Your Limits Are Actually Your Compass

[0:00] So let me tell y'all about this time that I broke these rich people's furniture. True story. Yeah, this is a true story, straight up.

[0:11] I bet you never heard a sermon open like that. So it was so beyond my class that I couldn't even tell you what this thing was. It might have been a table, it might have been a cabinet, it might have been a grand piano for all I know.

[0:24] All I know is that I broke it. So all I know is that it was big, heavy and brown. And I took that personally. You know, because I'm big, heavy and brown.

[0:38] Anyways, so I don't know why everything had to be a competition to me, but this certainly was another one of those occasions. So anyway, summer of 2012, I'm on a missions project with this parachurch ministry, this ministry called Crew.

[0:52] And part of this project situation was to work a job in the city and then do ministry stuff in your free time outside of that. And so I was working in this warehouse of this moving company, right?

[1:05] And I was describing myself as a furniture wrestler. And so again, like, I don't know why I have to make everything a competition, but it was. I was wrestling the furniture rather than just putting it where it belonged.

[1:16] And so part of my job was to fill these pod situations that they had, that they would then, you know, fill them up and then they would take them to wherever they needed to unload this furniture to. And, you know, put them in people's houses, this, that and a third.

[1:29] And so this fateful day, I found myself facing off with some rich people's furniture, namely Mr. Big, Heavy and Brown.

[1:41] And I took that personally. So I got ready. I grabbed the moving blankets, the packing tape. I started prepping this joint up like, yeah, you ain't going to defeat me. Once I get through with you, you ain't going to be scratched, you ain't going to be dented, nothing like I'm going to make sure I do this perfect, right?

[1:55] I was ready. So I taped that joint up real nice. It looked protected, secure, big, heavy, and brown. So I roll up on this jing and I just like squat deep.

[2:07] You know, you got to lift with your legs, not your back. That's what they say. So I'm over here. I'm like, you know, my face is scrunching up like a pug. I'm getting this thing up. So I was feeling like, yeah, I did that.

[2:20] Like, yeah, you ain't going to defeat me. Yeah, Mr. Big, Heavy and Brown. He's got the best of you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was feeling so great about it, right? Then all of a sudden, I hear something. Crack.

[2:31] And I took that personally. So, what's up, buddy, y'all? My name is Trevor Wendt. Good evening. Welcome to the Table Church. If you don't know me, I'm a member of the preaching team here.

[2:44] My pronouns are he, him. And throughout the summer, we've been in this series that we've titled, What Lies Beneath. And it's exploring this concept that, like an iceberg, right, most of who you are lies beneath the surface.

[3:00] So how do we as a congregation enter into deeper spiritual formation and recognize it as a journey of seeing more clearly into the real nature of the things, of the nature of things in this life as we gaze upon Jesus?

[3:17] And so I've been given the privilege tonight to close out this series with this concept of limits. So the title of today's message is Embracing a Theology of Limits, AKA the Necessity of Embracing Boundaries and Your Own Boundedness.

[3:36] So before we push any further into this message, I just want to answer this question. What is theology? So theology is just this fancy term that means the study of the nature of God and religious beliefs.

[3:53] And so theology of limits would be understanding what limits on our limited powers and abilities that we have as humans individually or collectively, like what those things are.

[4:08] And what does God have to teach us about these things? And what do these things have to teach us about our relationship to God's self through these limits? Right.

[4:19] So before we get to breaking all of that stuff down, I want to jump into Scripture real fast to help illustrate this story. So this story is one that I imagine that most of us in this room are pretty familiar with.

[4:33] It is the first sin, the original sin, if you will, in Genesis 3, which I'm going to just summarize. So I'm not going to harp on whether this story is a literal or figurative situation or if Adam and Eve really existed.

[4:48] But what we're leaning on and learning on today and leaning on from this passage is what it has to teach us about limits. So the story goes that one day God's craftiest creature, the serpent, says, hey, Eve, let me holler at you for a second.

[5:04] Then did God say that, you know, you ain't supposed to eat from any tree out this joint? Eve says, oh, hey, serpent. Now, nothing weird about that. Right. Talking snake. I'm going to just talk back like she must be Eliza Thornberry or something.

