 I am going to read to you to set up this idea tonight from Genesis 3 and verse 8. We could have picked other passages and we'll touch on other people's lives to strengthen this idea, this concept tonight. But this will set it up well. All the better because it was a Genesis occasion we're parachuting into. All the better that this idea happened, this problem, this challenge, this concept happened at the foundation of the human experience. And so it says, then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day. They hid from the Lord amongst the trees of the garden. But the Lord called to the man, where are you? He answered, I heard you in the garden. And I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid. And he said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from? The man said, the woman. That flippin' woman maybe was his torn, we don't know, we don't have torn in the Bible, but that woman, the woman, you, you. This woman, you, this was not my idea, is implicit in that you. The woman you put here with me gave me some fruit to eat, and I ate it. We all know the story well, that exchange well. I think it is the first of a foundational example of something that I have come up with a term for. One of the things I teach in my master class is great communicators, I think, of what I call master the art of capture, grabbing a great idea, taking a mental or an emotional imprint of something that just happened, and no one else saw it, but your radar was tuned to the frequency that those things occur on, and you grabbed it. A few, I said a couple of months ago, I was concerned and had been for quite a while that my electricity bill seemed high. Anybody else feel like that sometimes? Seems high, and you know, we swap don't, and we go to new energy companies, and now they make it easy for you to change. It's never easy by the way, but they make it easy for you to change, and we'll do all the work for you. So I was with a new supplier about a year, and I was pretty happy with them, but my bill seemed high, so I called the energy company, and they put someone on the phone to speak to me, and I said, I think my bills are higher than they should be, and they looked at my bill online and checked my address, and my postcode, and my name, and everything else, and all of that checked out, and then this lady said to me. She said, Mr. Scanlon, you are involved in an erroneous transfer. That's what I thought, and the title of this message is Erroneous Transfers, or ET for short. ET will have a new meaning for you from tonight on. No longer will it be extraterrestrials, it will be erroneous transfers. In case of erroneous is not a common word to you, and it's not to me, erroneous just means mistaken. It's a default. It's something that shouldn't have happened. It's a confusion. It's an accident. It's a mix-up. So when she said to me, you are involved in, that suggests it's something I chose. The language, doesn't it? You are involved in, and I said, I am not involved in one of those with my neighbor. What do you mean? I said, well, erroneous transfer is a term we use. It is a term energy companies use to describe the problem you are telling us about. And I said, well, how can such a thing happen? She said, well, you are paying your neighbor's energy bill, and his use of electricity is three times mine. I said, I thought it seemed high. I said, how can this happen in this day and age when we are in the space age and we have Apple and FaceTime and iPhones and technology? How can this happen is what I'm wondering. How hard can it be? You are one job came to mind as she announced that I was involved in an erroneous transfer. I instantly wrote this term down after I had got off the phone, and she said to me, Mr. Scanlon, this is an accidental transference of your M-Pan numbers. I know it is a different world that I am clearly involved in, and so are all of you, by the way. This is why it's good to have a heads up about erroneous transfers. I said, what do you mean an M-Pan number? She said, every single property in the country has a very specific exclusive M-Pan number. I said, what does M-Pan stand for? She answered like no one has ever bothered to ask me that. She was fascinated that I was fascinated by the nature and the component parts of erroneous transfers, because by this time something else was going on in my head as you will see. She said, it stands for meter point administration number. Meter point administration number, M-Pan for short. She said to me, it's a ten digit number, and there's one digit difference between every household in this country, one in ten. I said, so how can this happen? She said it normally happens, heads up again for you guys, if you live in a block of flats, and you are so close in proximity that your numbers get confused because you are sharing a postcode, or in our case where there are just two properties on a separate piece of land, us and our neighbor. She said this is not uncommon where there's just two properties for your one digit in your M-Pan numbers to get mixed up, and she said to me, Mrs. Scanlon, you'll be so glad you called us because she said these erroneous transfers can go on for years undetected. She said that's because we, the suppliers, cannot detect them, because to us there's no problem because all the bills are being paid. This transfer, she said, can only be detected by the consumers, by the users, by the customers, not by us, the suppliers. She said, so we're glad you called us because clearly we can see that you have a digit mix up between you and the neighbor. And I'm like, whoa, this is amazing. She said we will sort it all out, and we will fix it, and we will make sure you get back the overpayment that you have had, and we will make sure he pays for all the bills he should have been paying as I was paying for his electricity for it seems like about two years I've been paying his three times my usage. That same day that I discovered this term, in fact, Glenda was talking to the farmer that owns the fields around us, and yet again his sheep had invaded our garden, about a dozen of them. Sheep are cute when you're driving through the dales. They are not cute in your garden. They are totally destructive, and they