How To Get What You Want

Introduction

Never in my wildest dreams, I think I’d stand up here at 10 after 5. So y’all have 50 minutes to listen to me. I did not put on the wireless mic, so I’ll be hanging close to the podium tonight. I went ahead and I blanked the screen. John is right on the invitation song, by the way. If I knew I had 50 minutes, I might have done all seven. We’re gonna talk. I don’t know if y’all have ever read Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. But that’s what we’re gonna base in tonight, as well as the Bible, don’t worry. It’s not just a secular lesson. If you want to open your Bible, Luke chapter 14. We will be in Luke 14, and we will be right there in verse 28.

So y’all got to hear me like three or four weeks ago. I don’t know if that was a good thing or not. But so I’m back again, and I’m starting with a picture. This picture comes from this July, June or July, when I was up in Oklahoma. And if you if you don’t know what it is, it’s a big rock. That is a big rock. That is a big front end loader. This tire, for me to reach the top of it, is eight feet. That’s a cat 990. One of the biggest they make. That particular stone on the end right there weighs 47,000 pounds. So that is as much as a dump truck can haul. So if you want an idea, most 18 wheelers going down the road have that and just a little bit more in them.

That is one big rock. this particular quarry is Bluebird Stone up in Poto, Arkansas. If you don’t know where Poto is, join the rest of the country. Tiny little town in eastern Oklahoma, out in rock country. we’re gonna follow that stone or one like it through its process, and we’re gonna see what they can do to it with some vision and with some planning. the title of the lesson is How to Get What You Want. So it’s really kind of a catchy title just to say, what do you want? Do you know what you want? There’s many times in our lives where we end up at a place where we have to think about that. So I’ve got a job opportunity.

Do I want to take it? It’s going to move my family. This is this happened seven years ago. It’s going to move my family. Do I want to move my family? Do I want to make more money? That’s always yes, right. But what do I want? At my core, what do I want? These are the times when you have a job opportunity. Maybe you lose a loved one. Maybe a child is born. You want to change your life? Hold your newborn child, your first newborn child, and look down and realize the responsibility that just happened. Get married. That’s the same vein. You’ve got a whole lot more responsibility now. You are now responsible for your family. What do you want for your family? So this is more of, or less of what do you want, more of what do you truly need at your core, and how are you going to get there?

So what do you want? I want to be comfortable. I want to live in a world where it’s peaceful. I want to live in a home where it’s peaceful. I want to be loved. I want to be accepted. I want to be able to show love and express who I am. These are all pretty common, basic human beliefs. Outside of that, you get into a whole nother realm of what do you want? I really want there to be no traffic on Monday morning. How much control do I have over that? Not a whole lot. Leave at 4 30 in the morning. There’s your answer. That’s how you get control on that one. I want the weather to be good next week. Even the weatherman can’t tell me if that’s going to happen.

And that’s his job. I want well-behaved children. That’s yeah. Don’t we all? Are your children well behaved? The right answer is always sometimes. Okay? The answer is yes, sometimes. How do you get there? You have no control whatsoever over the traffic. You do have control over the time you leave. What control do you have over your children? That’s the amount that you exert. So, Stephen Covey, I don’t know if you’ve read his book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. We’re not doing all seven. The seventh, I’ll give away the ending, is just sharpen the saw. So you can have the best saw and you go to use it and you start using it, and it gets dull. And you have to continually sharpen it and maintain your equipment.

Your brain is that saw. So the seventh one is you have to continually learn. And in a setting such as this, you have to continually study. Why do you think the elders asked us to read the Bible this year? To follow the daily Bible reading. To sharpen. It’s so that you will know what God has planned for you and what God wants from you. The last, or the first three concepts are all intrapersonal. They all deal with everything inside of you. Decisions you make that affect you. And the other three are intra, like think, or inter, like think interstate highway. They deal with other people. So we are only going to focus on the first three of the seven habits.