[5:16] If you don't know who Eliza Thornberry is, shout out to my 90s babies. Go look up the wild thornberries and get some 90s culture in your life.

[5:28] So she continues. Nah, we just can't eat from the joint in the middle of the garden. Can't even touch it or we finna die. Again, telling a serpent all your business is not particularly my first choice.

[5:40] But, hey, do your thing, homegirl. So serpent says, nah, God's tripping. That joint is just finna give you God powers. You gon' know good and evil. Eve says, oh, word. Believe in a random serpent. Again, not my first choice, but okay.

[5:55] So she goes and ganders at this forbidden tree. And the fruit, that fruit is looking plump, juicy, ripe. The joint is looking good and powerful, like a devil fruit from One Piece.

[6:08] If you don't know One Piece, it's an anime, very popular anime, one of my favorites. Go look it up after this. You ain't never seen anime. One Piece is great. Anyways, so Eve eats this joint, right? And somehow her husband, Adam, has been here this whole time and ain't said nothing.

[6:26] Ain't talked, ain't said nothing about a serpent, ain't said nothing about forbidden fruit. He's just aloof. I don't know what this man is on. So he's looking like, all right, she ain't dead. I must be good.

[6:37] I must be good. All right, cool. I want devil fruit powers too. I mean, they look pretty tasty, you know? I guess I understand you, Adam. Anyways, so they eat this joint. The next thing that you know, they realize that they're naked. And they start tripping.

[6:50] I mean, if you randomly realize you're naked somewhere in the open, I guess that's a reason to start tripping. But God rolls up in the garden and says, hey, where y'all at? No, that's really, it says it in scripture, I promise you.

[7:05] And so they're shook. And all of a sudden, Adam comes out, oh, hey, God. Oh, man, I'm sorry. We were afraid because we were naked.

[7:17] And he's like, who told you he was naked? You eating devil fruits? Devil fruits. And so he's like, oh, he starts blaming people, as you know, men.

[7:28] And so he's like, the woman you gave me, she came over to me and said, baby. And I said, yum, yum. We did. And so. And then God's like, hey, Eve, what you on, girl?

[7:46] And she's like, look, G, oh, this snake, this serpent. Oh, it tricked me. And so God starts cursing everybody. I mean, everybody. Everybody's serpent getting it. Women getting it. Men getting it. We getting history, lineages, all this stuff.

[7:59] Everybody is getting it in this moment. It's a trip. It's a trip of a story. But even then, God shows compassion, makes these naked fools some clothes, kicks them out the garden so they don't eat from the tree of life with this tandem of the knowledge of good and evil that they've just eaten.

[8:19] So they live forever in the state that they're not supposed to be in. It shows them that compassion. And in this story, we see God's limits all over. And we learn a little bit of what it looks like to refuse to accept God's limits.

[8:36] So let me pray and we'll dive a little deeper. Let me pray and we'll dive deeper. Jesus, I ask you that you would grant us the serenity to accept the things that we cannot change, to change the courage to change the things that we can, the injustices, the evils in this world, the ways that we can improve ourselves, our communities.

[9:04] We can love the people around us. Give us the courage to do those things, God. God, grant us the wisdom to know the difference. In your name. Amen.

[9:17] So Adam or Adam is a Hebrew word that means man or human or humankind. And while Eve comes from the Hebrew word heva, you got to say it with the guttural thing, heva, which means life or living.

[9:34] So in this passage, I want you all to think about Adam and Eve as a metaphor for collective humanity and like our collective community. So God gives Adam and Eve limits and says, eat anything that you want out of this garden.

[9:50] Just don't eat, don't touch, don't look at like straight up like your mama in the grocery store. Don't touch this or you finna die. You will surely die. And they refuse to abide by their limits and choose to know good and evil.

[10:07] Now, critical scholars such as Julius Velhausen and Gerard von Rad would argue that this concept of good and evil in this passage is not about this sort of objective good and evil or like this objective knowledge that we're used to understanding this like in Western culture.

[10:25] This concept, if you look at an object, a thing, a person, an animal, that you can know if this thing is good or if it's evil. They argue that it is a functional knowledge, that it's about what is helpful or harmful to humanity, to humans.

[10:42] So in Genesis 3, 6, we read this. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise.

