Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Have you ever been in a season where everything in your life is moving fast, doors are opening, you're making progress, you're reaching your goals, and you're noticing. I can't really breathe. I don't like who I'm becoming because everything's coming so fast. You guys, this is what I like to call the inner sync. It's a tension that we all generally live with because success without alignment will slowly turn into exhaustion. Outer life can't outpace our inner life forever.
[00:00:29] That's when things catch up to us and we have a burnout or we break down or we crash out.
[00:00:34] And when that does, we end up losing the part of ourselves that made it all worth it in the first place. So today I want to talk to you about what happens when your outer life outpaces your inner life, how to recognize it, why it happens, and how to get back in sync with yourself, with your purpose, and most importantly, with God. Welcome to Shifts and Ladders. I'm Ryan Robinson. Hope you're doing well, and you'll be blessed today. We usually have an anchor scripture that we talk with and we anchor our conversation on. It's going to be on Matthew, chapter 16, verse 26.
[00:01:15] Bless me. And it says this, doesn't say that. But what do you benefit if you gain the whole world and lose your own soul?
[00:01:25] Is anything worth more than your soul?
[00:01:29] We hear this all the time when it comes to money and all that kind of stuff. This is the thing. God is not opposed to success. He doesn't condemn success.
[00:01:38] In fact, the first commandment that God gives us is to be fruitful, multiply, subdue the earth, take dominion. Right? That's the first commandment that God told man when he made it. So the thing is, Jesus isn't condemning success, but what he's calling us to do is to come back to alignment.
[00:01:59] This is disintegration that Jesus is depicting here. So what he's saying, what's the point of gaining everything if it costs who you are?
[00:02:07] You can be asking for provision without purpose so you can have the stuff, but still lack the fulfillment for the reason why you are here.
[00:02:18] So this verse reminds us that the soul, your inner world, your mind, your will and your emotions aren't optional when it comes to success.
[00:02:28] It's actually the engine for everything else. And if that is off, everything else that your soul touches will be off. Okay, so let's get to the first point here. And it says this outer acceleration without inner anchoring can lead to a crash out. Okay, so in your outer life or in your world, you have responsibilities, opportunities, achievements. My son just came in here a little bit ago and there's just some things that are happening. There's like, you know, things are moving fast and if you aren't in peace yourself, the things externally will really affect you internally and you start living out of sync. You don't have peace internally. You cannot expect peace, peace outside of you, especially if there's a lot of noise happening outside of you, but you don't have any peace inside. You can have a lot of issues. So you might be accomplishing things, but no longer are becoming anything. And God's actually more interested in who you are becoming than what you're actually doing.
[00:03:30] Because out of your being or out of your identity, you do the things that you are. If you are identify yourself as a football player, as a fashion or a fashionista or a musician, you would expect that you would do the things that fashion folks, musicians and football players do because you've aligned your identity to do those things. So when you are running out or doing too many things, you start to burn out. So think about this.
[00:04:02] Recently there's a new iPhone that came out and one of the things that they brought into is what they call a, a water vapor chamber, which actually helps the phone cool down in overheating because it's built to. Your phone isn't built to run so many apps at one time. It overheats.
[00:04:25] So because it runs so hot, because so many things are open, there has to be a brand new situation or brand new mechanism that helps cool it down. Because if it's too hot, it will not be able to sustain itself and actually work, work properly. This is what happens when we live from duty. From duty, from duty and obligation.
[00:04:47] Instead of delight and fulfillment, we start receiving and, and, and I'll say we start receiving, we start operating from pressure. And when you start operating from pressure, you start feeling the angst and stuff that comes inside and ultimately you can combust because you were overheating. So this is how you know this is happening. And I hate to admit this because we've all done this. When you know you're overheating or you're having a stressful time, you start snapping at the people you love, you start enjoying, you stop enjoying the things that you once enjoyed.
[00:05:25] Like I loved, like there was a time and season where I didn't like music. And I love music. I have a minor in music.
[00:05:33] So you're like, man, something's wrong when you're not doing the things that you enjoy doing. Something's off.
[00:05:39] And then you start measuring. Here's a key one. You start measuring your worth based on productivity and not purpose.
[00:05:48] You can ask for the profits. You can start doing all the things that you think are important, like getting the money, getting the bag, all those things, those external things. But you cannot be influenced fulfillment, not with purpose, because from purpose you can actually flow and have all of those other things.
[00:06:07] But when we start putting metrics out there and not having internal alignment, it just becomes work.
[00:06:15] And you end up suffocating the very thing that you are because of the success that you prayed for. Yeah, pause on that one. So think about it. Ask yourself this. Where is my life? At a pace of instability and unsustainability. Okay. And where am I producing more than I'm replenishing?
[00:06:37] Are you giving out more than you're pouring into yourself?
