"A Day in the Life: How to Keep God First" [Sunday Message]

Ever feel like your day starts with a whirlwind of stress, to-do lists, and endless responsibilities? What if there was a simple way to ground yourself and find peace before the chaos begins?

In this week's "Mountain Mover" series message, Pastor Joe Liles explores how to create a meaningful connection with God that extends beyond Sunday morning - transforming your everyday moments into opportunities for spiritual growth.

Key Quotes:

• "If your day begins with God, your life will change."
• "God will keep you, protects you. He watches you, He guards you."

Scripture Readings:

• Mark 1:35
• Psalm 121:1-8
• Psalm 127:1-2

Takeaways:

1. Honor God FIRST thing every morning
2. Release control and trust God's plan
3. See your entire day as a spiritual journey
4. Recognize God's constant protection in your "comings and goings"

Whether you're an early riser or someone who struggles to get out of bed, this message offers practical insights into building a daily relationship with God. Learn how to shift from feeling overwhelmed to feeling supported.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Mountain Mover Series
• 4:17 Morning Rhythms with God
• 8:50 Scripture: Mark 1:35
• 14:02 Scripture: Pslam 121:1-8
• 18:00 Scripture: Psalm 127:1-2
• 22:04 Seasons of Life and Transition
• 24:04 Closing Prayer