are rude, and they can be random and daft. And these sheep had rampaged in our garden, pooped everywhere, and trod all on the lawn destroyed and eaten the flowers, smashed the terracotta pots, one of which was worth over a hundred pounds, a tall terracotta pot, smashed it to bits, and I called the farmer to complain, and he came to see me, and he drove in his tractor to the other side of my garden fence and got out of his tractor, and he said, well, he said, you know the problem is, he said to Glenda, your garden fence is the problem. He said your garden fence has got huge gaps in it. He said the sheep, of course, are going to look through the garden fence, see that lovely grass, and go through the fence and eat your grass. He said to Glenda, you need to take care of your garden fence. That's the problem. And she said to him, hang on a minute, this is a garden fence. This is not a sheep fence. So it's not our job to reinforce our garden fence with chicken wire, as was his suggestion, to keep out your sheep. And as she told me that story, I was aware that the farmer just committed an erroneous transfer, didn't he? He put his out of control sheep problem on us. And if Glenda hadn't said to him, which she did, our fence is not the problem. Your fence is the problem. Or should we say your absence of a fence is the problem? There is no fence between our fence and your sheep, it's just our fence. We are the last fence of defense against your out of control sheep. So you need to put a fence a meter away from our fence. That's the fence that's missing here. The problem isn't our fence. And if we had not put that ball back over the net to the farmer, we would have been instantaneously, in seconds, apologizing for our poor fence. We would have later on been investing and putting in finance to reinforce our fence all along not thinking, hang on a minute, there's something wrong with this picture. This is not our problem. This is the farmer's problem. But he was erroneously transferring his problem over to us. So because that happened on the same day as my call with the energy company, I had my capture, I had my concept, I had my idea to bring to you tonight. And this is the first time I've ever done this message, so whether it's a Ford or Ferrari, we shall see. You will be the judge, don't matter if it's a Ford, more people need Fords than Ferraris anyway, and they're much more economical to run, are much safer vehicles to park up without getting keyed and scratched by the envious people who are destined to Fords all their lives. But we all need a Ferrari now and then in our conceptual garage. Something that is rare, something that took a while to figure out, something that now and then you drive out in a season of your life that defies a Ford idea fixing it. But it requires something unique and expensive and that cost you a lot to figure out. Sometimes we need to pull those Ferrari concepts out and say, this is a moment when I need to bring that idea to bear, that wisdom to bear, and figure this out through that Ferrari concept. So whether this is one of those, we will see. Some of you already know it was worth coming tonight because you're already nudging or texting. I think we're involved in erroneous transfer. I'm going to call my people tomorrow. What would be even better is if you use the term before they did, they'll be all over you. Because they'll know that you know stuff you shouldn't know. And they'll think that in trouble because you came up with it. Yes, I think our MPAN numbers are confused. Can you help me? They're going to be like, ooh, we'll help you. The Israelites did the same thing to God, didn't they, and to Moses? They said, Moses, if you hadn't led us into this mess, we were better off back in Egypt. We were three meals a day. We had routine. We had stability. We had reference points. But now what is this thing you've led us into where we don't know where our next meal's coming from? And if we do know what it is, it's the same stuff we had for the last 20 years and centered their problem in Moses' leadership. And we could go through a Scripture and go through a history, but we don't need to establish this idea. I guess you are a little bit ahead of me to see where I'm going because this problem that started in the Garden of Eden where people transfer their problems to someone else, in this case, Adam to God and Adam to Eve. He blamed them both, transferred his issues to both of them. It has been going on ever since. And I pastored here, as many of you know, for over 30 years. And I figured the other day if I had a pound for every erroneous transfer that I was involved in, I could probably pay off the mortgage on this place now. I realized when I was pastoring later than I wished I'd realized it, that most church problems were not church problems at all. That there were people's personal problems they transferred onto the church. And that we were involved in mass erroneous transfer. And that we spent much of our days, which is why pastors usually don't last very long. Because pastors spend much of their time involved in erroneous transfers where they are trying to resolve issues that are not theirs to resolve. And if we build churches, by the way, and many do, where we lead you to believe that the idea is that you depend on me to hear from God, then we all the more encourage you to transfer your issues to us. And when we let you down, and when we're not there, and when we're not available, and when we don't answer in the way that you anticipated we would, then you feel even more so that there's no love in this church. There's no compassion in this church. And of course, over three decades, the amount of times I heard that again would make me rich if there was a pound attached to every one of those comments. And I realized eventually that many of these things I was spending my time trying to fix were like a confusion over whose fence it is. That I was involved in one of these, and many of you are involved in one of these now, because you are involved in relationships and friendships where this is taking place, where your MPAN numbers are confused with those who you're doing life with. And the way some of you are going to realize this after tonight is