 Today I would like to continue with part two called escaping the news or escaping the trap, escaping the chokehold of the enemy in our life. We live in a very busy culture. We live in a culture today where a lot of people are overwhelmed, a lot of people are depressed, a lot of people are stressed out. The straw that breaks the camel's back. So I've read this thing about camels this week is that camels can survive in harsh conditions of a desert. They can go for 10 days without water. They can travel up to 40 miles per hour. They can carry up to 900 pounds of weight for 25 miles a day. 900 pounds, it's like a truck. Camels can carry great loads, but if a straw is placed on the camel, maximally loaded down, its back will be broken. The back is not broken by the straw, it's broken by the overload. So though they can carry 900 pounds for 25 miles, once they reach their max and you add a straw, it breaks their back. They collapse. The researchers agree on two things. Almost all the researchers agree on two things. One, all of us as humans are limited. Somebody say I'm limited. So burn that book that you bought that says you have no limits because that's not true. You have limits. You have limits physically, you have limits with time, you have limits with your gifts. All of us are limited. What makes God God is that he is not limited. You are limited. And one of the problems in our generation today is that we have many self-help gurus who are trying to lie to us and tell us to break our limits instead of live below our limits. This building has a limit of how many people we can fit. Let's say that this building can fit only 200 people and we stack 600 people. It's going to ruin this experience for every person. The bridge we are driving has a stress limit, meaning the amount of weight a semi can have when it rides on it. If you take a semi and load it five times more weight, it's not going to be fun if you're driving right behind a semi. If you go to a coffee shop and 70 people can sit in a coffee shop but 700 show up, you won't be drinking coffee there. Why? Because a limit gets broken, limits get pushed. We live in the generation today where we have caffeine, where we have five-hour energy things you can buy at the gas station, anything you can do so you can constantly push your limit instead of live below them. And researchers say that we have limits. Number two, if we constantly push our limits, we go into overwhelmed, overloaded, overdrive, which eventually chronically destroys our relationships, our health, and our life. Something that I want to share with today is that when you live an overloaded life, it will lead to a burnout. Once the threshold of your limits are exceeded, overload replaces margin. It's kind of like a tree. If you take a tree and you bend it, you release it, it goes right back up. No harm done. You hold the tree lower, you hold it more and more and more and then something happens with the tree is snaps. Once the tree snaps, you release it, it doesn't go back up again. And that's what happens in our culture today when it comes to the issue of burnout, when it comes to the issue of being overloaded, overworked, depressed, and stressed out. The idea of stress didn't exist until like 1950, that one doctor started to study this topic. Until that time, the reason why stress wasn't really existence because we didn't have telephones. We didn't have televisions. And most of us didn't read... Well, I wasn't even alive that time, but there was no newspapers. It was also that time where we did not have light. And as much as incredible Thomas Edison and everybody else who invented electricity is great, what happened with an invention and light is that we started to prolong the day artificially. When our bodies were supposed to come down and go to sleep, what we did is we tried to trick the system, push the limits and say, no, we can stay up longer if we have artificial light. God is not giving us the light, we're gonna find more light. And so what started to happen, then came the telephones, then came the social media, and then came everything else. And what started to happen in our culture today is that though we are way more advanced, our phones are smarter, our cars can drive themselves, we have robots that can serve us, we have an AI jet, jet GPT thing that can pretty much like write everything and anything, and very soon it's gonna control probably half of the world. We have a world that is extremely smart, but we as humans are suffering because many of us are no longer humans, we're machines. We're no longer made machines, we become machines. There's something about a machine that you must understand, machine needs to be turned on and off, you can't. Machine runs on power, you run on life. Machines that don't operate in seasons, they operate all the time, you have seasons. You can't just have a baby because you got pregnant yesterday, you have to wait for nine months and there's no pills and no medicine you can take to make that baby go from nine months to just nine hours and just be born right here. It just can't, there has to be certain because that's what life produces, life and it takes time, you can't speed it up, nothing you can do to speed it up. Makes us nervous, confused and a little bit tense so we create systems to try to bypass that. And so what I'm gonna do today is I'm gonna dive into God's word and deal with something, this message is gonna be most practical message you probably have heard from me in a very, very long time. But I believe it's gonna be applicable. This message is also the one that I'm struggling to live the most. So this is not gonna be, I'm not gonna share with you, hey, look at my victories. No, I'm just gonna share more about where I'm struggling in this area as well. This is not gonna solve every problem. If the problem is demons, please go watch last Sunday's message, Spirit of Python. But for a lot of us, the problem is not demons, the problem is us. The problem is our habits, the problem is our lifestyle and the problem is our decisions. And we can name it, claim it, blabber, grab it, confess it, possess it, go to the altar, spit it out, vomit it, shake it, bake it, fall and roll and all of this stuff. But if you have bad habits established in your life, you are not going to find peace permanently. Jesus says, if you are stressed out, overwhelmed, come to me, give you peace. And then he says, if you stay with me, you will find peace. I will no longer need to give it to you because I will change the way you live, the way you think, the way you behave and you will ultimately have an access to this peace all the time. So it's okay to come to Jesus, say I'm overwhelmed, I'm stressed out, burned out, Jesus, fill me with your peace, give