[10:57] That make one wise can also be translated as to make one succeed or to make one prosper. And it's connected to existence and knowing what is helpful and harmful for both the individual and the collective existence and making decisions about those sorts of things.

[11:18] And see, that's what's really interesting about the way that this passage is set up. German Old Testament scholars Karl Budd and Julius Hemp will argue that this passage is not focused on a moral knowledge or even primarily focused on the concept of an individual success or an individual's mastery of life, but rather focused on and concerned with, above all else, the life of the group, the collective, this existence in community.

[11:48] And with this existence of humanity as a whole. And this existential threat of the knowledge of good and evil, this knowledge of what is helpful or harmful impacts the individual, the community, and even impacts God's self in this narrative.

[12:06] This refusal to listen to limits had lasting impacts. So keep that in mind as we move forward today. So what are limits?

[12:17] With all that groundwork laid, what are limits? Limits are our limited powers and abilities as humans individually and even collectively. I like this definition here, a restriction on the size or amount of something permissible or possible.

[12:35] We all have limits. I don't care if you are Asia Wilson, Pablo Picasso, LeBron James, Albert Einstein, James Baldwin, the prophet Deborah, Frida Kahlo. I don't care who you are.

[12:46] Everyone has limits. No matter how talented, gifted, well off, lucky, fortunate, whatever it is, all of us have ceilings. I think Pete Cesaro says this best or not best, but he breaks this down in these categories of what he sees limits as pretty solidly in his book, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality.

[13:08] And he breaks this down into 11 different kind of spaces or boxes you could push limits into. So, number one, the physical body.

[13:20] Your physical body, we all have physical bodies. We all have limits of what they can do. Some people LeBron James. Some people, you know, have lasting or like pre-existing ailments. Some people got asthma.

[13:31] Some people have all these sorts of things, right? So our physical bodies impress limits upon us. Our families of origin. Our families have, you know, different things that come with them. You might have grown up, it could be something as simple as you might have grown up as, you know, a child of a single parent or you might have grown up as an only child and that impacts the way that you see the world, right?

[13:51] It might have been you grew up poor. You might have grown up middle class. You might have grown up rich. All these sorts of things impact the way in which, you know, limits that might be impressed upon us. Our race, our ethnicity, our country of origin.

[14:04] Growing up in the U.S. versus growing up in the Caribbean islands versus growing up in Australia. All these sorts of things impact stuff. Growing up black in the U.S. Very different than growing up white in the U.S.

[14:15] All these sorts of things impact the ways in which you experience limits in your life. Your marital status and kids. Married people with kids is going to tell you they ain't got a lot of time.

[14:28] You know, it's going to take a whole lot more, you know, to get those people to a function. Things like that. And so those are limits that are placed upon you, right? In comparison to somebody who is single.

[14:39] They have a little bit more flexibility with stuff going on. Stuff doesn't have to be as regimented in many situations. Your intellectual capacity. Everybody ain't a rocket scientist, right?

[14:50] But at the same time, sometimes really smart people ain't great socially. So there's an intellectual capacity going on there. We all have limits. Talents and gifts. Everybody's got different talents and gifts.

[15:03] You might have more than someone else. You might have less. But we all have limits on what those things look like. Your material wealth. Enough said. If you got money, it changes things. If you ain't got money, it changes things.

[15:15] You got a whole lot of money, you need to work on that. Sorry. That was my little shot at billionaires in the church service now. All right.

[15:26] So your work and relationships. What's your work look like? What's your job look like? You know, you're working 90 hours a week. It's going to impact stuff. If you have a good friend group. If you have communities surrounding you. It's going to change stuff.

[15:37] Like limits impressed upon in those situations. Your raw material of life. Your temperament, personality, unique self. Like the aspects of you that are just a part of you.

[15:48] Your introvert. You do extrovert things, you're going to be drained. Extrovert. You do introvert things, you're going to be drained. So you have to work with the limits of how you're made. How you show up.

[15:59] Your unique self and how you show up in life. Your time. Most valuable resource we got, right? We all have a limited amount of time that we're on this earth. But we also have time that's limited, varied upon all these other things going on in our lives.

