John Burke: No, I really do think God is trying to peel us like an onion down to the core of who we are and who he is.

Jim Daly: Why is that? What is his goal in that?

John Burke: I think it gets to what he really wants. But I think part of getting to that, he doesn't force us. He leads us gently, sometimes not so gently. My first disappointment, I was an engineer before I became a pastor. I was not a believer. My dad died of cancer. I remember standing at his graveside and looking at these two dates separated by a dash.

I was just looking at them and thinking about how life gets summed up in two dates and a dash: when we're born, when we die, and yet there's this dash in between. What are we going to make of the dash? What's it really about? As I was standing there thinking about that, my dad had kind of defined success the way everybody defines success in our culture. You make a lot of money, you have a great family, you take great vacations, and you're independent and financially well-off.

Yet on his deathbed, he had said something to me. He said, "John, I'd give it all back if I could just have my health and my family." That marked me. I stood there thinking about that, and it actually led me on a journey coming to faith in Jesus and at the same time asking the question, "What is success?"

The truth is I had these deep longings. We all do. We all have dreams and hopes and aspirations, and I had many of the same. I had a plan. I was going to get my engineering degree, which I did. I was going to get an MBA. I was going to start my own company. I was going to have a beautiful, wonderful wife who loves me and I love her, 2.3 kids, and vacations. We all have those. And yet it kind of rocked me too, thinking back, that it can all be taken away in an instant. So what is it all about?

Jim Daly: That's really good. Let me pull you back a bit because in the book you also mentioned an experience with your dad about building a train, I think when you were a boy. That had a good analogy for you. You learned something out of that. I don't know why you took so long to come to Christ, John, but what was that analogy with the train set and building it?

John Burke: When I was maybe eight or ten, my dad got one of those HO train sets. You remember those electric trains. But we decided to build a Colorado-like landscape, Pikes Peak, and we did. We paper-macheed, we sculpted it, we laid out the track. It went through mountains and tunnels. There were towns and all this, and it was amazing.

It took us probably five months to build it. It was awesome. When it was done, we high-fived and we turned it on and it went around. It was just amazing. But after about a month of watching the train go around and around, it started to lose its interest. What I realized looking back is that it wasn't just the train moving and going around that was so wonderful about that. It was me and my dad doing it together. It was us making it together.

The point for us is that there are a lot of dreams we have, a lot of hopes, and a lot of ambitions. They're not necessarily bad. In fact, many of them are good. But many of them are like a finger pointing somewhere. I believe where it's pointing is relationship. Without the relationship, first with God and then with others, all those other things lose their meaning. They're just a train going around and around, just a dash between two dates.

Jim Daly: It's interesting because I think of people who tell the story of having that desire to make a lot of money and become a millionaire by the time they're 25 or 30. Then you talk to some people that have actually done it, and they speak about how empty it was. They thought it was going to be something grand, incredibly rewarding and filling. Then they get there and they say, "It really didn't have the impact I thought it would."

John Burke: Right. That's one of the things I talk about in Soul Revolution. We all have deep longings. They're good. I think they're from God. But sometimes we have shallow strategies. In other words, we don't really understand how these deepest longings are going to be met. What if you have all those but you still don't have contentment? What if you still struggle with anxiety and worry all the time? I know multimillionaires who still worry all the time. They've told me.

Is there something deeper still? Maybe you want security. You want to know you're going to be safe and secure, so maybe you build a fortress to make sure whatever happened in the past doesn't happen again because that's often where it comes from. But what if you can't trust people and don't have intimate relationship? What if you don't really feel loved? Is that security enough?

Our deepest longings, when we start to drill down, are spiritual. They're what God promises by his Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. Our deepest longings only get met when we understand what God's deepest longing is too. God's want, God's dream, is for intimate relationship with you and with me.

Jim Daly: Let me get into that a little bit because in the book you talk about God's longings. I don't know that I've ever thought of that other than God loves us and built us for relationship with him. But I didn't carry it to the next conclusion, which is: why did he do that? That's your point.

John Burke: If you think about it, if his main desire was to get people to do right and quit doing wrong, if he's God, couldn't he make us? Couldn't he force us to stop doing wrong and do right?

Jim Daly: Right. Autocratic.