me the joy, especially if you're going through stuff that is just completely crazy. But what's not okay is that if we only come to Jesus instead of walking with Jesus to change the way we live, the way we think, the pace of our life, the way that we behave in our habits so we can constantly live in perpetual peace in the midst of chaos. Have joy that's unspeakable. Have peace that passes understanding and is above our comprehension because somebody give God some praise. Hallelujah. I personally struggle with the issue of having margin. Somebody say margin. Now margin, as we said last week, is having space between your limit and your load. Margin is having breathing room. Margin is having money at the end of the month. Margin is going up the stairs and having a breath after that instead of being completely dropping dead. That's what margin is. When I think of margin, when I think of free time, little extra money, free space, I'm always thinking that this is a problem to solve, not a virtue to protect. And it's been a personal struggle for me. Ever since we went on a vacation with my wife this year, I got rocked there by the Lord because I felt a revelation that came to me that really just rocked me. And this revelation in this form of a statement that I live my life trying to maximize my potential. And God says, I want you to live your life protecting margin. Meaning keeping breathing room because when you have breathing room, you make yourself available to God. When you have breathing room, you make yourself available in your finances, in your time and in your morality. When you don't have breathing room and you're constantly maxed out, maxed out, maxed out all the time, what begins to happen is that you won't reach really your potential. You will reach your burnout. And ever since that's been my prayer, Lord, help me to live my life in such a way that there is a margin. It's not easy like everybody in here. I am in the Bible college right now. I'm halfway through to my bachelor's in theology. I have a full-time ministry and a full-time church, full-time wife and a part-time dog. I also write books, create courses, blogs, podcasts, videos, travel and so many, so many other things. And so sometimes I feel like the 27 balls that is hanging out there and to be able to create margin and all of that, find breathing room. And one of the biggest things that everybody meets me and the first thing they say, I know you're busy. They're not even asking like, I know you're busy. So just, I know you're busy. And they keep saying, I know you're busy, which I know is not good. So, by the time I'm done with my message, I'm gonna be at the altar. You're gonna be coming and praying for me today. But the reason why I'm sharing this with you is because what I'm gonna share with you today is not something that I'm preaching at you. It's something that I'm preaching to myself now every single day. So it's my own journey of walking with God and I wanna share that with you as well. It will not relate to some of you teenagers. You're like, margin, I have too much margin. I need something to do during the summer because I'm gonna go crazy with all this margin. But hang in there, this season of your torture will not last very long. Once you go to university, pick up two jobs and try to pay for college, trust me. You're gonna look for this message on YouTube. Let's open our Bibles to Matthew chapter 13, verse 22. Now, he who received seed among the thorns is he who hears the word and the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches choked the word and he becomes unfruitful. So I want you to notice something about this seed. The seed goes into the soil. So we see three things, seed, soil and the sower. The sower, of course, is the preacher of God's word. We know that the seed is Jesus. It's the kingdom of God and the soil is our hearts. And the Bible breaks it down to four types of soil. Seed is the same, soils are different and because the soils are different, there's different results. And we see that the third type of soil is actually, everything is fine, that it's very frutal soil, meaning very successful, very productive. It's so productive, everything grows there. See, some of us struggle with failure. We're like, man, anything I touch is just broken. Some of us struggle with success and that's also a problem. Because anything we touch, we get opportunities, we get ideas, we just type A personality, we wanna run, we wanna like just hustle and bustle and side hustles and things on the weekend and we just like create different things and school and work and kids and the football practice and this practice and the golf and then social media and then we started the YouTube channel then we started the podcast and we're like doing all of these amazing things and there's nothing wrong with the soil. It's super frutile, but it's also not super healthy. And the Bible says this what happens, the seed goes into the soil, the seed, somebody say seed. Seed has the potential to produce a harvest. Somebody say harvest. And so the seed goes into the soil and the seed doesn't really need anything. It has a potential to become a harvest. It has a potential to multiply itself but there's just one problem with the seed is the seed needs space. Somebody say space. So the seed that goes into the soil needs space. If it doesn't have space, it cannot multiply, it cannot become a forest, it cannot do anything that is sort of not natural. Because if you put a rock on a table, it stays there on the table for five years. Will it there be a mountain from this rock? A rock doesn't produce a mountain. Why? Because it just doesn't have the power in it, it cannot multiply, has no life in it. The seed on the other hand is very tiny, very small. You put it into the right environment, the soil, your human heart, you give it space, it can produce a harvest. See, this is what I want us to get out today is this is that God wants to do more with less. Say this with me, say God wants to do more with less. Which means God wants to multiply things. God wants to supernaturally accelerate your finances. God wants to supernaturally bless your family. God wants to supernaturally bless your business. God wants to supernaturally bless your relationships. God presents his kingdom as a seed, not a rock. Meaning it has a supernatural ability to multiply itself. If you give it margin, if I give it breathing room, if I give it space, somebody shout space, somebody shout my space. That was a social media network. I just was trying to see how many older people we have here today. You need, God needs space, breathing room. We need to have that space. This is what we need to remember about this seed. The seed can multiply, the seed needs