[16:13] So we have to, you know, we have a limited amount of time in a day. We have a limited amount of time in a week. And so we make decisions accordingly. And lastly, our spiritual understanding. Can't know everything about the spiritual in this world.

[16:26] No matter how many seminary degrees you got. No matter how long you've been in church. No matter how well you think you know God. You're still going to have a limit on what you can understand spiritually.

[16:37] And that's okay. But we all have limits in those sorts of things, right? And so in different stages, ages, and places in our lives, these limits can look very different.

[16:48] And they can expand and they can compress in different situations. And we can embrace these limits or we can try to avoid them. But we will never escape our limits.

[17:00] But at the core, they have so much that they can teach us. My big idea for today, if you don't remember anything else I said today, remember this. Limits are a compass that leads us to the locations of our needs.

[17:16] And don't worry, I'm going to say it like 16 more times. Because that's why it's a big idea. So, limits can teach us. Limits can teach us a lot. Limits can teach us what we need from ourselves.

[17:29] Limits can teach what we need from others and for others. And limits can teach us what we need of God and for God.

[17:40] So, what we need from ourselves. As we grow up and go through this process of understanding more about who we are, more about our personhood.

[17:53] We learn about our athletic capabilities, our intellectual capabilities, more about the world we grew up in, where our talents and gifts reside, our temperament, our personalities. We begin to see all these things and we begin to build lives in ways in which we are limited.

[18:09] From a spiritual formation sense, we begin to understand where we need boundaries and our own boundedness. So, yes, this might mean for somebody who grew up in a family with a history of alcoholism that they avoid alcohol.

[18:24] But it's also things like if you're a person that knows that you get a lot of energy from sunlight that you might be, you might not go live in Seattle, right? Like you might choose places to live that have a lot of sunlight or pick apartments or places to live that have a lot of natural light.

[18:41] And so, you structure your way in living and inhabiting this world based off of the things that are your limits, right? And so, we learn our limits and we make decisions and set boundaries and frameworks that enable us to live lives that best reflect Jesus.

[19:00] So, how do we embody the fruits of the Spirit? How do we stand against injustice? How do we discern the areas in our lives that we're called to?

[19:11] We learn, we grow in, and we embrace our limits. Limits are a compass that leads us to the locations of our needs.

[19:24] So, what we need from others. Limits help us understand what we need from others. One of the most powerful statements that you can ever say is that I need help.

[19:35] Part of our spiritual formation and maturity is recognizing our need for community and communicating those needs that we have, right?

[19:46] I clearly needed help when I was wrestling them rich people's furniture, but I let my pride get to me and I broke that jank. And I got scolded by my manager and he had to glue it back together with wood glue and all that situation.

[19:59] So, whether it's help in moving heavy things or prayer or therapy or discipleship, we all need help. Remember the Adam and Eve narrative taught us about this concept of limits as understanding what is helpful or harmful for the community as a whole.

[20:19] So, we sit in this space of understanding that knowing when to say, hey, I ain't got it. Or I could use your advice or those I see in you conversations where we're seeing the talents or gifts that someone else might have and telling them about those things.

[20:35] See, embracing and engaging our own boundaries and boundedness opens up for a fullness of life in community with others. Limits are a compass that leads us to the locations of our needs.

[20:51] They teach us what we need for others as well, right? So, we understand the things that we're great in, right? And the things that we lack in. We may have poor conflict resolution skills and we need to work on our conflict resolution skills.

[21:05] Like, we might have an issue where we triangle relationships. If you didn't hear Anthony's sermon from a couple of weeks ago where he talked about family systems theories, go into YouTube and go peep that joint.

[21:18] And the concept of the process, it had a lot of good stuff in it. But the concept of triangling relationships where you pull someone else in a third party rather than dealing with the conflict directly with somebody. Those sorts of things, right?

[21:29] Or we might see our limits in the spaces of the ways in which we're great with kids, right? And so, we babysit a friend's kids to give them the night off. Or maybe we're a lawyer.

[21:41] We put together a workshop to equip immigrant families on what to do and protect themselves to the best of their ability. If they are targeted by ice. See, limits give us guidance where to show up for others and how to show up better for others in our lives.

[21:57] We echo the early church in this way. As in Acts 4, where we're seeing this church where they're making sure that everyone's needs are met, right? Limits are the compass that leads us to the locations of our needs.