All three of these very basic concepts will help you be a better Bible student, a better evangelist, like the evangelism class we’re talking about. They’ll help you be a better parent, they’ll help you be a better student, they’ll help you be a better child. They’ll help you be a better employee. All around, they’re going to help you be a better person. Let’s look at our rock. These are three other stones that are being brought in, same quarry. The one on the end, it probably weighs about the same. These aren’t just any stones. They come from a very specific area in Oklahoma where there’s a quartz deposit. Most of Oklahoma is a sandstone. This quartz is incredibly hard. Incredibly hard. So it makes a great countertop material.

Most of the countertops you see are marble, or you’ll see some quartz, you’ll see some manufactured stones. This stuff doesn’t just come out in these blocks. They go out and they have to dig it and break it. And it’s not like cutting limestone out of the ground. You may see an Austin. They literally cut the stuff out of the ground. This is way too hard to cut out of the ground. So they break it out and they get it here to the quarry. And at this quarry, they take it out of the quarry and they bring it to a processing facility where they process all their stone. And there’s a saw cutting it. This is a wire saw. There’s a wire right here. It’s it’s impregnated with diamonds.

It’s a diamond wire. It’s about an $1,800 wire. That its sole job is to cut that stone. So, and that wire is about 45 feet long when it wraps back through the saw. That’s how they begin to process this material. And then after that, they cut it down and polish it, and this is a polished stone. See the wood grain in it? That’s actually stone. That’s just where the water has passed through the rock over time and pressure, and it has left that pack. And so that stone is really, it’s about 18 inches wide and about three feet tall. Beautiful material. makes a great countertop, it’s 95% quartz. But how do you get from there to there? Guy who owns a place, his name’s Tommy.

Tommy’s a great guy. He might be 40. Tommy didn’t roll out to the quarry one day and say, hey, look, that’s a big old rock. Let’s make it into a countertop. He pulled out his lawn chair, he sat down, and he waited for it to turn into a countertop. Yeah, doesn’t work. He didn’t say, you know, it would be really nice if I built a million dollar facility to cut that into a countertop and pull out his lawn chair, sit down, wait for it to happen. He didn’t tell somebody else to do it. He didn’t pass it off. He put together a plan and he did it. No matter what your goal, if you don’t have a plan, you won’t get there. Let’s go to our reading.

Step into Luke chapter 14. Beginning in verse 28. For which of you desiring to build a tower does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it. Otherwise, when he has laid the foundation, is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, This man began to build and was not able to finish. Or what king going out to encounter another king in war will not sit down and first deliberate whether he is able with 10,000 to meet him who comes against him with 20,000. And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. Without a plan, you’re like this man who goes to build his building and doesn’t count the cows, but doesn’t count the costs.

When he builds his tower, he lays his foundation and he builds the foundation. And he never finishes his project. Without laying out your project, without having some forethought and some foresight and some time and planning, the tower never gets built. This countertop never gets cut. So we’re going to take these three different concepts that come from Stephen Covey and talk about them now about how to get what you want. How to get what you need. So how do you go from there’s a big rock in the ground to a countertop? Or from I’m single and I want to find a mate to married, or from I have children and I would like them to be good children to turn them into good children. Maybe I want to be a better Bible student.

1. Be Proactive

How are you going to do it? The mental ascent will not get you there. You are not going to achieve it if all you do is sit down and overthink the problem. So let’s start off with number one. Be proactive.

So you have two types of people. You have a proactive approach and you have a reactive approach. Tommy Caldwell was proactive when he saw that rock and he saw, I can cut that and make this. No one came to him and said, Hey, I want to make a countertop out of that. Let’s go and do it. No, he said, we’re going to figure out how to do this. Active is the opposite of sedentary. So if you want to get anything done, you’re not pulling out your lawn chair. You must do something. This concept of being proactive also has to do with personal responsibility. You have to realize that you’re responsible for who you are. So if you want to change who you are, that starts with you.