[00:06:41] That, ladies and gentlemen, is important. Because if you don't do that, you will kill yourself by doing the things that you think are going to make you there, get you there faster.
[00:06:51] I love this analogy, but it's true. If I don't like treadmills, I didn't like getting on a treadmill. I was in college when it was raining outside in the off season. I hated it. But the thing is, you can't outrun the treadmill. You're not going anywhere.
[00:07:06] Running faster on a treadmill doesn't mean you're going to get to that destination faster.
[00:07:11] You're going to be in the same place and same space. So if you cannot lead others or lead yourself well, because your inner world is empty and you're chasing the wrong thing, imagine what your life could look like if you had margin and a place to actually be still.
[00:07:30] So this is the next point, too.
[00:07:32] Point two, sink or getting alignment begins with stillness.
[00:07:38] Psalms 46:10 says this. Be still and know that I am God. It's hard to stay still when you got stuff around you, right? It's not weakness actually to be still. It's actually a weapon. Because it actually depicts that you trust God with all of the things that are going on, not just around you, but also in you.
[00:07:59] Imagine how much awareness you gain when you actually sit still.
[00:08:06] We live in a culture that equates busyness with significance. You know, in the corporate world, like, how you doing? I'm so busy.
[00:08:14] Why is that a good thing?
[00:08:17] Busyness doesn't have any direction.
[00:08:20] And if you're not moving, you feel like you're falling behind. And when you feel like you're Falling behind.
[00:08:26] You don't feel purposeful. You feel frustrated because you're not as busy as everybody else. But could that actually be God realigning you with your purpose? Think about this. The word stillness. Just think about it.
[00:08:40] It's not silence.
[00:08:42] It's attentiveness to where you're going. Think about going to the doctor and they get their stethoscope. I had to practice that before I got here. And the things that cannot be heard if you're moving all around. The doctor can't hear your heartbeat.
[00:08:59] What does you usually say? Be still.
[00:09:02] Take a deep breath. He does that, or she does that.
[00:09:05] So that they can hear what's going on on the inside.
[00:09:10] Because they won't be able to help you or treat you if they can't hear what's going on on the inside.
[00:09:19] So most of us skip this because we have busy schedules. And we actually thrive on saying, our schedule is so busy. Look at how busy I am. It's a badge of honor. For some odd reason, I relish in this, too. So I'm honestly with you on this because I've struggled with this in the past. We pray, but we don't pause.
[00:09:41] We create, but we don't admire what we built. We work, but we don't wonder. We plan and we do. We plan, we scroll, we post, perform, but we don't do the things required to listen. We don't get the feedback we need.
[00:09:56] And this is the thing. God doesn't speak at our pace.
[00:10:00] He speaks in his presence.
[00:10:03] And usually it takes some time to get quiet to hear him. God can speak loud if he wants to, but that doesn't get you the opportunity to listen. That's disruptive.
[00:10:15] I'll give you a perfect example. When Elijah was being threatened by Jezebel, he goes in and he's, like, terrified, he's scared, all that kind of stuff.
[00:10:25] And he goes into I can't remember the mountain.
[00:10:29] It says, the Lord is passing by. He said, the Lord is passing by. So there's all of this storms, there's fire, there's quakes and everything, but God speaks to Elijah in a still, small voice.
[00:10:42] It was the first time that Elijah actually had some inner peace going on.
[00:10:46] So when you slow down, your spirit starts to catch up with everything around you. You start to notice a couple things when you slow down.
[00:10:55] Maybe that opportunity isn't aligned with who I am. Maybe that habit doesn't really meet the needs I had. And maybe what I thought was success doesn't even fit me anymore. Stillness is where clarity comes from. And God has to get us to a moment where we have to be sat down and reevaluate what's going on in our lives. Because noise gets filtered.
[00:11:25] And when it does, sorry, noise gets filtered by stillness. And when it does, the true self emerges.
[00:11:32] People typically keep their schedules full because they're trying to avoid something. So the question then becomes, what are you running from?
[00:11:41] And why can't you pause to address it? Because pursuing success and running away from something all looks the same. And now here we go to point three.
[00:11:52] Let me get moving on this. Alignment requires rhythms, not resolution. So when people feel off balance, they try to fix it with a big thing, Big absolutes. You've probably done this. I'm going to rest more, I'm going journal every day. I'm gonna take a sabbatical, I'm going to eat healthy tomorrow, I'm gonna eat this, that and the other. We make these big things, big resolutions, New year resolutions, all those kinds of things. But the truth is, alignment is a one is not a one time correction. It's a continuous rhythm of getting the thing right every single time. So you can't fix disconnection by doing more stuff. You have to realign your life with the rhythm that comes with renewal. So you just can't say, I'm going to do this one time and expect it to stick. You've been doing the wrong thing for years and you think one thing, one day of deciding I'm a fix, everything is going to fix you going forward. No, you have to take the time to build the rhythm of consistency that breaks the habit you've built for years, decades even. So you have to understand this. So a couple things that'll help you get into a rhythm of inner sinking or inner alignment. Okay, you gotta have some kind of daily reconnection with God.