[22:12] They also teach us what we need of God in our lives, right? Where do I need God to show up in my life? How can I?

[22:24] Like, how can God show up in my life? What is God teaching me in my limits? Paul's a great example of this. He had this limit that he referred to as a thorn in his flesh.

[22:37] We don't know what it was, but we know he ain't like it. And he asked God to get rid of it multiple times. And so, he's like, hey, Jesus, get rid of this thorn in my flesh. And Jesus responds to him. And he says this in 2 Corinthians 12, 9.

[22:52] My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. And so, Paul continues. So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.

[23:09] See, limits lead the way for God's power to be displayed. Moses had a speech impediment. Elijah was depressed. Peter had anger issues.

[23:21] Abraham was old. I'm talking big old. And he's trying to have a baby. Like, limits, right? Jacob became disabled the night before he was about to be in a fight.

[23:34] Or at least he thought he was about to be in a fight with his brother that, you know, kind of like screwed over for his inheritance, right? Tomorrow was a widow being taken advantage of.

[23:45] And yet, God used all of these people purposefully. Limits lead the way for God's power to be displayed. And that's not to lionize any forms of abuse or neglect or harm that's been done to you.

[24:03] It's to say that despite these wrongs, right, that you still have purpose. They're not big enough to stop what God wants to do in you and through you and through this community, through your personal communities and in this world.

[24:19] Imperfect people are perfectly positioned to live purposefully for God. I'll say it again. Imperfect people are perfectly positioned to live purposely for God.

[24:34] See, God is still working and can work through you. What we need for God. Limits also show us what we can do for God.

[24:45] Jesus commissions us at the end of his ministry that you will be my witnesses in Judea, Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, to the ends of the earth, right?

[24:56] Walking in purpose, our limits lead to the discernment of the callings that we have in the kingdom of God. But they also connect us to our relationship with God because it is a relationship, right?

[25:10] What are things that I'm not great at, but I can grow in in my relationship with God? How do I best connect with God? How do I embrace my limits to connect with God? One of the members of our preaching team, you see over here, Becky, she talks about how she knits in church.

[25:26] Because she needs her hands to be active to focus. She's understanding her limits to better connect to God's self, right? I'd be reading on the treadmill and walking around my house because I struggle to stay focused while I'm sitting down.

[25:40] So I had to hack my brain so that I could, you know, learn. Because learning is kind of important. Can't really preach if you didn't read stuff. Limits lead us to a better understanding of how we develop our relationship with God.

[25:54] So what happens when we reject limits in our life? I mean, straight up, there's just going to be consequences. For Adam and Eve, it was expulsion from the garden. Physical consequences, psychological consequences, impacts that harm humanity as a whole.

[26:09] There's a whole bunch of stuff going down. Many of us have parents, you know. We all, we see situations where we might have parents or an older person, right, who should not be driving anymore, but will not give up those keys.

[26:24] And it takes everything to claw those keys out of their hands. And if you finally have reached the point where you were able to do it, you know, the time that they were doing it was endangering not only them, but endangering the people around them, the community around them.

[26:39] Or it's that person who can't let go of their high school successes and won't live in the here and the now. And it can divert us away from the places that we can thrive now rather than survive, right?

[26:54] Or someone may love singing and love music, but they cannot sing at all. And they devote their life to trying to become a Whitney Houston level talent rather than embracing that maybe there's a different place that you need to show up in the world.

[27:11] Maybe that music shows up in a different way in your life. To embrace those limits, you might see a different path. Or something like we're healing from church trauma or hurt, and we try to jump back in too quickly.

[27:26] We try to get involved too quickly, volunteer too quickly, while our bodies and our spirits are not quite ready yet. And it can delay this healing process that we need to walk through to fall in love with Jesus again.

[27:38] See, burnout, trauma, apathy, depression, pride, so many things can come from refusing to acknowledge our limits and trying to handle it all.

[27:50] Limits are the compass that leads us to the locations of our needs. So what happens when we embrace limits?

[28:01] Well, John the Baptist is a great example of this. He was a leader who paved the way for Jesus' ministry in the first century. And as he was baptizing people, right, Jesus comes through, he baptizes Jesus.