space, and the seed, though it can multiply, it can fight, and it cannot find space unless you create it. The seed will not choke the thorns. The thorns will choke the seed. How could that be possible if the seed is so powerful, but it cannot fight, it cannot compete with weeds. And weeds, weeds are all these extra things that all of us have and I have tons of them. Weeds happen when you become fruitile, when you're good at something, what you do, when you become blessed, when you become successful, you get the job, you get the degree, things are going, and you get more opportunities. We can do more. We don't wanna miss out. Well, look at the Jonas's. They already moved into a new house. Look at my coworker. They already got three kids and you're still not married. Come on, hurry up. This idea of missing out, this idea of keeping up with other people, this idea of putting pressure. I need to be further. I looked at my wife today. I'm like, I'm 37 years of age. I feel like I haven't done anything with my life. She's like, well, that's what happens when you're in your life. You see, when you step out of it, she's like, then you get stuff done. I'm like, we don't have anything. We don't have done anything. And that's how some of you of us feel because we're kind of in it and then we compare ourselves to other people. No, it's not true. Because we're not here to be productive as much as we are here to live for God and to be fruitful. Can somebody say amen? Something I want us to keep in mind and that is this, the blessing of God makes one rich but it adds no sorrow with it. Proverbs 10, 22. Blessings of God will make you busy but busyness doesn't make you blessed. You can be blessed and a little bit busy and you can be busy and not blessed at all. Burdened, overwhelmed. Blessings must have boundaries or they become burdens. In Psalm 18, 19, it says, He brought me out into a broad place. Somebody say, broad place. Broad place. He delivered me because he delighted in me. God doesn't just want to bring you to a place where you are blessed. He wants you to bring to a place where there is space, where there is broadness, that there is a margin. John 15, two, it says, every branch in me that doesn't bear fruit, he takes away and every branch that bears fruit, he prunes that he may bear more fruit. God can do more with less. Our relationships needs room. Seeds need space. Miracles need margin. Blessings need boundaries. Grace has a pace to it and revival needs a rhythm. Sometimes we have to say no to good things so that we can say yes to God things. Sometimes you have to say no to weeds. So you can say yes to a seed. At first it doesn't make sense saying yes to a seed. The seed doesn't grow fast. The seed is not boisterous and big. The seed will not get you a lot of likes on Instagram. The seed will not get you win a competition of who's better, who's ahead, who got the new nice and shiny and the latest and the coolest thing. That's not how the seed works. The seed is slow, but the seed multiplies itself and the seed cannot do that. God cannot work if we don't give room. When COVID happened and then my ministry, VSM started to take off. What I started to notice is it started to get a lot of opportunities. A lot of opportunities to go and speak to other churches. Something that a lot of pastors or preachers look to that are like, man, this is like amazing. God's answering my prayer. I realized at the time God wasn't answering my prayer. God was testing me. And so I took a whole year off from travel, declined every single invitation to really stay back home and not only stay back home, but find out what does God have for me to do? What did he call me to do? And said no to everything so I can say yes to listening to God's voice. And then a year later, I started to travel and I made a decision that pretty much for every yes that I will say, I will say about five no's because you can't say yes to everything and say yes to God. And so now I am super intentional. Make sure that I'm here on Sunday. Make sure that I'm able to do my school. Make sure that I'm able to still meet with the people that I need to meet at church, to meet with the team. Make sure that I also have peace and my relationships are healthy. And the moment that some trips or invitations do not answer that, then they have to go. No matter how big that is, no matter how much opportunity there is, no matter how much money I need because I started to let go of the church's salary until we move into a new building, all of that has to take second because it's better to say one yes to God than to say too many no's, too many yeses to man. Interesting, in the beginning of the year, the Lord told me this in my heart and he says, if you walk my path and if you say yes when I tell you to say yes and keep margin in your schedule this year, I will surprise you with things during this year that you were trying to or were hoping to get one day. The whole Sid Roth interview, I was trying to get there for the last five years for those of you who don't know who Sid Roth is, he interviews people and he has a television network. When I released my book, A Break Free, I was trying to be there. I actually sent the book there. Nobody opened it though. Nobody responded, nobody called back. I had two other people that said, we will call and we will get you in there, nothing worked until I gave up. And not only until I gave up but until I also said, Lord, I'm making room for you. We'll see what's gonna happen. This lady calls me. Turns out she was from Richland. Ukrainian-Italian and she says, I watched your stuff last year. Yeah, didn't like you. I was like, ma'am, I'm totally not offended by the way. You know, and she's like, but this year, she's like something just spoke to me. That's the guy that we need to bring for that interview. And I really felt even when that happened, when I finally gave that up and I said, Lord, you can do more with less than God started to move more. We want God to do more in our life, us less. A lot of us, what we do today is we do more and we see God doing less. God wants to do the opposite. But to do that, there has to be room. Three things that I'm gonna leave you with today or highlight when it comes to room. Number one is in our mind. Number two is in our money. And number three is in our morality. So I'm gonna make it something very practical to find room in our life, in our mind. We need to take one day off a week and not work. Number two, to find room in our money, we have to spend less than we make. I'm gonna go a little Dave Ramsey today on you. And number three, to find room in our morality, we have to not ask the question, how close to the line I can get. But we have to ask a different question. So let's dive in. Number