you're going to realize that I think, I think I am paying too much for the small size life that I think is my life. I think my drama bill, I think my drama bill really belongs to someone that lives in a house like this. Not someone who has very little drama in their lives, because I'm not really a drama person, but you seem to be involved in drama all the time. It could well be that somewhere in your close relationships you have an MPAN number mixed up and you are paying someone else's bill. And you've done it for so long and so consistently no one thinks there's a problem, because all the bills are being paid. But after tonight I wonder if you will go home and move away from the literal version of this with the energy companies and ask yourself, who is plugging into my little house? Who is draining my supply of energy because it's limited? And who is creating for me a high cost to do the life I am doing? Because I don't think I can sustain this for another month, another year, or another 10. And I think you may well find that you are involved in paying someone else's bill. And I can't afford your bill and you can't afford mine. In fact, if we were all to get a glimpse of our actual bill, I think we'd all cut our usage overnight. If we all were to see this is actually how much you are spending, this is the size of your usage because someone else has been paying that for us for years, we don't think that's our usage. But if we were all to settle and get our mixed up digits sorted out, I think we'd realize that, yeah, I live a very small life, but I'm paying a factory's bill. I don't have that level of high maintenance behavior. I'm not a high maintenance kind of person, but I feel I'm involved in high maintenance expensive relationships that are draining me and I think I'm paying 10 times what I would need for me because you're involved in an erroneous transfer relationship. And it's enough that you pay for your own consumption because your own consumption sometimes can max you out. And we don't mind because it at least is our consumption. We don't mind a big bill if it was a season in our life where we had a particular output level that was not common to us. And we all go through seasons of life where we have a greater demand on our resources than other times and you get a spike in your energy usage. We don't mind that if it's our own spike and we can identify reasons why it's perhaps there. But if you're paying for someone else's agenda, if you're financing someone else's hurt, if you are carrying someone else's offense, if you are caught up in someone else's confusion or guilt or mistake or stress or pressure, then the message tonight is you need to get in touch with your supplier and say, hang on a minute. I think there's something going on here. And if you can identify, and this is why it's difficult because the MPAN numbers, there's one digit separating and the closer you live together, the more confusion is possible. And I'm saying that for this reason, there's a different MPAN number between spouses. Some of you in marriage are paying a higher bill than you should be because you are paying your spouse's bill. Don't think this must mean it's another unit. No, this is an individual. This is an individual customer number, account number, MPAN number. And so we can't even share one because we're married. We can't share one because we're best friends or in the same team together. There is no one MPAN number for the same team, or the same side, or the same unit, or the same tribe, or the same church. But everybody has their own individual number that has its own individual demand, its own individual cost. You have to figure out, and for the next half of 2017, you could figure out, what do I owe? What actually does belong to me? What part of this bill is legitimately mine and only pay what you owe? And let everybody else pay what they owe and refuse to pay more than you owe, it will be the greatest gift you could give yourself in the next half of 2017. Because when you only pay for what you use, you will be happy and whole and balanced, and your life becomes doable suddenly. But when you are paying the bill of people you do life with, and it becomes a default behavior in your life, in our lives, as the lady said to me, this goes on for years and is completely undiscovered. And it's time to discover it and it's time to be thoughtful about whether you pick up the phone anymore to those people that bring their energy demands into your life. It's time to review perhaps your relational world to think, well, do I really want to spend another evening in the company of those people? Because I think every time I'm there, I feel so drained and so drawn on, and I didn't need that tonight, and I didn't need it for me. I could have been home with people that don't do that to me, but you seem addicted to supplying someone else. You seem addicted to paying other people's bills, and it will kill you and aid you before your time. And if you don't figure it out, you will blame God or blame someone else or blame the church. And it may well just be the greatest gift someone could give to you would be to say, I'm sorry, I think I am paying your bill and I'm not going to do it anymore. And everybody starts to stand the cost of their own usage. They say at airports, don't they, when you check in. Has anybody given you anything to carry? Anybody slipped anything into your luggage that is not yours that you don't know about that maybe you shouldn't be carrying? And we say no because we're not aware that that has happened, and they know that you may not be aware. Hence the question, and we're all here tonight perhaps with a check-in point. In July 2017, a check-in point halfway through the year, where you might want to ask yourself, has someone slipped you something? Has someone put something into your luggage that you didn't see and weren't aware of that has made your year heavier than it should have been today that has made you struggle to carry the weight of what you have on in life when you don't remember doing that prior to that, but there's been a season where you kind of feel maybe someone slipped something into your luggage. I used to laugh and tease the church about this idea different