[28:16] And after that, people are beginning to leave John's baptism sessions to go to Jesus' baptism sessions instead. His devout followers are kind of pissed about this.

[28:27] They're like, hey, John, what's up with these fools leaving you to go to this new dude? And John says this, no one can receive anything except what has been given from heaven.

[28:42] See, John knew his role. John knew his role and he fulfilled his purpose and finds fulfillment in his purpose. He stays humble and he points others to the next stage of their development from him to Jesus.

[29:00] So when we embrace our limits, we create this opportunity to thrive as who we are and being who we are. And it not only impacts our lives, but it impacts the lives of the communities that we're a part of.

[29:14] Limits are the compass that leads us to the locations of our needs. So you may be wondering, all right, we're talking about limits, Coe.

[29:25] How do you know when something is a limit or how do you know something's an obstacle that you need to overcome? And the answer to this is discernment. Now, discernment can be a challenge.

[29:37] Sometimes it's like something that you feel in your gut, something you feel in your spirit, right? Sometimes it can be something that you need more practical ways to try to help to understand yourself. And so here are some practices that may be beneficial to you.

[29:50] Shout out to Anthony for putting these or putting me onto these because I'm about to apply them all into my life. And so, yeah, I'm going to just go through a few of these. So first one is this joint called a three circle test.

[30:04] So take notes, three circle test. So there's this theologian. His name is Frederick Buechner. God rest his soul. He has this bar where he says that your calling is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.

[30:19] And so this test is kind of inspired from that. And so the deep gladness circle, what genuinely energizes you in your life? Like even when it's difficult.

[30:30] And if you're forcing yourself through something that is consistently draining your soul, not just your energy, it's draining your soul. Then it might be a signal that that's a limit for you.

[30:43] World's deep need circle. Is there a genuine need in the world for what you're trying to accomplish? Sometimes we persist in these things in our lives that the world doesn't actually need from us.

[30:56] And sometimes you're off base and sometimes you might just be early. Like the QR code person. Like shout out to the QR code person. If they had given up, we wouldn't have our slides the way we do.

[31:09] Like shout out QR code person, homie. Yeah. Number three, competence or calling circle. Do you have or can you develop the basic capacity for this thing?

[31:25] Not perfection. The capacity. So if you got that singing dream and you can sing, but you can't sing like Whitney, then that's okay.

[31:36] You might have to just do this thing your way. If you're operating in the intersection of these three circles, the deep gladness, the world's deep need, and the confidence and calling, then these might just be obstacles that you have to push through in your life.

[31:51] If you're missing one or two or all three of these joints entirely, you might consider that a limit. Another joint might be time based discernment. You might use time to help you discern if something is a limit or an obstacle.

[32:06] A six month rule is a good one. Give yourself in meaningful challenges in your life six months to try to, or six months of consistent and wise effort in it. So you're continually putting effort into this thing that you might consider a limit.

[32:20] But also to really set a timeline and go and reassess that joint. Don't just persist without any sort of reassessment because you can lose years chasing after things that may be outside of what God has for your life, outside of what you are structured or like that you're built like to do.

[32:40] It might be limits. Another option might be to track your energy. This would be called an energy audit. Track your energy over several weeks while you're working at something that you're aiming for, aiming to discern if it's an obstacle or a limit.

[32:55] See, obstacles can typically drain you initially, but they'll energize you as you continue to grow in them. But limits are going to consistently deplete you without any sort of corresponding growth or joy.

[33:09] And understand also that you might be good at some stuff that are not for you. Things you are not, like things that you're able to do can also deplete you.

[33:20] And so it may be a good time to discern that they are not for you. Like for instance, I don't like editing all that much. I'm pretty dang good at editing. But I, it's the least favorite creative output that I am interested in.

[33:34] And yet, I worked as an editor in a marketing agency for like three years and I don't want to do that again. So, there might be a limit. Last thing I'm going to hit y'all with is bodily wisdom.

[33:46] Sometimes, your body is a tool for discernment. For example, you might be having physical symptoms about things that might be limits in your life. Your body often knows what's going down before your mind knows what's going down.

[34:00] So, if you have persistent headaches or you have sleep issues or you have stomach problems, these can potentially be signals for you that you're fighting a limit in your life rather than working through an obstacle.