And when you want to change who you are, you first must come to the realization that you are responsible for your actions. You’re responsible for where you are right now. It doesn’t matter that 15 years ago your parents were divorced, and you lived with just your mother and you didn’t have any money, so you never really got that great education that you wanted, so I’ll never turn into what I really want to be. No, that’s not how it works. One of the guys that we do Boy Scouts with, his name is Brian Aguilar. He is a constable. That’s his situation. He grew up with no money. He just graduated college. Because he has this proactive approach. He realizes that it’s his responsibility. And it has nothing to do with his circumstances.

Reactive people will wallow in their circumstances. Oh, it’s going to be a bad day, it’s raining. Traffic’s bad, the rest of the day is going to be bad. Nothing I can do about it. That’s just the way my day is going to go.

If you were always affected by everything going on around you and not focusing your energy on the things that you can change. You have control of your life. You could have left at 4 30 and beat the traffic. And if you want things to change them. Sounds simple, but that concept is lost on many people, especially the millennials of the world today. You can let your circumstances pull you down, or you can rise above and press on. Eleanor Roosevelt said, no one can hurt you without your consent. Unless you give consent to a person or a circumstance, it cannot affect you. Yeah, it might slow you down in traffic, but you can make a phone call and you can get things going before you get to the office.

There are ways that you can overcome your circumstances every time.

2. Begin With the End in Mind

Go back to our rock example. There’s a giant rock out in the middle of the field. Let’s do something with that rock. Great. What are we going to do with it? Let’s make a big paperweight. Done. We’re finished. That didn’t take a whole lot of imagination, did it? No. Well, let’s make it into something. Let’s take it and see. We’ll put it at the quarry, the processing facility, and let’s see the next guy that comes by, let’s see what he wants us to cut it into. See what he wants us to make it into. Maybe we can chip on it, maybe we can make a statue out of it. No. There was a plan. This guy who’s building the tower in Luke 14, he had a plan.

I want to build a tower. That plan begins in your brain. Everything that happens twice. It happens once in your brain, and then it happens when you make it happen. So you can have all the great ideas in the world, but if you never put anything into action, if you’re never proactive, like number one, you’re never going to get anywhere. Beginning with the end in mind is a concept of focusing on what you want the end to be. So I want to have godly children. That is my end. So how am I going to get there? I’m going to let my wife do it. No. Well, that would probably work because I married a great woman. That would be totally, you know, I would be not fulfilling my responsibility as a husband and a father.

So how am I going to do it? I’ve got an idea for what I want, but how am I going to get there? Well, now I have the end. And I need to set some goals. So Mike did a Wednesday night invitation of three and a half years ago on goal setting. It was after we were doing a class in the back, and he gave us the five-fingered approach, the smart approach to goal setting. I didn’t put these on the board. Specific goals need to be measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. This is how you set goals. They have to be specific. You can’t say, I want to have a godly family. Okay.

A better goal is by the time Elijah is 10, I want him to be able to recite the books of the Bible and tell me a brief summary of each book. That’d give me two more years. He can do the books of the Bible. I can’t give you a brief summary of each book because Hezekiah, we’re not there. But that’s a specific goal. And it’s measurable. He can recite the books of the Bible. Oh, we’re missing these. Oh, okay. Now we need to get a summary for each book. So it’s measurable. Attainable. Is it attainable for a 10-year-old? Eh, 66 books, that’s a lot. He’s a smart kid. I don’t know if he could do it. Is it realistic? Again, smart kid. Timely, two years. So okay.

My little example plays out. If you don’t plan for it’s never gonna happen. Do you use a planner? Do you use a daily planner? Do you use your iPhone or your Outlook calendar? I have to. Brad asked me today, hey, what’s this week look like? Oh, I’ve got a phone call with the point of sale people, and if it’s not in my phone, I have no clue. And I’m talking about this right now because I need it. Because I’ve gotten away from doing a lot of things that make me efficient. And when I work at work and I have a list to work off of, the list gets done. When I don’t have a list and I work out of my brain, a couple things get done.