Transcript

Pastor Joe Liles: 0:03

You as we come together for the message. We've been in a series that's called Mountain mover. And this series has been about really a discipleship. It's been about this identity of meeting God in these many in different places. And it was inspired by our youth going on mission, and we first heard a message from them called Beyond comfort. And it was really this identity that when we heard from them, they had gone on mission. And if you've ever been on a youth mission trip, it is a trip that really starts from a long drive, usually into kind of daily activities starting early in the morning, at seven, you're up before that, getting ready, you work till late in the evening. You have a worship and then you have like a spiritual moment. Then you go to bed, and you do it again. And and in these moments, these youth open up. They find their relationship with God. They come back into the heart of God and and it's really these kind of spiritual moments that lead them to become camp counselors and to continue this ministry and go on. And as we were preparing for these trips, we thought, what does it mean that as adults, we would find those same moments, but we don't necessarily have someone creating those for us anymore. We don't have someone says, Hey, take a week off from work, a week off from your family. I want you to drive an absurdly long way in a 15 passenger van with 10 other people you don't know, and we want you to arrive in a place that you've never met, do mission for a week and then do the same thing on the return. How many of you are in? Do we got this right now? Yes, one of you. This is why adult discipleship is really hard. This is why it's hard, because it's not what we're used to anymore. And so we walk through this series of really talking through, what does it mean that we would find the spaces to create this relationship with God ourselves, and how would we move into that? So we talked beyond comfort, and we talked with these youth experience and how they move through this trip. And then, in addition to that, we moved on, and we said, Okay, we talked through Jesus, talking with the disciples, saying, you have little faith, which we said in that message that we were grateful that we had little faith, because it meant that we had room to grow. And a little faith can move a mountain, but we're not at that little faith, yet we have room to grow to move that. And if we have a little faith, then we are moving our way towards Jesus. So whether you have a little faith, or you feel like you are filled with faith, you are in the heart of God, and we are moving towards that. And so we keep on moving through this series in a really incredible way. And as we've gone through each and every one of these message talking through last week, we talked about trusting God, and what does it mean to truly trust God in your relationship? And we talked about this relational sacrifice that you have to have and trust that you're almost giving away a part of yourself to someone else to say, Hold this for me. Hold my life, hold my story. Hold this incident, hold this thing that you know about, and I want you to hold it with care and compassion, and I want you to love me through it, and that's what Jesus does. But we found it hard to trust each other, and so we've been walking this whole narrative, and then today, as we open up, we're getting into a new reality with Jesus. We are talking about, what does it mean to have daily rhythm with Jesus Christ? What does it mean that we would see our whole day as a way to understand our relationship with God every single day, not just on Sundays. And if you're thinking about discipleship, it needs to come from a weekend trip in a summer to just a Sunday to every single day in your life. And that's where we need to move this and so as we come to this part of the series, I really wanted to talk to you about what is the daily relationship that you have with God, and what does it mean in your life? And we're gonna go through a whole day in Scripture. We're gonna start off in the morning. We're gonna talk about the middle of the day, and we're gonna talk about the evening, because there is scripture that says that we should find rest at the end of the day, that we should feel that we can go to bed in peace, that we can sleep in peace and have this moment. How many of you go to bed every night in peace Nothing's the matter like you're not waking up feeling any anxiety or anxiousness or worry or anything else. Zero people. Is this true? Are you guys just afraid to raise your hand? Right? No, it's true. So what does it mean that we would have a daily relationship with God? Let's talk about the morning first. How many of you? It's by show of hands. Let's just separate the room and divide everyone right now. How many of you are morning people? We got some morning people out there? Yes, my morning people. Give it up for the morning people. How many of you are other people? Not? Holy, no, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. How many of you are not morning people? How many of you are not morning people? Okay, do you see how we said that you're either a morning person or not a morning person, right? The designation is morning person, right? That's the same in both. And so we're gonna read a scripture way. I am a morning person. I love getting up in the morning. I when I was in seminary, the therapist that I had in seminary, which were all prescribed to go to therapy, right, to prevent burnout and different things like that, and to experience it as a seminarian. So I went an hour and a half away because I didn't want to commit to therapy. So I drove an hour and a half so that would be so upset by the time that I got there that I would have to commit, right, that. That's what I told myself. So I drove an hour and a half to therapy. Now, I go to therapy willingly, and it's awesome. And so I drove an hour and a half to therapy. I got over there, and I was telling my whole story, and she's like, Well, tell me about your daily routine. I was like, Man, my daily routine is like, 11pm to 2am is like my prime time. I was like, that's what I'm getting work done. I said, everyone else is sleeping. And I said, I'm just getting work done. I said, it feels amazing. And she goes, Oh, you're a competitive sleeper. What? What do you mean? A competitive she goes, Oh, you feel like you're winning because other people are sleeping. And I was like, You're not wrong. And she goes, but you're wrong. I was like, and what she was saying is, she goes, Just because you're up and doing these things that other people are sleeping