one, when it comes to finding space in here, finding room in here, finding breathing room, finding peace, more peace, we have to follow God's principle from the creation. And that is to take one day off a week. Now, we are not 70 Adventists. We love 70 Adventists. They let us park our church parking cars over there. We love them. But there's something about 70 Adventists you have to remember is that statistically, 70 Adventists live 10 years more than every other denomination. Somebody did the math. Every Sabbath they keep, keeps them, adds to their life. Because they take one day off a week and they don't work and they do it legalistically, some of them, they do it religiously, meaning no work on Saturday whatsoever, they go to church and afterwards they spend time with the family, no vacuuming, no gardening, none of the work that we all do on the weekends on our days off we just don't get paid for. But they actually take the day and they separate it to God, separate it to family. Statistically, they get those days back by living longer. Now, I grew up in the home. We were not 70 Adventists who were Pentecostal Sundayists. I know there's no word in the dictionary but we can create words, we can create words in America. On Sunday in the home that I grew up in, we were not allowed to do anything. We went to church twice on Sunday. I mean, I remember I didn't finish my homework on Saturday so I needed to use scissors. I got in trouble for using scissors for cutting piece of paper for my homework. It was not allowed. We're not allowed to vacuum. We're not allowed to play sports. Okay, we took this Sabbath thing to the extreme. We're not allowed to do anything. Food had to be prepared and there was this rule in the family. I thought there was legalism until I came to America now and I'm missing those days. But there's something biblical when God created the world. He did six days that you work and the seventh day God unplugged. Now, God doesn't get tired. God doesn't get weary. God doesn't need that but he did it for the humans to follow the pattern. Six days you work and the seventh day you stop. The word Sabbath means stop. Somebody shout stop. Stop meaning we have to take one day a week. This is God's rule for life. This is God's law. This is not something we do to go to heaven. This is something we do so we don't go to heaven too fast. Yeah, this is something we do so we follow God's pattern. So this is something we do so we can live with this memory. I am a human being, not a human doing. I am not a machine. Machines work all the time. If my iPhone decides to not work on Sunday, he's fired. How dare you do that to me? You can't take days off. But see, we as human beings were created in divine circle, divine cycle and that is this. Work, work, work, stop. How we have it in America is this. Work, work, work, months, months, months, months and then we have a vacation. Vacation was not biblical idea. God's biblical idea is you have a vacation once a week called a day off. That was God's idea for Sabbath. Now when Israel came out of Egypt, I want you to notice, God introduces the idea of taking a day off first in Exodus and he says, because I worked for six days, I rested on the last day, you need to do exactly the same. In fact, the fourth commandment has the most lines than any other commandment. God was so focused on that. Why? Because human beings sometimes become human doings unless we stop. Some of us like, I can't afford to stop. We'll get to that in just a second. In Deuteronomy, God talks about the Sabbath and he no longer talks about the creation as an example for him, for Israel to follow him. He talks about slavery now and he says, you were in bondage in Egypt and he says, now you can keep the Sabbath and remember how you were slaves. And when you're reading that, you're like, why is God referring to slavery when he's talking about a day off? And now referring to the Genesis account of creation, you know, the cycle of God, which is work, work, day off, work, work, day off, work, work, day off. But God is referring to bondage. What does bondage have to do with the day off? Slaves don't have a day off. And God was saying, you're no longer slaves. That means work cannot be your task master. Work is not your identity. It is a gift from God and we work six days but we have to have one day that we stop from all the work. Why? Because slaves don't rest and we are not slaves anymore. Don't allow your job, your hustle, your dreams to become a Pharaoh that drowns you in the sea of stress and being overwhelmed. You drown it and you rebel against the Pharaoh by taking a day off. Just one post office worker, just won a lawsuit against the post office. Take it all, took all the way to Supreme court that he wants to take a Saturday off because he worships God on Saturday. I told our aunts to go and to Supreme court so they can get Sundays off too. Not just Saturdays. Are you with me? Many of us want God to direct our steps but God wants us to follow his stops. Let me say that again. If we want God to order our steps we must follow his order to stop. God wants us to stop once a week. Now when it comes to this, it's most difficult to do because there's a spiritual principality that does not want you to stop. I like what Old Testament scholars said. Sabbath is an act of resistance. It's an act of rebellion against Pharaoh and his empire. It's an insurgency and insurrection against the isms of the Western world. Globalism, capitalism, materialism, all of which sound nice but quickly make slaves of the rich and the poor. John Mark Cumber in Elimination of Hurry said, this Sabbath is like a guerrilla warfare tactic. If you want to break free from the oppressive yoke of Egypt's task master and it's restless, relentless lust for more, just take a day off each week and stick it to the man. Come on somebody. If we don't stop, we drop. In Chronicles 3621 it says, to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah until the land enjoyed her Sabbaths. As long as she stays desolate, she kept Sabbath to fulfill 70 years. Little background story. Israel goes to Babylon as into exile. Jeremiah prophesied 70 years that will be in exile. In Chronicles, we see the insight of this story. So Israel was supposed to keep Sabbath, not only for them, they had to have a Sabbath for the land. So every seven years or so, you had to take a break and not plant anything and allow whatever grows, kind of grow, pretty much give land a break. Israel didn't do that for 490 years. Now they end up in exile in Babylon and God is prophetically saying, because you did not give land a break, I'm gonna kick all of you out of the land into the exile so that the land will get its break. I wonder if every time we don't