John Burke: He could. So why doesn't he? Well, because there must be something deeper he wants. He allows free will even against his will. Why? Because you can't have love without free will. You can't. Let's say you fall in love with some person and you want them to love you back. You could shower them with gifts, with good things, but they might love the gifts and not so much you still.

You can't actually buy real love. You could try to force them. I guess you could put a gun to their head and say, "Marry me or love me." Out of fear they might parrot it, but we would all know that's not love. Love must be free. That's true for God as well. That explains a lot of why God allows the things he allows in this world and even uses our disappointments to show us what it is deep down we really are longing for as well.

Jim Daly: That is so good. It's interesting, though, because we typically in the church will lean toward living a life that's more perfect, that is sinless, because it's pretty obvious in Scripture that's the goal. But the irony of ironies is the Lord is saying everything that you've just said—that you're going to learn more about me through those sinful valleys that you go through.

We don't really understand that as well as we should. We tend to think of God as like a grandfather who's shocked at our behavior, who would have never thought that you could do that. But he knows everything. He knows how we behave as sinful human beings. Nothing is going to shock him.

John Burke: The other incredibly freeing truth is that the life God wants with us is so simple. It really is. We don't have to work real hard or try real hard. When my dad said that on his deathbed, the reason it struck me is because what someone says as their last words is the salient point of life to them. Jesus did the same thing. He told us what matters most, and it's one thing. There's only one thing you have to do as a Christian.

Jim Daly: Listen up.

John Burke: Lean in. Think about it. When Mary and Martha were preparing dinner for Jesus and the disciples, Martha's busy and she's frustrated with Mary sitting there listening to Jesus. Jesus says to her, "Martha, you're working so hard, you're so stressed out. There's only one thing necessary, and Mary's chosen it."

Just pause. Only one thing is necessary? We better figure out what that one thing is and focus on that. That is the same thing Jesus was saying his last night on earth. John chapters 13 through 17 is actually what I base Soul Revolution on because Jesus said to us what was most important, and it's the same one thing.

The one thing he said to Mary and Martha was listening. Listening to the Lord is what's most important, but he said it in a different way his last night on earth. He knows he's going to leave, and he's trying to get it across to them. In John chapter 15, he says, "Look, I am the vine, you are the branches."

I believe they were actually going from the upper room down to the Garden of Gethsemane through the vineyard. I think he picks up a branch and he goes, "Let me just stick it in your head, guys. It's this simple. A branch doesn't have to work hard to produce fruit. All it has to do is stay connected to the trunk, the vine, and fruit happens naturally. I'm the vine, you're the branches. Stay connected to me, and you will bear much fruit. Apart from me you can do some good things."

No. You can build big businesses, you can have great families, you can do this and that, but nothing that he intended. Nothing that gets at the deepest longings. Apart from me you can do nothing. This would be the one thing. That's the whole point that I'm trying to get across in Soul Revolution. That actually all we have to do is learn to stay connected moment by moment to God's Spirit, and the rest of the things take care of themselves.

John Fuller: John Burke is our guest today on Focus on the Family. He's referenced the book Soul Revolution: How Imperfect People Become All God Intended. We'll encourage you to get in touch with us for your copy. The details are at focusonthefamily.com/broadcast or call 1-800, the letter A, and the word FAMILY.

Jim Daly: John, that's the core of the book: this idea of the 60-60 Experiment. Describe what that is and let's talk about it.

John Burke: Let me tell you how I came to it because, just like anything else, many times it only comes through disappointment. I was trying to get my deep longings met with a shallow strategy, and God used that to show me how I get what I really want with connection to him. When we planted Gateway Church, nothing went as planned.

Jim Daly: Here's a disclaimer: normally with the Lord, it doesn't work out the way you think it should.

John Burke: Yeah, and we all know that, but when it actually hits, our response is different. We were supposed to launch in the General Cinema movie theater. We had built this core group, raised money, and sent out invitations and mailers. Two weeks before, General Cinema in Los Angeles calls me and says, "You can't do church in our movie theater. It's bad for business."

I go back to the guy in Austin who signed the contract, and apparently, he wasn't supposed to sign the contract. I'm talking to lawyer friends, trying to figure out what to do. We're going to have a bunch of people show up in two weeks and we can't meet. Nothing worked. Finally, in desperation, we called a prayer meeting of our core group.