is not a winning moment, right? That's not a healthy way to approach life. She goes, you're literally comparing yourself against everyone else, and while they're sleeping, you feel that you're getting ahead of them, right? But you're not having a healthy lifestyle every single day, and in the day, in order to incorporate that, to maintain that it would be something that is spiritually, emotionally and physically healthy for you, holistic health. And so what that means, if we're looking at Holistic Health, is that our day, our whole day, has to be generated towards God. I particularly love the morning. I love the morning I wake up anywhere between four and 5am right? There's some mornings that I go on a run. There's some mornings that I go to workout with a group of guys, where we end in a circle of trust and prayer for each other. There's some mornings I wake up and I do a devotion. There's some mornings I wake up and I go, nope, not today, and I go right back to bed. That happened this past week. And I was like, it's not going to go. I love the morning because I do feel like there's solitude there, but that's what I find. What we're going to discover today is, where do you find your peace and rest with God? Where do you find your moment with God? And how do you seek that every single day? And I don't want to miss this, you're going to hear me say it over and over again in the message today. How do you seek this every single day in your life, because your life is going to relate to a lot of other areas as you go through things. And if you can start every day with God, your life will change. Your life will change. If your day begins with God, and we're going to talk through that, but in order to talk through that, there's a way to begin with God, and it's always in Scripture. And so we love Bibles. Here in the church, we're going to open up our Scripture today to mark, the gospel of Mark. If you have a Bible, raise that up. We got Bibles out there in the church. Okay, yes, I love it. We have a mission that everyone will bring a Bible. We love Bibles in the church. And so with that, if you need a Bible, we have Bible boxes around the church. And as I can see, people keep on grabbing Bibles, which is great, because if you don't have a Bible, you can take it home with you. You can take home in the Bible. And we're gonna populate the Bible coming into August, our Bible boxes. We're going to have adult Lutheran study Bibles in there. We're going to have student Bibles in there that are study Bibles, and we're going to have kids Bibles in there. And so you can grab any Bible that you need for your family and take that with you, right? We love to know that you have a Bible and so, but if you don't have a Bible with you today, that's okay. No worries. On the chair back in front of you. There's a card that says the Bible app. If you're online with us, there's a link in the description for Facebook and YouTube that says Bible app. And you can open the Bible app on your phone. It's an app, and you can go into Scripture and follow along with notes and the message and everything else that's going along today. So today, we're gonna be in the Gospel of Mark, right in the beginning Mark chapter one. And we're going to read one verse, verse 35 Mark, chapter one, one verse, verse 35 and this is while Jesus is preaching in Galilee. So he's healing. He's preaching and he's healing. So if you can imagine the ministry of Jesus right now that people know of the ministry of Jesus, they're he's come out of the baptism, he's come out of the temptation, and he calls his first disciples and immediately goes into this into this miracle style of ministry, because the people see that this teacher can heal, and so they call for him to be this teacher. And so in between these healings, he's trying to teach them the gospel, which is the message and the promise of the kingdom. And I don't want you to forget that at the end of the day, if you remember one thing is that whatever your troubles are, the promise of the Gospel, the promise of the kingdom of God is what is being prepared for you. No matter what you're going through eternity and peace with God is what's being prepared for you. Remember that at the end of each day, and here's what he says in Mark chapter one, verse 35 says this in the morning while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed one more time. In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed the gospel of the Lord, one verse. So think about this, if we're trying to decide if you should be a morning person or not a morning person. Very early in the morning, he got up. That's Jesus all day. You. Like, are some of you struggling right now? You're like, what's happening right now? Are you telling me to be a morning I'm not telling you to be a morning person. That's not the identity of this message. There's something different that is happening here. There's something different when he says he got up in order to be with God. And if you understand this, what Jesus is doing is he's just healed demons, and he's just healed people, and people keep coming to him and coming to him and asking for more and asking for more. And I want you to think about this in your life. How many of you were overwhelmed by how many times people are coming to you throughout the day, not just family, but all the things that you have that are responsibilities in your life? How many of you are overwhelmed by that? Raise your hand if it's true. Jesus was in that too. There's a very important part. When he said he got up early in the morning to pray, he was deepening and rooting and setting a foundation in his own relationship with God. So here's the first part of this, if you want to deepen your relationship with God every single day. It does not mean that you're getting up earlier every day. Just a note, if you want to deepen your relationship to God, it doesn't mean that you're getting up earlier every single day. But what it does mean is that if you want to deepen your relationship with God, it means that the first thing you do every day is honor, God. It doesn't mean you have to be up early. It just has to be the first thing. And here's what I want to tell you, I've been practicing this. I'm not great at it. When I wake up, sometimes the first thing I go to is my stress. Sometimes the first thing I go to is I missed my workout. Sometimes the first thing I go to is guilt. Sometimes the first thing I go to is I got these family responsibilities, and I gotta wake up Kayle, and I gotta get hurt across country, and I gotta make sure land is up. I gotta get the food going, and I just