take a day off, we actually incur God's judgment. I am not saying that God doesn't love us more or less. There's nothing to do with that. Your body is incurring judgment. It's kind of like going on a red light all the time. It's a matter of time. You will get hurt. Some of us were like, we'll undergrace. This doesn't mean being undergrace doesn't mean that we reject God's laws and God's principles for living as human beings. It means we submit to them without making those principles and those laws something that dictates legalism. Jesus says on the Sabbath, if your ox falls in, meaning something happens in an emergency, you can do that, but many of us don't live like that. We create emergencies on our days off. That's me. Something that the Lord challenged me on a vacation. I need to go more to vacations. I feel like I hear God more clearly there. And I really felt the Lord challenged me this and he says, I want you to treat a day off like you treat tidying. He says, what excuse do you have for not giving a tide? I said, well, I could do more stuff with this money. He says, but you trust that I will do more with 90 that you can do with 100. I said, yes, Lord, and I never doubt it. When I tide every single time that I get paid, it's been a habit instilled to me by my parents that God can do more with your 90 that you can do with 100. And God says, do exactly the same thing with your time. I can do more with your six days of work that you can do with your seven days of work. Oh, but there is a book that I can write. If I just take these days off, I can finish the course. I can finish the homework and everything. And a lot of us have this thing, but exactly the same thing we would could do with our finances, yet we don't do them. Many of us were faithful with tidying. We're like, no, this belongs to God. I trust he will bless the rest. I want to challenge you today to rise against the principality in the United States and rebel against it. By honoring one day a week, God created cycle and taking one day and completely stop. And you may say, what do I do on that day? Three things. One, stop working. Meaning stop doing work that you get paid to do and not paid to do. For a lot of us mowing the lawn, fixing the car, repainting the house, changing the roof is work. We just nobody pays us. And so what many of us do is we have two days off a week, one day we do the work in the houses, which we all need to do, catch up, pay the bills, fix the computer, fix this, fix that, run around to this. And then we have to have one day where we don't do any work and we stop, the worst Sabbath means to stop. The second thing that what we must do is to enjoy ourselves. Enjoy, do things that enjoy us. And no, going to the bar is not enjoying. That's a sin. It's like, yeah, perfect. Bench watching, that's not enjoying. That's numbing. Entertainment, that is numbing yourself. That is not enjoying. Do things that enjoy. Go for a walk, go drink coffee, get a meal with somebody. Do something that replenish your emotional energy. And the third thing is contemplate God. Do something that reconnects you to God, whether it's in prayer, whether it's in worship. And I'm not talking about, oh, I did my Bible reading plan. That's not that. Did you enjoy the Lord? Pull back to enjoy God. For some of you it's Sunday. You come here with your family, you worship Jesus. You go to spend time with your family. Take time to stop completely. Not just for your work, but because you're a human being and God created this world to run like this. We can't be smarter than God. Can you do more things by working all seven days? Probably, but you will die faster. You will not enjoy things. So how do we get our peace in our mind? How do we get breathing room? Is we make like seven day Adventists, make a religion out of this. One day we keep off with our family, with our God, and with our fun. Amen, is it hard? It's not hard, it's very difficult. Because the Pharaoh is gonna try to take all of your days off. And we have to honor that. Can somebody say amen? If we keep the Sabbath, the Sabbath will keep us. Chick-fil-A is the most loved fast food restaurant in the United States. Chick-fil-A has less stores than McDonald's. Chick-fil-A is closed on Sunday, which is one of the most profitable days in the fast food restaurant world. And Chick-fil-A makes more money, only being open six days than any restaurant, fast food restaurant, in the United States. You may say, how do you explain that? You can't, the same way you can't explain how somebody can tie 10% and still make it at the end of the month and have extra. Why you can't explain that? Because the seed brings the harvest. And you're making the room for the seed. God will supernaturally provide when you tithe, and God will supernaturally provide for your life when you take one day off. Trust God with your time as you do it with your tithe. Keeping the Sabbath should be as normal as giving 10%. And this is, I'm preaching to myself right now. Tithing is giving money. Keeping a day off is giving time. God can do more with 90% of your work than you can do with all of that work. There was a story of a wagon train of Christians traveling on its way from St. Louis to Oregon. They observed the habit of stopping for the Sabbath during the autumn. But as winter approached, the group began to panic for the fear that they will not reach their destination before the snow began. Number of members of the group proposed they should quit the practice of stopping for the Sabbath and travel seven days a week. This caused an argument in the community until it was finally decided to divide the group into two groups. One group will rest one day and trust God with the whole snow and the weather situation. And the other group will take everything into its hands and go as fast as possible to Oregon. And they wanted to see who will arrive to Oregon first. Both people and their horses, the ones who rested will rest it by their Sabbath observance and they could travel more efficiently by other six days and they arrive to Oregon first. Sabbath is about taking 24 hours to stop work, rest and focus on God. Constantine, the Roman emperor, the first Christian Roman emperor is the one that ordered the whole empire to take one day off and actually to serve and to worship God and to be with their family. American colonies had blue laws. Blue laws were laws where you were not allowed to work on the Christian Sabbath, which was Sunday. 