On my way out the door to this prayer meeting, the phone rings. This is back when phones rang and you had to go back and get them. You didn't put them in your pocket; it wasn't my cell phone. It was a pastor friend in Cincinnati who had this prompting to get someone he had led to the Lord connected to our church who was moving to Austin. I told him, "Well, I don't know that we're going to have church," and I told him why. He said, "Well, I think there's someone in my church who might know someone in the movie industry. Want me to talk to them?" I said sure and didn't think about it.

We go and we pray. The next week, I made one desperate attempt and went back to the movie house in Austin. When I walked in, the guy goes, "Well, you guys have good connections." I'm like, "What do you mean?" He goes, "You haven't heard? The president of General Cinema in New York called the Los Angeles office and said work it out with the church in Austin. So you're good to go."

Jim Daly: That was a good friend.

John Burke: It was God's prompting of my friend to call me. He knew someone who knew someone who knew the president. Now, I thought everything was going to go great. Six months later, though—because God worked it out, right?—we get kicked out. Then we had to move to six different locations during two years. Every time we moved, we lost people. It was so frustrating. I'm like, "Lord, what am I doing wrong?" I got to the end of myself in disappointment and frustration.

Jim Daly: And frustration with God because he's not doing his will the way he's supposed to.

John Burke: Exactly. I said, "Look what I'm trying to do for you. Look what I'm doing for you. Look what all I've given for you." In that, he started whispering something into my mind over and over when I would start complaining for about a year. It was the same thing every time: "Am I enough? Am I enough?"

At first I was mad. I was like, "What? I left my engineering career to follow you into ministry. I left that ministry to come plant a church to help reach people. What do you mean, 'Am I enough?' Haven't I shown—" Then I realized, I guess not. The truth is if loving God, loving my family, loving the people who are coming, even with the difficulties that come, is not enough—if God has to do things my way or I get mad and angry and frustrated with him—then he's not enough.

What I realized in this—and this is getting to the core of this whole 60-60 Experiment in Soul Revolution—is Jesus' prayer. What he taught us to pray is: "Your kingdom come, God. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." God's will mostly is not done on earth because we spend most of our time trying to get "my will be done." That includes Christians and even pastors.

I spent a whole year just practicing waking up every morning surrendering my will and trying to only do God's will during that day as best I understood it. It was amazing.

Jim Daly: That's the challenge you put in the book. So let's talk about 60-60. What are you challenging your readers to do?

John Burke: It came from that year of this experiment I did personally and the joy and peace I started to feel. A deeper love for my children—these things that I really wanted—it was amazing. I'm mowing the yard one day and I'm talking to the Lord about it. I'm just saying, "I wish the people in my church could understand how great this life is with you."

I had the thought: "Do an experiment. For 60 days—it takes time to change a habit—every 60 minutes, set your watch beeper to go off, set an alarm to go off, or something to remind you: 'Abide in me, remain in my love,' as Jesus said in John 15. 'You will bear much fruit. Apart from me you can do nothing.' Just get them to try it for 60 days and see what happens."

We did. Thousands of people have done this experiment, and it's life-changing. It's life-changing. But it's what Jesus said over and over. Paul said it in Galatians chapter 5:16: "Walk by the Spirit and you won't carry out the desires of the flesh." You don't have to try to stop sinning or try to break that habit or this habit or that addiction. Just walk by the Spirit, and you won't do that. Instead, the fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness—all that will start to grow.

Only one thing is necessary, Martha. It's the one thing. We have to learn to stay connected. So that's the experiment. Here's the whole idea: we're all in the habit—just think about it—when you wake up on the typical day, how much time do you spend making your plans and thinking about how to get them done versus, "Lord, what are you doing, and what do you want me to do in each thought, in each moment, in each decision with my co-workers, with my children?"

Do we really realize how much God loves us and is always with us and actually wants to guide and help us? That's what Jesus said in John 16: "I'm going to send my Spirit, he will always be with you and he will lead you into truth. He'll lead you in the way of truth."