And then there’s a whole lot left that doesn’t get done. So write it down. Make it measurable and specific and attainable. If you don’t clearly define what you’re trying to do, then trying to get down the road is that much harder. When you start each day with a clearly defined goal, you’ll feel that you accomplish more in a day. This is a concept that comes straight out of the book. And it I’d like to impress upon you. We want to start each day for prayer. What are we praying for in that day, in that morning prayer? I always want wisdom. You know. If I can apply my knowledge better, then I’ll be a better person. But it’s my goal in my daily prayers to set a goal.

3. Putting First Things First

Today I want to do this for the Lord. And if I say it and I pray it, and then I make that one of my clearly defined goals for that day, I am more likely to accomplish it than I am if I just go about my day and hope that things happen. Because that’s not how things happen. Let’s move on to the third real quick. So it’s called putting first things first. Sounds a lot like priorities. The person who went to build the tower in Luke 14. They forgot to plan properly. But they got the foundation part right. That was the first thing in the building process. This putting first things first goes beyond prioritizing your life. If you were going to write down a list of everything happening in your life and prioritize it, how long would it be?

Pages and pages and pages, and then you go to prioritize it, and by the time you’re done, you’re at the bottom, and you’re down to things like feed the dog. And at the top, you’ve got things like care for my family, and do a good job at work, and remember to pray every day. What are your core values? Back to that question from the beginning. What is, what do you truly want? In your core values, what are what’s your core role in this life? What’s your purpose? And what’s your priority? So I wrote down three for me. I want to be a good Christian. A number one. I want to be a good husband, and I want to be a good trainer of my children. If I can do those things, I will have a successful life.

Those three things will fill all of my time. That will include Boy Scouts. That will include work. What that does not include is when I get home, relaxing for an hour and a half on the couch in front of the television. That does not include hunting season, which I will get to at some point. Does not include video games or movies or golf or hunting or cars or guns or all of the other things that I really like to do, and they get sprinkled in there at times, and some of that will come in training my kids to hunt, to shoot, and to work on and drive cars. But right now in my life, there’s no time for those. They’re not a priority. Because at my core, I want to be a good Christian, a good husband, and a good father.

By focusing on our core priorities first, you can begin to make real measurable progress in who you are and who you should be and who you need to be. In Hebrews 12, right after we had this great cloud of witnesses, what does Hebrews 12 and 1 say? So we’ve been we’re surrounded by this great cloud of witnesses. Let us lay aside every encumbrance that besets us. That’s me cutting these things out of my life. I’ve got a brother-in-law who’s a he does Iron Man triathlons. He’s crazy. No one should want to do that. He did one up in Maryland and it rained. It was so wet and rainy and windy that they canceled the swim. And when they were running, they were ankle deep in water.

Like they’re running a marathon. After they rode a bike for a hundred and some odd miles, they’re running a marathon in ankle deep water. He’s crazy. On their bikes, who has a mountain bike? You know, a 24, 26 inch bike, you know, we know what they look like. If you put his next to mine, I don’t have one. You put his next to somebody else’s, his weighs less than half. Because he has special wheels and a special frame and a special seat. Everything is special to make it light. Because he’s riding over a hundred miles on that bike. I don’t particularly care, especially since I don’t have one. But if I had one, I wouldn’t care if it weighed 30 pounds. I’m just gonna cruise around with the boys in the neighborhood.

But no, he’s built for speed. He has taken all the encumbrances off of his bike. It’s fast. The wheels are this thin because he’s on the highway. He doesn’t care about going off road. It’s built for one thing. And everything that is not for that purpose is off of his bike. When we look at our life, and I’ve got these three things. I want to be a Christian, husband, and train my children. What can I weed out of my life? Just like Kevin taking things off of his bike to be for this purpose. God built us for this purpose. What are we doing to get the encumbrances off so that we are better at his purpose? That’s this putting first things first. This is about the priorities.