100 years later after American colonies came, they still observed the blue laws where you could not work on Sunday. In fact, George Washington, the first president of United States was just elected to be a president of United States, was traveling from Connecticut to New York and was stopped for violating Connecticut's law for bidding travel on Sunday. This was the history of United States. In 1980s in Arkansas, James Armstrong was fined $25 for digging potatoes in his field on Sunday. John Meeks was fined $22.50 for shooting squirrels on Sunday. I think that's a recreational activity. That should have not been fined. But this was the history of the United States. The history was this is that we honored God. Everybody had to be stopped working because there was an honor of Judeo-Christian valleys. Today, what we see is, I call it greasy grace, where anything goes, God's law doesn't matter. We're not under the law. No, we're not under the law, but these laws still work. These principles, I'm not preaching to you a way to get to heaven. What I'm preaching to you is on the way to live in a way that glorifies God, in a way that replenishes your family, your health and your life by taking one day, getting a good nap, reading a book, praying, worshiping, going on the nature, coming to church, whatever that day is, if it's on Sunday on Sunday, the idea is not which day, the idea is that there is a day that is observed that we honor God. Can somebody say amen? The second thing, and that is we find breathing room by spending less than we make. Quality of life is not always determined by the standard of life. Look chapter 12, verse 15, and he said to them, take heed and beware of covetousness, for once life does not consist in the abundance of things he possesses. The standard of life is about your possessions. The quality of life is about your relationships. In order to raise the standard of life, a lot of us, we don't see the increase in our finances, so what we have in our culture is increasing debt. For many people, they increase the standard of life by increasing their debt, which produces more stress, more need to get an extra job, because the standard of life tells us if you have a better standard of life, you will have a better quality of life. But one person did the research and found out this, Dr. Angus Deaton, no matter where you live, your emotional well-being will be as good as it's going to get at $75,000 per year. And money is not going to make it any better beyond that point. It's like you hit some sort of a ceiling and you cannot get emotional well-being much higher by having more money. Now for some of us, we're like, man, there's a lot of room to grow. Lord, increase that, and that's completely fine, and there's room to grow. But what I wanna encourage us with this, with finances, and this is where many Christians make a mistake, and they don't think anything is wrong with it. Man, it might not be wrong, but it's completely a foolish decision to live your life financially maxed out. Credit cards maxed out. Spending is at the level of income. Guess what begins to happen? There is no margin room there. When there is no margin room there, we have to do one of the two things. We have to either increase the income or decrease the expenses. So we can have a margin. When it comes to do we buy a new car? Do we upgrade a house? You have to ask this question. If we get that, will we still have a margin in our life? If we don't have a margin, then God has spoken. You shouldn't get it. But we got a prophetic word. I had a dream that I was driving a brand new car. It's not a dream, it's a nightmare. Forget about it. Because once the bills begin to come, there will be no dream, it will be a nightmare. There will be fights. People divorce because of money problems. And what begins to happen is this lie. If I increase my standard of living, I will have higher standard of life. But the standard of life doesn't consist on the standard of living. Does not depend on the standard of life. What it depends on is on the quality of relationships. And what squeezes relationships is maxed out credit cards, no times off, and everybody running around like a chicken with the head cut off. It doesn't increase the depth of that relationship. So I wanna encourage you today, begin to make decisions, not on, oh, it's new, oh, it's out, oh, it's my phone glitched one time in seven days. I need to have a new iPhone. But the question is, can you afford it and still have a margin? Not, can you afford it to put it on the payment? No, can you afford it and still have a margin? If you don't have a margin, that means it's not God's blessing. It is the devil's temptation. Oh, it can't be God wants to be blessed. Yeah, but the Bible says the blessing of God doesn't add sorrow. Anything that adds a burden with the blessing might not be a blessing. It might be a temptation. And what we do is we max out our credit cards. We max out every single thing and then we come like, man, I'm stressed out. Well, you dig the hole. When Noah took animals into the ark, I want you to know this few things. This really just excited me when I saw that. Is Noah took seven pairs of animals, seven types, no, apologize. He took seven pairs of clean animals and two pairs of unclean animals. I always thought that it was just one pair of each. Turns out there was seven pairs of clean and two pairs of unclean. So of each animal, he had to take about nine pairs for few reasons. One, preservation. So when all of this is done, there's animals that could continue to live. Preservation speaks of our savings account. A lot of us, what we make, we don't have any preservation, meaning nothing is there for tomorrow. Everything is eaten today and that's not healthy. The second thing why he took some animals is to eat while they were going through the stuff. All of you vegetarians, I'm sorry, but it happened in the book of Genesis. Animals were being eaten and eating. So this speaks of spending. But then he had one more thing that he had clean animals for is to offer them as a sacrifice. So he had these seven pairs of clean and two pairs of unclean so that they could be eaten, so that they could reproduce and continue the lineage of more animals so that we can have animals as well and so that they can offer to God as a sacrifice. That's really, animals is like our money. We need to save, we need to spend, and we need to give. And sometimes we're like, man, but that's a lot. I don't have money to give. That means a few things need to happen. Number one, we need to increase our income. How do we do that? Ask God, like Jebus, Lord enlarge my territory. I remember fighting with my wife over $5 Starbucks a long time ago. She would go like once a week to meet with people and spend $5 in Starbucks and Starbucks coffee is just way overpriced and way overburnt. But anyway, and we're fighting, fighting over it. I was like, babe, could you cut it back? If you just cut back the $5 Starbucks, it will solve all of our financial problems, pay off all of our