The Christians Hour

Ben Cachiaras: You're listening to The Christians Hour. Thanks for joining us today. We're excited to dig into God's word together. The Christians Hour is a ministry of Gospel Broadcasting Mission, where our heart is to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ to all tribes, all languages, and all nations through radio and media until all have heard. And we do that right here, beginning in our own communities and extending around the world.

In fact, we have teams serving across Asia producing programs in multiple languages to bring the gospel into some of the most difficult and unreached regions on the earth. We want the world to hear, just like you are today. Now, can I ask you, have you ever found yourself wondering, "How did I get here?" You wake up one day and you have a moment of reflection, trying to piece together the events that brought you to where you are.

Time seems to have passed so quickly, and you realize you've ended up somewhere you never expected, in a situation you didn't plan for. Now, I love fishing and I've noticed something over the years. If I'm not careful, I can get caught up chasing the next best fishing spot. When I was a kid, I'd always walk along the banks of the stream near my house, thinking that there might be just a better spot right around the next bend.

So I'd keep going and going, and before long, I'd stop and realize how far I had gotten from where I started. It wasn't intentional. It just happened. I got so focused on that moment that I didn't notice how far I had gone. Friends, the same kind of thing can happen in our spiritual lives, and it can be a dangerous place where we can find ourselves. It's called spiritual drift.

In today's message, Mike Breaux, teaching pastor at Eastside Christian Church in Anaheim, California, he takes a deeper look at how spiritual drift happens and what we could do to guard against it. Well, here's Mike.

Mike Breaux: Today we're going to talk about some things that always come up. I'm at that age where I'm losing stuff—phone, wallet, keys, glasses. Anybody else there? Come to think of it, I've been doing that since I was 13, so it's maybe not an age thing. But when that happens, you have to do this: you have to retrace your steps.

You go, "Okay, so I was in this room. I walked in here, saw the remote on the floor, I picked it up, put it back on the coffee table. Then I told myself not to forget my daughter at school, but I wanted to take a snack with me. So let's see, I walked into the kitchen and I opened the fridge. Well, there's my keys, right next to the shredded cheese." That's the way it works. You retrace how you got to where you are.

And it's been my experience that in life, we all have a tendency to drift, don't we? We can drift in our purpose, in our passion. We can drift in our relationships with each other, in our intimacy with God. And the thing about drifting is that it happens gradually. A lot of times, we don't even notice until one day we look up and we're nowhere close to where we thought we were or where we should have been.

How did it happen? What contributed to the drift away from you, to my drift away from joy, to my drift away from good health, to my drift away from my spouse, away from real friendship, away from intimacy, away from passion? What do you see, God? How did I get here? And you pray this little prayer, it's Psalm 139, just says, "Search me, O God. Search me, O God, know my heart. Test me and know my anxious thoughts. Point out anything in me that offends you, and I need you to lead me along the path of everlasting life."

You come to God and say, "Okay, God, how did I get here? Because I'm sure I've drifted." Christine Caine has a book. I read it last summer. It's called *How Did I Get Here?* It spurred me to think about my own life and some personal experiences that have caused me to drift. For instance, I have found that drift happens when we stop counting and we start comparing.

Man, it's so easy to get caught in the comparison trap, isn't it? We're scrolling through our Facebook or Instagram feed and we see everybody else's highlight reel: how they've lost 20 pounds in three days, their stunning vacation pictures, their amazing Pinterest-inspired preschool snacks, their CrossFit workout of the day. Their kids are all dressed in adorable outfits that they hand-crafted. They're eating vegetables from the garden that they planted in those cool raised garden boxes. They're all sitting around a farmhouse table that they built one afternoon from some pallets they found behind a Home Depot.

And all of a sudden, you say, "My life stinks," right? And we start believing that we're not good enough, we're not beautiful enough, we're not smart enough, we're not worthy enough, we're not ripped enough, we're not popular enough, we're not blessed enough. And we start to drift towards all kinds of unhealthy thinking. But I've also found that drift happens when we stop gathering and start isolating.