Jim Daly: You know, John, in that regard, some people that might read the Scripture says, "Pray unceasingly." And you go, "Seriously? How do you even do that?" You have to go to do your banking, you have to work. How do you pray unceasingly, like you're constantly in a state of prayer? It has that feel to it like it sounds impossible to do—every hour, every 60 minutes. But really, John? I mean really?

John Burke: That's what I like to say is: that's not what we're doing. We're not trying to beat the Muslims in instead of five times of prayer a day, we're going to do 12. That's not it. It is learning to do life with this God who wants to do life with us, who truly loves us more than we can possibly imagine.

God is so good. We have to realize how much he loves us. In fact, one little experiment I've asked people to do sometimes is to realize that all love we experience is borrowed love. This hit me one time when my children were little. You know when your children are little, they're so cute, but they're cuter when they're sleeping. One night I was just watching my daughter sleep and just praying over her, and I just had this overwhelming sense of love for her. In that moment I heard the whisper of God say, "I love you more."

It shocked me. It wasn't audible; it was just a thought. It came out of left field. But then as I started to ponder it, the Bible tells us God is love. There is no love apart from him, which means that all the love I've ever felt or given is just borrowed love. He loves me more, and he loves you more. Whoever you are, whatever you've done, it doesn't matter. He loves you more than you love your children or your spouse, more than you've experienced love from your grandparents or your parents. It's all borrowed love.

Jim Daly: That is so good. The point of that is unless we realize who God is and that because of what he's done for us in Christ—he did that so we will walk with him. He didn't do that just to get us into heaven one day. Believe me, I wrote about heaven, I know about that. That's not why. He wants us to do life with him in this loving relationship. That's what Jesus was trying to get across in John 15: "As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you."

There is no greater love than to lay down his life. And "abide," he said, "in that love." You will abide in my love when you obey me, when you obey my commands, when you listen.

John Burke: Listen and respond. That's the 60-60 Experiment. It's not stopping every 60 minutes to pray. It's not that. If you do that, it's good, but you're just totally missing it. What it actually is, is trying to reorient ourselves from a habit of ignoring God most of the day to realizing that God is with us all through the day and loves us and actually wants to guide and help us.

I think what helps people is realizing it's not changing your life; it's reorienting your life. You don't have to change necessarily anything you're doing, but do it with the Lord. You're already going through life talking to yourself anyway: "Okay, what am I going to do now? Why'd that person do that?" You've got this constant conversation in your head between you and yourself. Just let God in.

John Fuller: What a great idea from John Burke to stay connected with God every 60 minutes for 60 days. You've been listening to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly, and I hope you've been inspired to take on this challenge.

Jim Daly: The grace aspect John talked about is so important. It allows us to experience freedom in Christ, and this is why Focus on the Family exists. We want to encourage you in your relationship with the Lord and give you the resources you need to step out in faith. If you're having some trouble in that area, whether you've been hurt by past relationships or you would like to develop more courage in your faith, we have caring Christian counselors who can give you some direction and get you on a path toward healing.

Another solid place to start is the book we talked about today, Soul Revolution: How Imperfect People Become All God Intended. And we'll make it easy for you. When you pledge a monthly gift for any amount, we'll send you a copy of the book as our way of saying thank you for supporting the ministry of Focus on the Family. If you can't afford that, we'll send it to you for a one-time gift as well.

Your continued prayers and financial support allows us to provide much-needed help to individuals, couples, and families. Over the past 12 months, close to 500 people each day tell us Focus on the Family has helped them commit or recommit their lives to Jesus.

That is an incredible number. It really is, and we couldn't do this ministry without you. So if possible, support the ministry today. Do so when you call 800, the letter A, and the word FAMILY.

John Fuller: That's also the number to reach out to one of our counselors and to request a free consultation with them, or stop by focusonthefamily.com/broadcast. Thanks for listening to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ.

This is John Fuller, and Father's Day is a time to honor those men who lead their families with courage. On the new seasonal podcast from Focus on the Family, Legacy of Courage, we uplift dads with real stories sharing humor, tender moments, and lessons that'll stay with you. Hearing from first-time dads to adoptive dads to seasoned pros, you'll be reminded about the power of a father rooted in God's strength and why showing up matters. You'll find it at celebratingfathers.com.