Welcome friends. We have a little more for you today. We have had more for you, actually the last two episodes of Kingdom Offerings.

And we have been talking about what “more” means for us as kingdom citizens. We’ve explored the idea of desiring more of God and His kingdom blessings two podcasts ago. In our last podcast, we talked about the fact that all of our choices for more have costs. So, we concluded that we should choose well. So, by now you’ve figured it out, we’re at Kingdom Offerings here at One Hundred-Fold Ministries, and I want to reflect on that a little bit more. I want to talk about “more” a little more.

So, what if we don’t choose well? I’m going to say that I don’t make as many bad choices as I used to. And that’s the benefit of life teaching me lessons as I get older. And that kind of depends on whether or not I apply myself to the teacher, and the teacher, of course, is life itself.

So, the passing of time and my paying attention helps me to avoid some bad choices. And so let me alert you to some lessons that I’ve experienced from having more of the world than I need. I’m going to talk about that today. Having more of the world than I need. Maybe if you hear some of the things that life has taught me, you can escape some of the consequences in your life of the bad choices that can be made.

I want to say that learning from other people’s mistakes is a great way of going through life. But sadly, I have tended to the three-year-old attitude of, “I do it myself”.

And so, I tend to make my own mistakes and, hopefully, learn from my own mistakes. So, in the next little bit here, see if you can identify with these consequences of having more of the world than you need in your life.

I can see a bunch of circumstances and consequences but let me focus on just three for today. Three consequences of having more of the world than you need in your life. Three of them: a hurried life, a cluttered life, and a performance-driven life.

Let’s talk about that first point, a hurried life.

Having too much of the world is often not so much about the stuff you own that you have to find a place for, but it’s actually about the over-the-top, mostly worldly stuff that you do. The world is telling us you can have it all, and you can do it all. But what the world is not telling us is that you don’t have time in the day for all that the world is telling us that we should be doing.

If more of the world that I’m hoping for, in this case is things like experiences and maybe credentials, occupational status, all of that is going to take time. And most likely, money too. But time is truly our number one non-renewable resource.

When the world offers us more to do, and more to learn, and more to experience, it doesn’t at the same time tell us how much time it will take to drive to these experiences three times a week, how much time it will take to complete the experience, or how much time it will take to keep that experience current over the years. The phone on my camera makes it easy to take pictures, but it doesn’t make it easy to sort them and eliminate the duplicates and delete the crummy ones.

That takes time. So, the extra things that I’m trying to do in order to have more of the world tend to crowd out the truly important things in my life. Things like relationships and service to humanity, perhaps my prayer life. If I do try to keep all these activities and commitments spinning, I find myself hurried. I find myself ineffective. I find myself breaking promises and speeding through important tasks that take time to do right.

I find myself hating my life as it’s overspent and under-delivering the hope that I have for it. So, hating my life is maybe too strong, but I hate being hurried. And not to mention, I’m most likely hurrying through the disciplines of my spiritual walk as well. And that’s not great. This hurried life of trying to manage more of the world than I need is cramping my style.

Not only can we be hurried, but we can also surround ourselves with clutter. So, there’s the hurried life, and there’s also the cluttered life. And that’s my second takeaway. Trying to have more of the world than we need leads to a cluttered life. So, on the internet, a gal by the name of Julie McCormick wrote a book called How to Declutter Your Life and Reduce Stress.

And she noted that the excessive clutter in our lives is often a cause of stress. And it can impact every facet of our life, from the time it takes you to do the things of your finances to the overall enjoyment of life. So, clutter. Clutter can distract you; it can weigh you down, and in general, it invites chaos into your life. So, the first three things that she suggested that would help a person kind of work on the clutter wasn’t so much about actual stuff that you have cluttering your basement and maybe your bedroom.

No, she said this. Julie said, “Reduce your commitments, reconsider your routines, and declutter your friendships.” I thought that was pretty profound that the clutter in life that Julie McCormick was referring to had more to do with the stuff of life that was not things.

So, there can be lots of different kind of clutter in our lives that keeps us from having more of God when we have too much of the world that we need.

And finally, the last stumbling block that I want to talk about today is this temptation to yield to a performance-based life. When I have more of the world than I need, I have to work harder and longer to keep it.

So, this performance-based life is filled with activity, usually to prove to someone who is important to you, might be a parent or an employer or a spouse, to prove to someone important to you that they should be proud of you. And maybe that they should love you more because of your clever, hard performance. And a life of performance to try and impress others, I’m going to tell you is a formula for disaster.

Trying to outperform others so that you feel important is to live life on the edge of a knife blade. Someone is always out there to outperform you. And over time, I’ve discovered that a 30-year-old body can usually outperform my 70-year-old body, at least when it comes to physical things. A performance-based lifestyle is exhausting and unsatisfying, and frankly, you can’t keep it up.

God has said, “I love you anyway, not I love you if.” It’s his answer to the performance-based lifestyle. He says, “Give it up, because I love you anyway, regardless of how poorly or how well you perform, I love you anyway.” You see, His love for us is based on His Son, Jesus Christ, and when we give into His love and His rule (speaking of Jesus) then our Heavenly Father sees us as complete and righteous, even when we see ourselves as failing.

You see, there is no more performing for attention and pride and love, not in the kingdom of God. You are free from that now, in Christ. All of this is to say that more of the world than what I need is not only distracting, but it’s destructive, and it’s spiritually dangerous. The world will do all it can to neutralize your walk with Jesus. The world is a fallen world.

And the hurry, the clutter, the dancing of you on strings like a puppet, the world wants to jerk you around, and I think most of us will confess that we just don’t take the priority time to get more from God, because we’re having too much “more” from the world, in a world that the Bible tells us that is passing away.

So here at One Hundred-Fold Ministries, we’re inviting you into more, but not into more of the world. You can have more of the kingdom blessings of God, not so much by increasing your time, perhaps, but by refocusing your attention and your motives. We’ll be talking about all that soon, a little bit more on Kingdom Offerings. And I also invite you to check out our Backyard Conversations blog.

You can find that on our homepage too. So, this is Dave Scherrer, the president and founder of One Hundred-Fold Ministries. And I do invite you into the deeper life of the kingdom. Take care.