debt, and we will never fight again. Literally, it will bring all the peace in my life. Everything I'm missing in my life right now can't be resolved by you not drinking Starbucks coffee for once a week. So this is in my head. I didn't tell her that yet. I was preparing the speech, making sure that my points were bulletproof. And I remember in my car, I felt the Holy Spirit put prompted in my heart and he said, instead of fighting your wife to reduce the $5 a week, what if you ask me to help you increase finances by $5 a week so you don't have to fight and your wife can get that overpriced burnt coffee? And praise God, she got delivered by now. She doesn't drink Starbucks anymore, praise you Jesus. She drinks other coffee. She has a suspensive though. And now I drink, I take more coffee. And I remember I said, Lord, you're right. It will take exactly same energy for us to cut off $5 of coffee and fighting and all of this stuff and then she's gonna slip back into that habit. I knew she's gonna slip back. It will take all of this hustle. But what if I take half of this energy and I pray the prayer of Jabez, all that you would bless me and enlarge my territory? Lord, increase my income. Lord, increase our income. When we just got married, we lived in an apartment, incredible place to live in. But then instead of buying a brand new home, we said, what can we buy so that we can have margin? If we buy a brand new home, we wouldn't be able to have margin because we couldn't save $150 a month when we lived in the apartments. But we said, okay, what if we buy a rental so that we can rent one side, live in one side, rent out to basement? That was before Airbnb. And then we can have margin and we can have even extra so we can go on the vacation. Now the rental property didn't look as pretty as our dream home. But see, what drove our decision, our financial decisions wasn't how it looked. What will it do to our margin? A lot of us make decisions based on how will it look and make me feel. But you're 25 years old. Those things shouldn't matter. Maybe you're 35 years old. Maybe even you're 45 years old. What should be driving your financial decisions is this. Can I still save, spend and give? Can I have margin if I make the decision? If there is no margin, that means that's pretty much, you know what God is telling you. Hold up. But what about my friends? You're not living your friend's life. You're living your life. Your peace matters more than your prosperity and that peace will lead to prosperity. I pray that you will prosper as your soul prospers and be in good health. Christian prosperity is not maxing everything out and leaving stressed out, popping pills because we can't sleep at night. Christian prosperity is that we prosper and we protect here so that everything else flows out of there. Amen. Joseph saved during the time of famine. 20%, one-fifth of everything Joseph was making, they could have just built bigger. What do they have those things in Egypt? Pyramids. They could have made golden pyramids. All this grain was coming in. This would be a good moment to upgrade, update, bigger, nicer, newer. Shania, did you guys see the new vision thing that Apple is releasing? Didn't you see the new card the Tesla is releasing? Didn't you see the new thing that this is releasing? This would be a good moment, prosperity. Let's make things bigger, nicer, newer and updated. But Joseph had a wisdom that came from the Holy Spirit. He says, when we have plenty, that means there's coming a day we won't have enough. We have to exercise wisdom. We're gonna take 20% and we are going to store it. We're gonna store it so when the famine comes in, I can make Pharaoh the richest man on the planet because now he has grain to sell. Other people are losing during a famine. I'm winning during the famine. Why? Because when things were plenty, I exercised prudence and wisdom. Now I understand this is not plain in the spirit out in Jesus mighty name message. But this changes everything when it comes to our life. When it comes to our finances. God wants us to live with prudence. It saddens me how many Christians are in debt to their eyeballs. Saddens me how many Christians are stressed out and fighting. It can start today. You can break the cycle in your family today by making the decision. Maybe you're looking and you feel more overwhelmed. You're like, man, this message makes me more depressed. I'm just reminded of how screwed up my finances are. My goal isn't to offend you or to cause you to feel more depressed but to plant a seed that maybe in three, four years you will get out of that and you will live a different legacy. Leave a different legacy and live a different life. Come on somebody. Let's give the Lord a praise. And the last thing is put a distance between you and temptation. Blessed is the man who walks not in the council of the ungodly but stands in the path of sinners nor sits in the seat of the scornful. So we mentioned how do we practice breathing room, margin. Number one is in our life, we honor God's principle. We take one day off. In our finances, we honor God's wisdom and that is not only that we tithe but we try to live with the margin that we have extra every single month. If we cannot have extra, we either cut back our expenses or we increase our income and we look at how can we live so that we have extra. Sometimes it's hard. Sometimes it's not possible for a season but we seek them knowing that's God's wise standard. But there's one more area that I wanna mention about margin and that is morality. You have to, I have to have a distance between me and my temptation for me to walk in righteousness. Many people what they do is they cause their temptation to come too close for them by playing in the gray areas. The Bible says the righteous man doesn't walk, doesn't stand and doesn't sit. What does this mean? This means we don't actually fall into sin as many of us think. We gradually walk into it. You don't just fall into sin. For example, the big sin Samson committed, judges 16-1. Samson went to Gaza, saw a harlot and went into her. Okay, minister of God, anointed man of God, slept with a prostitute. Bad, bad day. No, it wasn't a bad day. Did you know how many miles Gaza is from where Samson lived? 