start. It just goes. And so what I've been doing is I've been waking up and before I move, I put myself in a posture, back into prayer. I honor God in the first thing because I know what comes next is the things that I want to control in my life. The things that comes next is the things I can't give up control over to God yet. So I pray to God first going, I don't have the time in the day to get it all done, like I'm going to start the day, and I'm just going to start walking, and I think of all the things I'm trying to control, and I just go, hold on. You said, You have me. You said you hold me, and I'm going to be faithful to that. I'm going to begin my day by honoring God, and that can look like prayer, that can look like Bible reading, that can look like Silent time with God, that can look like a walk in creation, but the first thing every day in your life, no questions asked, should be to honor God, and that will sustain you throughout the day. You don't have to be up early, but the first thing you have to do is honor. Now I want you to hear this, because I want to talk you through the whole day. I want you to turn over into Psalms. So we've been reading wisdom and poetry throughout this series, and I want to keep us there, and I want to move us into Psalm 121, so if you go back into the Old Testament, right, and think about the Psalms, right, go back in the Old Testament, it's going to be in the front portion of your Bible, where you can find job in Psalms, and then it'll go into the Minor Prophets. But the psalm of this is called the assurance of God's protection. And we're going to Psalm 121, verses one through eight. And here's what it says. I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth. He will not let your foot be moved. He who keeps you will not slumber. He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is your keeper. The Lord is your shade at your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord will keep you from all evil. He will keep your life. The Lord will keep you're going out and you're coming in from this time on and forevermore. I read this Psalm, and it's part of a song that I love, too, the Song of Ascents, and the song is truly about really understanding our relationship with God. But did you hear over and over again that the Lord will keep you, the Lord will keep you, the Lord will keep you, the Lord will keep you. I feel that in our day and age today, that sometimes we just have this need to know that someone cares for us so deeply that they will neither summer nor sleep be. Because they care for us that much that they will always watch over us. And we're looking for that from the people that we love, and it's not possible. We're looking for the people who love to care for us in every way that we need, for physical love, for emotional loves, for spiritual love, for that, and we're looking for it from everyone around us, and we can't get it. We lessen those and we say, well, just take this from you, and I'll just take this from this from this friend, and I'm going to try to put it all together so I can I can fill my bucket and feel that people keep me and they hold me and they love me, and I'll keep this heart. But the reason we have to go back again and again and again to that is because we're trying to fill our cup with something outside of God. And I read this again, and it was, keep you, keep you, keep you. And I looked up this definition, this biblical definition, the Hebrew of what keep is, and it means to guard, to watch, to protect and to preserve. And instead, if you're thinking of God like a shepherd, the shepherd watches over you and guards you. If you're thinking of God, like the God of Israel and the God of our kingdom on earth and on heaven, the God will protect you. If you're thinking of God who's someone who's planning eternity, our God will preserve your life for an eternity. Everything that we are looking for in this life comes from God in every single part, and this moment moves from the get up early in the morning, says at every moment, God will neither slumber nor sleep. And with that, you're coming in and you're going out, he will watch over every time you move from space to space. How many of you feel really good in one moment and are about to walk into a meeting and feel very anxious the next moment? Has that ever happened to anyone, like, you're good, and then the day just hits and it overwhelms you're like, I'm not good. Things are not going well. This is the going in and the coming out, and what needs to happen in the middle of that is going back to God, because God will keep you, protects you. He watches you, He guards you. This is the important narrative, what God is doing in your life. This is the biblical definition of keep. And I want to take you through another Psalm. This is Psalm 127, so turn just a little bit more. And I love this, because this talks about our home as we go throughout the day, the comings and the goings, and we try to find God in the midst of those This one's God's blessing for the home. Verse one in Psalm 127 says this, Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain Unless the Lord guards the city. The guard keeps watch in vain. It is in vain, here's the other win for the other side that you rise up early and go late to rest. Can I get an amen? See, I balanced it out. You thought I was just going for the early people. Don't worry. It is in vain that you rise up early and go to late to rest eating the bread of the anxious toil, for he gives sleep to His Beloved. He gives sleep to His Beloved, the bread of anxious toil versus the bread of life I used to feel, and I still feel, in something that I struggle with, if I'm going to confess to you, and something that I'm working through right now in my personal life, is that I feel that I have to exhaust myself to get permission to rest. And I didn't discover that until recently, because I confused by exhausting myself with my sacrifice to God, and I said, Oh no, if I'm at the end of the day, and this was a mission trip, reality, I learned this on mission, and this was an unhealthy way that I learned this. I learned on mission that if I go all day and at the end of the day, I've given my whole heart, my mind, my body and my strength to the Lord, and I ended the end of the day, and I can do no more but lay down and go to rest because I have nothing left to give. That's a holy and spiritual relationship. But that's not what God is talking about here. I was eating the bread of anxious toil. I needed to prove that I could work harder. I needed to prove that I could be more I needed to prove that I could serve in