[00:13:10] Okay, it could be five minutes, it could be one minute, you know, before you grab your phone, take a breath, pray, align, ask God what matters most today.
[00:13:23] And then from that one question, you can reset your priority priorities and guard your peace. Because the first thing that was important to you is getting guidance from the One who made you. Okay, Then there's a weekly kind of alignment. Pick one day where you don't produce a thing.
[00:13:41] And the Bible is called a Sabbath.
[00:13:44] It's when you rest, you play, you create, you worship.
[00:13:48] And in fact, it's actually a sign that you trust God because you believe that God can do more with the day that you take off than you can do on a full Day of hustling, grinding and making things happen.
[00:14:02] If you submit that one day unto God, God can take your six days and make it better than what you could do in seven.
[00:14:09] But this is where the trust comes in. Because the world won't fall apart when you do less, though in fact, sometimes less is more.
[00:14:17] But you have to make it make sense again because culture will tell you team no sleep, no days off.
[00:14:25] That's trusting in your own ability and not trusting in God.
[00:14:30] Then also you have to do this. Seasonal reflection or an alignment.
[00:14:34] I want to say check in. Sometimes we do this. I do this once a quarter, but every few months ask, am I living in a way that reflects what I value, what I'm believing God for?
[00:14:46] Has my pace been misaligned with the peace I say I have?
[00:14:52] And this is how you keep your soul calibrated.
[00:14:55] And this is the thing I didn't get this from. Like, I mean, it's in books, but where do they get it? Jesus modeled all three of these.
[00:15:04] He prayed daily to his Father, he observed rest and Sabbath, and he regularly, regularly withdrew to reflect before major moments of purpose and success, before he did anything, he found ways to restore himself by connecting with the Father or reconnecting with the Father to get replenished.
[00:15:26] Your soul creates and craves that same kind of rhythm. Jesus was the most perfect human being to have ever lived. Bible says he was a man who knew sin, but did not sin.
[00:15:39] And in fact, we actually should replicate all the rhythms that he had. Because this is the thing I believe that Jesus was God made manifest in a human being, in a human form.
[00:15:50] Okay, so with his capability, he could have done any and everything, but he didn't. So if God himself, if Jesus himself didn't do everything that he was even capable of doing, why should we not learn from how the Rabbi himself lived his life? He sat down, he didn't sprint anywhere.
[00:16:19] He lived his life at the same time he accomplished what he was here to do.
[00:16:26] Okay, so let me be as clear as I can.
[00:16:30] Your inner world is not a secondary thing to address.
[00:16:34] It is a sacred thing to address. You can have an impressive outer life and be completely empty on the inside.
[00:16:42] And if you're not careful, the applause of others can drown out the whisper of God. It is a fear of man that you can actually develop because you value others opinion than what God has said about you. That's why I believe that God allows us divine discontent.
[00:16:59] He has to slow us down from opportunities because he's not punishing us. But he's actually protecting us from the success that could ultimately destroy your soul.
[00:17:11] I've lived in this tension. In fact, I'm in a season of it right now where I looked successful. I was leading teams, speaking, building, accomplishing.
[00:17:18] Externally, I was doing great on the outside, but internally, I was out of alignment.
[00:17:26] And you cannot outwork a lack of alignment. I'm telling you, it'll put you in a place that God will have to sit you down before you break yourself down.
[00:17:41] Okay, so here's my challenge to you this week, okay? Take 15 minutes alone, turn off your notification on your phone, get quiet whether it's in the morning or in the evening, still 15 minutes away, and ask God, where am I moving faster than my soul can take?
[00:18:00] Listen and be real with yourself and allow God to be real with you.
[00:18:04] You'd be surprised what could be revealed.
[00:18:08] The goal isn't just to build a life that works, but it's to become a person that's whole and operating in fulfillment. That's true. That is what true success is. That's what true freedom is.
[00:18:21] And that's what true alignment to your soul means.
[00:18:26] Listen, if this blessed you, I'm asking if you could share this with somebody.
[00:18:32] Share this with your friends, with your family, with your loved ones that may be crashing out, that you see them heading in a direction that could potentially hinder them. We're on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube.
[00:18:46] I pray this bless you, but really take some time as we continue to go on this process of integration.
[00:18:55] It's important because God wants you whole so that you can fulfill what you have been designed and destined to have in this earth. God just doesn't want you to have the stuff.
[00:19:07] He wants you to be whole.
[00:19:09] All right, we'll see you in the next pod.
[00:19:13] Peace.