25. Did you know how many steps it took to get to Gaza? 56,250 steps. Did you know he didn't just fall into sin? He took 56,000 steps toward it. It wasn't a sin when he took the first one. It wasn't a sin that he took the second one. It wasn't a sin when it was a 56,000th one until he finally ended up in her house. Greg Grishel said this. He says, people don't ruin their life by taking one tragic big step. It's never one. It's more like 56,250 steps. But this is where we do it. This is how we do it, is this. It's not sin, therefore I do it. The fact that it's bringing me closer to sin, we ignore that. Kids, young people always ask me, Pastor Vlad, is it wrong to kiss before wedding? And I ask him this question. Is it wise? In light of knowing where this will lead, they ask me, is it wrong to do this? I ask them this question. I said, don't ask me, is it wrong? Ask me, is this wise? Why? Because nobody does something that's wrong until they do multiple things that are not wise. But the reason they did multiple things that are not wise is because those unwise things were not wrong. And we say, it's not wrong to do that. It's not wrong to do that. And when you stack too many, not wrong, not wrong, not wrong, not wrong, not wrong. The Bible doesn't say anything into it. But if you ask the different question and say, is this wise? In light of what I got delivered from, in light of the dreams and the plans that God has for me, in light of the pulling grip of temptation that exists, in light of Satan walking like a roaring lion, is this the wisest thing that I should be doing with that joker? With in that place, should I be hanging out with that person? Should we be doing this right now? I know it's not wrong. We don't have a Bible verse that it says it's a sin. But if we keep stacking these things that are not wrong, we'll find ourselves dropped into a place where like, how did this happen? 56,000 steps that were not wrong. So how do we make margin? You put as much distance between you and your temptation as you possibly can. On your difficult day, Satan will bridge that gap by coming closer. But if that gap is big, on your worst day, Satan will get just closer. But he won't be able to overtake you. But if your temptation and you are so close that you see it every single day and it's bleeding on your neck, when you get weak, you get slower. And the devil still is fast. He will catch up to you and you find yourself in the same scene. Not because God didn't deliver you, but because you didn't practice wisdom. You thought it was legalism. It's not legalism, it's wisdom to put a space between you and the temptation. It's not legalism. For me, not to ride with a woman in the car or to go alone somewhere to eat, this is about wisdom. When we begin to put a space between us and temptation, between us and our struggles, the things that we battle with, it might not be wrong for you to have social media on your phone. But if that is the area that the devil always uses to trap you, the wisest thing would be to remove it. Oh, how will I live without it? You will live wholly and pure. Come on, somebody. It might not be wrong for you to date right now, but listen, you just got out of a relationship two weeks ago, it is not the wisest thing to do. The best thing to do is to put a gap between you and the temptation by separating yourself as much as possible. Make a margin, give God a breathing room so you can walk in holiness and righteousness. Instead of asking a question, how close to the edge of the cliff I can get without falling, we should ask a question, how close to Jesus can I stay? How close to Jesus I can stay? You know, for a lot of people, that's where the questions are always asked. How close? Really, that's the mindset that needs to shift. How close to hell can I get without going there? How close to sin has to land? It's not wrong to smoke weed. The Bible says we have authority over the grass. Yeah, will you smoke weed? Grass has authority over you. And people always come up and they, because the goal is this, how close to sin can I get? Now imagine me coming to my wife. My wife is watching right now. Babe, forgive me for this illustration. And I said, babe, the Bible clearly states adultery is sin, meaning the line is me sleeping with another woman. Babe, how close to another woman can I get without you considering it an adultery? Making out, hanging out together, DMing each other, snap chatting each other, sending inappropriate stuff to each other. But now, sin, my wife would put me out of my misery by just asking that question. And she would sign me up for a therapist for even thinking that question. Because she would say, how in the world are you asking that? You should be asking how close you can stay to me so you don't have to think about no other people. That's how we should live, remember. The man who built his house on the sand was called what? Foolish, he was not called sinful. What he did was nothing wrong. The man who built his house on the rock was not called righteous. What he did wasn't righteous. What he did was wise. The man who built his house on the sand, he didn't do anything wrong. It is what he did was stupid with the big ass, fully, the Bible calls him foolish man. Many Christians live by this. I didn't do anything that is not in the Bible. Yeah, but it's stupid. The Bible gave us book of Proverbs. So not only we live righteous life, but we live wise life, wisdom life. You remember the 10 virgins? Did you know that they were not called 10 sluts and 10 five virgins? They were called all virgins, meaning they were all pure. Only five were wise. The other five, not wise. Why? Because they didn't take extra oil. They didn't create extra in their life. There was no margin. There was no breathing room. Just enough in case he makes it in time. Come on, you know, guys, they don't come on time punctuality. It's not their thing. And he doesn't come on time and they miss the appointment not because they slept around, but because they lacked wisdom in their life. When we don't have a margin between us and our temptation, when we don't have margin between us and our debt, our income and our expenses, when we don't have margin in our life and our minds, what begins to happen is we are not operating in wisdom. I'm not saying we're going to hell. I'm saying we're going to live in one. We're going to experience what the man experienced to build his house on a sand. Overwhelmed. Now the enemy will attack us. The spirits of python and depression, they will attack us. But there's something we can do when we're not under attack is to build our life in the way that honors Jesus and puts a margin between us and our expenses, between us and our temptation and between us and our stress load. Amen. Oh, I got fired up. Don't ask, is this wrong? Ask, is this wise? Parents, when your kids come up and they begin to say, Mom, it's not wrong. Ask them this question, but is this wise? Young men, young woman, about that dating relationship, about that purchase that you want to make, about the school that you're going to go to, ask this question, not is this wrong? You passed that now, is this wise? And let that decide your margin. Amen. 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