It’s about focusing on them. This is how we make real measurable progress. It’s not scattered bits of time where we say, oh, I’m going to be a good husband today and tomorrow I’m going to go hunting and I’ll see my wife in three weeks. We interrupt this marriage for hunting season. You all may have seen that mean. Or we interrupt this marriage for the Texans.

Conclusion

When we go to lay aside these encumbrances, we have to actually do it. You have to go back to step one and be act. You get through these steps and they all work together. When you’re active and you have a plan and you clear aside everything that is between you and the goal so that you can exercise your plan, that is how you are successful. Whether it is becoming a better Bible student, being a better husband, or whether it’s one of your kids trying to learn play the violin, or whether it is one of my people at work trying to learn a specific product. When you can take these three concepts and apply them, you can be a better person. You can be a better student.

You can be a better Christian. Let’s take a moment, let’s say prayer.

Thanking you for this great group that has listened so patiently. Thanking you for the Bible, thanking you for your plan of salvation, and for the knowledge which is in your word. God may, it is our prayer right now that we may be focused on heaven, that we may be focused on our faith and sharing our faith with others. It’s our prayer that we can be the best Christians that we can be, that we can truly be a representative of Jesus on this earth. God help us to recognize the things that will hold us back. Help us to remove them from our life, and help us to fill our life with things that you would have us to do. Help us fill our minds with your word.

Help us fill our houses with your with our brothers and sisters. And help us to see the need that is out there and teach us to be better servants. God, thank you for Jesus. Thank you for his perfect example which we have in your word. May we always look to him and look to the Bible for our answers. This we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen. So we have this story from Tommy. This is your average quarry in Oklahoma. When I go up, I visit six or seven, sometimes ten quarries. This is what most of them look like. You don’t see much there, do you? Most of them are this. They’re a shamble. You walk out there’s thousands of dollars of rock in this picture that no one will ever be able to buy, and this company will never be able to sell.

Because this quarry, this hole in the ground was cut without a plan. This is most quarries. This is most people’s life. They started over here and they kind of worked their way around, and they hit a red spot. No one wants red rock unless you’re from Santa Claus, Texas. And they moved back over here, and these layers are too thick, and these layers are too thin. And that part is abandoned. If they would have come with a plan, they could have made this a profitable hole in the ground. Sounds silly. But in rock country, that’s a real thing. They want to have a profitable hole in the ground.

I want you to be a profitable Christian and a profitable person to other people. Be responsible for your focus on things that you have control over. Begin with the end in mind. And prioritize your goals. Let’s look at that beginning with the end in mind. John, get ready. When you read Stephen Covey, begin with the end in mind comes across a little different. He wants you to picture your funeral. Who’s going to be there and what are they going to say? It’s an interesting exercise. Who’s going to be there and what are they going to say? If no one’s there, I’m sorry. Come talk to me, I’ll come. What are they going to say? Daniel was the greatest baseball player ever. Man, or man, Daniel could grow some grass.

That guy, y’all know I’m a grass guy. That guy could grow some grass and he could sell it like nobody else. Or are they going to say, Daniel, we’re sure going to miss him because he impacted people’s lives. But I’m sure glad that he was a Christian because he’s in heaven. That’s what I hope people can say. Can they say that last part about you? Are you a Christian? Not just have you been baptized. Are you a Christian? Are you following God’s plan? Have you been baptized? Have you taken the first step to washing away your sins so that you can go to heaven? So that at your funeral, people can say, not just he was a good person, but he’s in heaven. Because God washed his sins away.

Because Jesus paid the price for everyone. Maybe you need our help. We have water hides behind the flowers up here every Sunday and Wednesday. If you need to be baptized, we’d be happy to do that. Maybe you need help. Maybe you need to get your life going. Maybe you need to work on your priorities. And you would like the prayers of this congregation. I think you’ll know we have an excellent congregation who will help you get to heaven. If we can help in any way, please come forward as we stand and say.