Many of us found that to be absolutely true during the lockdown portions of the pandemic where we couldn't gather, at least in a way that we were used to gathering. And then just many of us got out of the habit. And we started being alone way too often with our thoughts. And many people started diving way too deeply into the comment sections on Twitter or cable news networks or conspiracy theories, and we drifted.

We drifted away from God, we drifted away from community, we drifted away from friends, away from truth, away from compassion, away from our purpose. And the isolation was really hard on kids and students. So much anxiety was caused by not being able to hang together. I think the past two years have highlighted for all of us our desperate need for community. It shows us that we were made to do this life together.

I love my fire pit. I like to represent my team. I use it almost every night. Ventura weather is perfect for it year-round. I sit out there and work on messages. In fact, this series was created around that fire pit at night. And when I'm done, I get ready to go back in the house, I take the poker and I spread out the remaining embers because when they're separated, they grow colder quicker and they eventually burn out.

And it's why the writer of Hebrews says, "And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another." Keep the fire stoked. Don't spread out. Time is short. We need to be together, especially now that the day of his return is drawing near. What we're doing here this weekend and every weekend when we gather is important. When we stop gathering, drift happens.

Drift happens also when we stop resting and we start running. Now I'm not talking about working hard, not talking about being ambitious. We ought to attack things with excellence, but not to the detriment of our soul. Our Creator built that into the rhythm of life, even wrote it into the owner's manual. He says shut it down every week. Jesus told us people weren't made for the Sabbath. It wasn't God's intent to pile more rule-keeping on top of us, but the Sabbath was made for people, to be able to rest and reflect and worship and recharge. It's for our benefit. When we don't do that, drift happens.

I found the drift also happens when we stop praying and we start panicking. We just stop talking to God and we try to put it all on ourselves. We try to control everything, and as we do that, anxiety levels rise. One of my life verses that has brought me back time and time again from a drift into anxiety is Philippians chapter 4, verses 6 and 7, which says, "Don't be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving in your heart, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all human understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."

This one came to my mind one evening. I found that drift happens when we stop climbing and we start coasting. And the reason I thought of it was, I was sitting on the beach watching pelicans. Have you ever watched pelicans? They're fascinating. When they're cruising along and all of a sudden, they just dive-bomb into the water. And I started wondering what their success rate is. So I sat there on the beach and I did some very intense research. I Googled it, okay?

So I Googled it and I started reading articles that marine biologists really actually study this stuff. The success rate of a pelican is about 70 percent. When they hit that water, they come up out of the water, they throw their head back, they know they got a fish. And the fascinating thing for me was as I read these articles, the higher they climbed and then dove, the success rate went up to about 90 percent. And I'm sitting there scrolling through these articles, "There's no way." And I felt the Holy Spirit whisper to me, "Breaux, you need to climb higher. You need to back off the situation, get closer to me, and reset your focus, or you're going to drift."

I've also found that drift happens when we stop giving and we start grabbing. When we're not generous with our stuff, we're not generous with our money, with our time. When generosity doesn't define our lifestyle and it all becomes about just acquiring more, we drift. Drift happens when we stop serving and we start sitting. Because I love how it says in Ephesians chapter 2, "For we are God's masterpiece. He created us anew in Christ Jesus so that we can do the good things he has planned for us long ago."

When we're living beyond ourselves and we're serving other people, man, that's why it feels like we're hitting on all cylinders because God created us that way. When we sit it out, drift happens. I think drift happens when we stop wondering and we start wandering. Keep that wonder of who God is and what he has done for me. When we lose that sense of awe and we start wandering instead of wondering, we start searching for that elusive next thrill, drift happens.