a better way, I need to prove that I could do more and be better in the kingdom for God, even though I know, in my heart of hearts and in our theology that works righteousness and doing the works does not involve our relationship with God. And so I worked until I exhausted myself just to get the permission to rest, to feel that I could peacefully. Did you hear the eye, the eye, the eye, the eye, the eye, the eye, and that I was doing this, and I was doing this, and I was doing this, I can tell you what I was not doing. I was not setting my heart back on God every day i. It is not where I was going. If I look at this and I said beloved at the end of verse two, for he gives sleep to His Beloved, a divine love, I realized that as I'm thinking about this, that's what I was missing, is that I was trying to control everything that was happening in my life. And I'm a really good thinker, like I have a lot of ways that I can see things happening, so I feel I'm really good at control. Anyone feel like they're good at control? Yes, no one out there. Someone go with me. Please come on now, raise your hands. And what I realized is that where I was breaking was in this moment where I was not hearing the beloved. I wasn't giving up control. See, when you give up control in your life, what you're doing is you're creating space so that God can hold you. See what you're holding onto in life and trying to control is something that you are putting ahead of God. And if I said you need to honor God first in your life, you are putting other things ahead of God. And what you are not willing to release control on is a space that God needs to hold you in. It's that same and very thing that keeps us from our relationship with God. That is God is saying, beloved, I will give you rest in your anxious toil, I will give you rest. Just meet me as the bread of life. Meet me as the person that comes to you. And so from the morning that you wake up and you find your heart with God, and you devote yourself to God and honor God. God will guard you and keep you during your coming and your going, because it will not work from day beginning to day end, we will go back into ourselves. And so God will keep you there, and at the end of the day, if you can release control back to God and say, I did it again. I controlled a little bit, but I'm releasing this back to you. God will keep you and hold you and make space for you, because you are His Beloved. Now that's a day in the life. Here's why it's important to go through every day with God deepening relationship. Because I'm talking about a day, if you heard me, I talked about taking Kayla to cross country and waking Landon out, getting them ready for work, doing the tasks of the day. Those are preparation, going into a meeting, right? Seeing that happen, meeting a relationship, having a coffee. Those are the comings and the goings, going to bed at night, praying to God before we go to bed, and giving that back. Those are all things in one single day. Now, when I hear it coming and going again, I started to think, Well, if God has us in the day, and we go to our relationship with God every day, what does it mean when we're in a season with God, that coming and going looks a little bit different? What does it mean when you know you are coming into a new season? And then how do you honor God in that moment, I thought about this today, as I thought about our relationship with Tavo as I was preparing this message our worship leader, it's been a beautiful season. And I remember praying before this for a worship leader and God answering that prayer with table and the comings and the goings and us meeting and the worship and and the joy of the band together and the joy of growing. And it has been a season, and now we have a time where it's a coming and a going, and we go back to God again, because in the same way that God fills us is the same way that God sends others into your life and out of your life, in and through and about and every one of these we have to trust God with the people that we love, we have to trust God with our whole heart, our whole mind and our whole strength. And if you can't do it daily, how are you going to get through a season? So here's my hope for you. My hope for you is that you begin a new day with God. My hope for you is that you see that God makes a new creation and a transformation out of you, that you see yourself daily made new in the kingdom as a promise of God, knowing that God loves you for exactly who you are, for exactly what's happened in your life, and God knows who you're becoming. He will watch your morning, your comings and your going, and he will hold you in the evening as we go into every single day of our life. If you can do that. Us every day you will have a new relationship with God, And all God's people said, Amen, let us pray, heavenly and gracious Father, we come before you today, knowing that adult discipleship is hard, we come before you today, knowing that everything that we go through, we we want to give it back to you, but we hold it, and it's almost as if we honor other things in our life before coming back into that relationship to you. And yet it's such a small thing to start our day with you. It's such a small thing to begin by honoring you, to set our day and set a foundation for what comes next, and Lord, what I know is that we're not only setting a foundation for a day, we're setting a foundation for a season. We're setting a foundation for a hope. We're setting a foundation that you have already laid. So my hope, Lord is that we begin to trust you. My hope, Lord is that we look at the moments, that when we are with you, that you will guard us and watch us and keep us and protect us, that we will see you as the shepherd over our lives, and that when we hear your voice, we will answer my prayer. Lord is that you remind us gently and humbly when we try to hold on to things, my prayer Lord, is that we may go out today and change our lives and our relationship with you, that when you call us into deepening our relationship, that we may live into it, not just hear about it, that we may walk it and not just leave it on Sunday, my prayer, Lord, is that we see our lives to you as a humble sacrifice, but the sacrifice that we make is a relationship with you, not just working for you. So Lord, I pray that you move in every one of our hearts today. I pray that you are with us, that you whisper that you love us, that you forgive us, and that you make us NEW, most of all, and we, Lord, we pray this in Your holy and precious name And all God's people said, Amen. Do you guys enjoy our series mountain mover you.