[34:14] For example, I have exercise induced asthma and if the workout gets too intense, I'm going to wheeze. It's just going to happen. If it's hard sprints, if it's wrestling, I'm going to wheeze.

[34:25] Unquestionably. But, that didn't stop me from becoming a college wrestler. It was an obstacle rather than a limit. I could medicate the asthma with the albuterol inhaler.

[34:38] Shout out inhaler people. I could raise my conditioning to a point where that wheezing point would be pushed off and then that hard work would also turn, you know, as a benefit for me and be to my advantage because I put in more time, more practice, more hours.

[34:54] It was an obstacle rather than a limit. Because the truth is that walking in your calling and walking in the things that God has for you almost ensures that you will have obstacles.

[35:05] As Anthony says, true calling often involves learning to dance with your constraints, not bulldoze through them. Or this joint from Denzel Washington, if you pray for rain, you've got to deal with the mud too.

[35:21] So use these tools, whichever ones speak to you, to discover more about who you are and what you're capable of. And also, as Denzel Washington would say, fail fast, fail often.

[35:35] Other tools of discernment also come from our communities, right? The importance of those I see in you conversations that we talked about earlier, right? Trusted people sharing with you the talents and the gifts and things like that that they see in you.

[35:49] Or that coach, that mentor, that professor, that advisor who pushed you beyond what you saw as a limit. But they saw that there was so much more potential there.

[36:01] That there was healing there. That there was growth there. That there was mastery of life. Sometimes we've got to push up to limits to walk into the healing. Sometimes you've got to get to the edge of that trigger in order to begin to unravel it with trusted help, right?

[36:18] So when we talked about the three circle test, part of that is what does the world need as well? That's a communal mindset. Is this helpful for the community at large?

[36:29] Now, everybody in your life ain't a trusted source. Earlier in the series, I preached in the morning service and I said this thing I was really focusing on. Testing the spirits because not everyone comes from God. That means that not everybody is trustworthy.

[36:41] If it don't line up with Jesus, it ain't Jesus. And so, trustworthy people though with trustworthy records can be helpful to help us to see our limits. Emotionally, spiritually, mentally, physically, all that.

[36:55] See, this is a communal thing as much as it is an individual thing. And of course, discernment comes from God as well. Seeking God in prayer and discernment.

[37:07] That serenity prayer that I said earlier, prayed earlier. God grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change. The courage to change the things that I can. And the wisdom to know the difference.

[37:20] See, testing, becoming aware of ourselves, praying, seeking guidance, remaining open to the ways that God is speaking to us and helping us to read what our limitations are.

[37:33] These are important to understanding our limits and discerning what's a limit and obstacle. See, because Jacob thought his life was over when he was facing his brother Esau.

[37:45] Abraham thought he was too old to have a kid. Nicodemus was a tax collector. And in that time, those people were considered scum. So, how could God use him, right?

[37:58] Naomi and Ruth were women in a super patriarchal society, and they were both widows, and one was old. This was not a good setup for them. And yet, God made a way to put their glory on display.

[38:14] God can lead you past your obstacles to your true limits. And they may be more expansive than you could ever imagine. Limits are the compass that leads us to the locations of our needs.

[38:30] So, I'm going to close with this. Limits can be absolutely frustrating. But limits can also be really freeing. I learned by Breaking Them Rich People's Mystery Furniture that I was strong enough, but I wasn't wise enough to take care of that furniture properly.

[38:50] To understand the limits of myself, like understanding its limits in tandem with my own limits. And I learned that I needed help in that situation.

[39:02] And that would have not only made the load easier for me, but it would have also given another person the opportunity to show up for someone else. And to protect someone's precious belongings.

[39:15] It was the most helpful thing for the community as a whole. No matter how expansive someone's limits seem. Like no matter how expansive someone's gifts and talents and all these things seem.

[39:29] We all have limits. And they can be bridges that lead us into fullness of life. Or they can be barriers between being fully who we are and fully who we're called to be.

[39:41] Limits are the compass. Limits. I'm going to say this right because it's the last time I'm going to say it. Limits are the compass that leads us to the locations of our needs.

[39:54] Amen. Amen.