So if we want to stop the drift, you just reverse the list. You stop isolating and you start gathering. You stop running and you start resting. You stop panicking and you start praying. You stop coasting and you start climbing. You stop grabbing and you start giving. You stop sitting and you start serving. You stop wandering and you start wondering. Get proactive and intentionally start some or restart some things that will help keep you anchored.

So like I mentioned, I'd like to go back and just quickly address the one that has made the biggest difference in my life over the past couple of decades: how drift stops when you start counting and you stop comparing. When you start counting and you stop comparing. The guy that wrote that awesome verse we just read about the peace of God that transcends all human understanding is a guy named Paul. And if you know anything about the Bible, Paul was this guy who was radically transformed by God's grace, anchored his life in a relationship with Jesus Christ.

He was chosen to spread the good news of God's love all around the world, ends up planting all kinds of churches. He writes most of the back half of the New Testament of the Bible, and a lot of that was written from a prison cell because of his faith in Jesus Christ. So want you see what he writes from a dark, damp prison cell. One of my favorite passages in the entire Bible, Paul says this: "I have learned how to be content with whatever I have. I know how to live on almost nothing or with everything.

I have learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it's with a full stomach or empty, with plenty or little. For I can do everything through Christ who gives me strength." I want to learn that secret, don't you? When we are discontent in our soul, we tend to drift. We've talked about this before, how we drift toward what's called the land of "er." Have you been there? It's a place where it's not enough to be pretty, you've got to be prettier. Not enough to be smart, you've got to be smarter, you've got to be richer.

And then as we keep drifting, we eventually hit the shores of the Isle of "est." Now it's not enough to be prettier, you've got to be prettiest, smartest, richest, retweet-est. There's just no win in comparison. It steals our joy and our peace and drives anxiety and unhealthy competition levels through the roof. When we get our eyes off of all the ways that we've been blessed, I'm just telling you from experience, drift happens.

The Hebrew people prayed what they called "the 18s" or "the 18 benedictions." And that word *bene* in Latin means good. The word *dictio* means word. So "good words" are what the Jewish people call blessings. All day, every day, they wanted to thank God for what he had given them. So they would stop and pray, "Blessed are you, Lord, for you have given us food to eat. Blessed are you, Lord, for you have given us clothes to wear."

They prayed these benedictions, these good words, because they realized that God was a good, good father. He was a benefactor, and he was the source of all that is good. And they knew that they were beneficiaries of God's good gifts. They were the ones who had been blessed by God with life and shelter and a planet that provided everything that they needed. And they had a name for all the good gifts that God had given them. They called them benefits. Benefits.

In Psalm 103, David addresses this. He says, "Praise the Lord, O my soul. All my inmost being, praise his holy name. Praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all of his benefits, who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires on the deepest level with good things." The more I chewed on that passage, the more I realized, man, I don't deserve anything good from God.

He's just a super generous benefactor, and I am the beneficiary. So I'm not going to stress out about my 401k, my investments, interest rates, inflation, gas prices, my PPO, HMO, or Medicare. I already have amazing benefits. I'm learning that the more I think I deserve, the less I'm going to be grateful for. And I just don't want to go through my days living that kind of life.

Ellen Vaughn's written a great book called *Radical Gratitude*. In that book, she says this: "Radical gratitude is powerful, provocative, life-changing. It's like a pair of glasses that get progressively sharper. The more we thank, the more we see to be thankful for. Gratitude is the lens that reveals God's incredible grace at work. It is the key to tangible, everyday joy." Man, I love that. She nails it.

She says, just look around, notice, see, count up your benefits. Learn to look at life through the lens of gratitude. I mean, think about this for a second. Ingratitude was the reason for the fall. I mean, talk about drift. It was humanity's discontent with all that God had freely given. They were living in absolute paradise and said, "Yeah, but what about that?" And drift happened.

This is a strong statement, I know, but I really do believe that ingratitude is the catalyst for all my sin. It's just been my experience. It empowers my self-centered pride. It stokes my jealousy. It fans the flames of lust and envy. It changes my vision. It makes me compete in unhealthy ways. It's caused me to lie, exaggerate, caused me to pad my stats, causing me to look suspiciously at other people, causes me to drift far from God, far from the life that Jesus came to give me.

So if ingratitude is the culprit, then maybe, just maybe, gratitude is the cure. I mean, there is enormous power in gratitude. There have been all kinds of secular, exhaustive research that shows that grateful people have much greater levels of happiness, peace, joy, and contentment. And I want to be counted among those people, don't you? I want to live my life with deep satisfaction. I want to learn the secret of being content.

Let's look again at the words of Paul there in Philippians 4. I want to highlight a different word. He says, "I have learned how to be content with whatever I have, for I know how to live on almost nothing or with everything. I have learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it's with a full stomach or empty, or with plenty or with little." And it made me think, how do you learn that? How do you learn that? Well, how do you learn anything? You practice, right?

Truth is, you and I get proficient at things by practicing things, right? The same is true with contentment. Here's the deal: you learn contentment by practicing gratitude. You learn contentment by practicing gratitude. All throughout the Old Testament portion of the Bible, you'll see the nation of Israel stopping to stack up rocks. And they would do this as a place of remembrance for what God had just done in their lives.

So through the years, as a family was traveling, they might come upon a broken-down stack of stones, and the kid would say, "Hey, Dad, Mom, what's up with the stack of stones?" And it gave that parent an opportunity to tell the story once again of God's goodness and God's faithfulness. And when you and I stop stacking stones, we stop telling the stories of God's goodness. And I'm not suggesting that you build a stone altar, but maybe you could start a gratitude scrapbook.

Or maybe you could start writing in a journal or a blog post or capture moments on video or pictures with your phone. Maybe you can dedicate an entire wall in your house where your kids can just walk up and write things right on the wall that they're thankful for every day. Pray together as a family, thanking God out loud. Just like you might practice piano or tennis every day, practice gratitude every day. Just start counting.

One of my practices that just keeps me focused on gratitude is—because I need structure when I pray and when I thank because I'll just go all over the place. Not that God minds, because God can sort it all out, but it helps me to stay a little structured. I go through the ABCs. And what I do is I'll start with the letter A and I might be laying in bed or maybe first thing in the morning, maybe late at night, maybe in the middle of the day. I do it regularly now.

But I'll work through, first of all, I'll work through the attributes of God. I'll kind of just sit there and go, "Okay, Almighty, Beautiful, Caring, Divine, Everlasting, Father, Great, Holy, Intelligent, Just, Kind, Loving." I'll just work my way all the way through the alphabet, just listing the attributes of God. Then when I get to the end, I go back. The second time through, I just list whatever pops in my head that I'm thankful for. Anything.

Any good thing, any tough thing in my life. I do whatever pops in my mind that I'm thankful for. I'll just go through like, "Apples, Beaches, Chemotherapy, Dogs, Evergreens." Whatever pops in my mind, I just write it down or I speak it out loud. Now, I have been thankful for xylophones and zebras a lot because that's about all you got when you get down toward the end. But then my third time through, I go back and I list people's names that pop into my head. Just people I'm grateful for.

And it's been just a really cool exercise for me. And I'm learning that if you want to discover or rediscover the rhythms of grace and joy and peace and contentment, just start counting the gifts that God has given you. Write them down. Because if you don't, you drift. I gotta tell you how this all played out for me just a couple of weeks ago. I got some kind of really painful infection in my right foot.

And I'm normally a 20,000-steps-a-day guy. That's my goal anyway. And I could not put any weight on my foot at all. And I've had plenty of sports injuries through the years, but nothing as painful as this. I had no relief. I couldn't go to sleep. There's throbbing, sharp pain. Plus, I was traveling, and I got to the church I was supposed to teach at that weekend. I could barely get up on the stage. I had to preach sitting on a stool.

Then as the lights went down, I kind of hobble off the stage as best I could. Then I had to go catch a flight, and I had to go super early just so I could make it all the way down the concourse. I walked slower than anybody in the entire terminal. Then we had a two-and-a-half-hour flight delay, which made me miss my connecting flight, which was the last flight out that night. By now, it's 10:30 at night. My foot is throbbing. I'm miserable.

I'm rebooked on an early morning flight the next day, and I'm thinking, okay, to walk outside and grab an Uber and get to a hotel and then come back early in the morning and stand through a long security line, that ain't happening. So I just decided to see if I could find a place to crash on the floor for the night, somewhere close to my gate for the morning. And as I made that decision, I turned down a corner and I found this isolated couch right around the corner from my new early morning gate.

So I hobble over to this couch fast as I could, threw all my stuff on the couch to claim that couch. And then I desperately—my foot was killing me—I desperately needed some ice to put on my foot. I looked up, there's a Bojangles chicken place right next to where the couch was. They were closing down, but they saw me hobbling over in pain. I asked them for a big bag of ice. The guy set me up with a big bag of ice.

I thanked them, went back to the couch, rolled up my sweatshirt that was hanging off my backpack, used it for a pillow, used my backpack to elevate my foot and put the bag of ice on my foot. And I laid there thinking, "This is the worst day ever." And then I felt the Holy Spirit prompt me saying, "Come on, man, do your ABCs. You know, really, dude, you're not Paul. You're not shipwrecked. You're not in prison. You flew to a great church, you sat on a cushy stool, and you scored the only couch in this entire airport."

So I laid there going, "Okay, start with A: Advil. B: Bojangles. C: Chicken. D: De'Vonte who gave me the bag of ice. E: Escalators that got me upstairs. F: That I still have a foot. G: God. H: Heaven where there will be no more pain." And I worked my way all the way through the alphabet. I'm telling you, it was a game-changer for me. And as I closed my eyes, I tell you, I slept well, like a guy in pain on a couch in an airport, but one with a much, much better attitude.

I'm just learning when things are tough, if you're going to drift, drift toward gratitude because it really is a game-changer. So I'm just trying to slow down, notice, reflect and count, and just practice every day just giving thanks.

Guest (Male): I found a love like no other love. He came to me like a gentle dove. Somewhere in my heart, I just knew there was a greater love than this world can give, a greater life for me to live. He knew that I was looking for a greater love.

It was so long that I was searching for this kind of love. Well, he died in my place so I could have a greater love. A greater love. A greater love.

Are you looking for a greater love in anything you can feel or touch? I'll tell you right now, it won't be enough. There's a greater love than this world can give. There's a greater life for you to live. He knew that you were looking for a greater love.

Has it been long that you've been searching for this kind of love? Well, he died in your place so you could have a greater love. A greater love. A greater love. A greater love.

Close your eyes, try to imagine a love that will never end. It's for you, it's for me, just receive a greater life. Greater love. Greater love. Greater love. Greater love. Greater love. Greater love. It's for you, it's for me, just receive a greater life.

Ben Cachiaras: So how about you? Are you ready to begin the journey back to where you want to be, correcting the direction of your drift? Maybe today, it starts with just one step. Ask the Lord to reveal where you need to begin, and then thank him for all that he has already done. Be intentional today because you don't want to look back tomorrow and wonder, "How did I get here?"

Well, our thanks again to Mike Breaux for that wonderful teaching. And our thanks as well to McPherson for their music of worship. If you'd like to listen to today's program again, you can visit our website at thechristianshour.org. There, you can stream or download this message for free and explore all that God is doing through our global ministry.

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Would you take a moment and share it with us? Simply email it to us at thechristianshour@gmail.com. And if you'd like to get in touch with us directly, that's the best way to reach us as well. Well, thanks so much for listening today. We hope you join us again next week.