ways, and I used to say sometimes I felt that some people came to church and got confused between having a root into God or a straw into someone else. I used to spot the straw people in church because they would make a beeline for me, sink their straw into me and suck me dry with their mansion-sized demands on my little requirement that I needed for me. And you know those cartons that are cardboard cartons with the straw on the side, and you keep sucking to the point where the carton implodes is to watch people walking around like an imploded carton with all the life sucked out of them because their friendships were more straws sucking the life out of them than they were energy giving and life giving and life replenishing relationships because there's loads of those out there too. And the right next to your neighborhood, there are people that live right close by that are not going to want you to pay their bill for them. So don't ever fear that if you relocate or you get your empanth sorted out, you won't have friends anymore. There are people that want to do life with you that don't want you in their life because they want you to pay their bill for them. They want to be a replenisher and a renewer and a contributor and a sharpener towards you. Those people are out there too. You've got to find them. We got so addicted to these co-dependent relationships. We got so used to paying each of those bills that we don't think there's a better deal out there. But until the customer says, hey, something's wrong here, it will continue to happen. And we want you to gift yourself and gift each other. Maybe some of you, as I'm speaking, are aware that you are the one that has been asking someone else to pay your bill. Maybe your gift to us tonight is to mail someone and say, I think I am the problem in your erroneous transfer. I think I am the one that is demanding a usage from you that is disproportionate to what you should ever have been paying out. And I'm sorry. I want to get our empanth numbers back and I want to pay for my own usage and release you from propping up and lending me the strength that you can hardly afford to be lending me. You need it all for yourself. Maybe that would be something you could say to someone tonight this week as you try to stabilize and sort out and fix who should be paying for what. I remember two classic messages that I did hear that were foundational to the new church we became from the early 2000s onwards after the crossing over and reinventing of our church. One of them was called They Devoted Themselves and it was from Acts chapter 2 and it was all about saying I didn't want a church where all the devotion came from leaders towards the people where we were the ones that reminded you and persuaded you and convinced you to involve or to give financially or to show up or to attend or to buy into the idea that we had as a church. But I wanted you like they did in the New Testament. He says they, the people, devoted themselves to prayer and to fellowship and to generosity and to reaching the community. All the devotion in other words came from the people not from the leaders and 2000 years later it's all been erroneously transferred from there to here where we are the ones that feel that we are keeping all the plates spinning and keeping everybody happy and involved and fed and many of you don't open your Bibles till you come on Sunday and someone asks you to turn to and then you read your Bible and so you transfer in the responsibility to feed you unto us and you are not a self feeder. And if you're not a self feeder and we're the ones that you have made responsible to feed you we're going to let you down. We're going to come out with something you don't like or doesn't work for you today and it's going to feel like what you need from us is not there because we've led you to believe that's how this thing works. So to teach they devoted themselves to all the energy and the drive and the buy-in and the generosity and the volunteering and the coming early and the staying late and the energy and the effort and the buy-in was from the grassroots of the church. It wasn't from leaders asking for it convincing persuading but from you and I taught that and leaders around the world said to me you can't build a church like that because the people need too much from us to keep them involved to keep them in line to keep them committed and I said you may be right you may be right I don't know but I'm going to give it a try I'm going to give it a shot to see whether we can reverse the counter flows whether we can reassign the MPAN numbers would be my language looking back now whether we can say no no this doesn't come from us this comes from you then the other message was God's carriers. This fundamental idea that I had that everybody should be carrying the weight of what we're trying to do together that if my Lord is disproportionate to yours for a non-legitimate reason sometimes we all carry a little bit more than someone else and we don't mind that when that's right in life when you are weak someone else can be strong when it's not your turn it can be someone else's turn we understand that mutual exchange of life and strength but when it's systemized when it's a culture that other people are responsible to carry weight that you should carry yourself we all get worn out and it becomes a jumbo jet church 300 passengers and 20 crew and the passengers are chilled ordering another pina colada and the crew are worn out serving the needs of the many and I didn't want to build a church like that when we had a chance to reinvent ourselves and so the DNA of this house the DNA of life church is not that the platform is responsible to feed you and to grow you and to provide for you and almost by default become God to you the DNA of our house is that you stand on your own two feet that you put your roots into God that you pray that you read that you feed that you love that you accept that you reach out that you do what you do because you can do it and no one else can do it like you so we shouldn't be trying that everyone should be a carrier that we're not into titles and badges and labels that we attached to people who are actually doing anything but we are all carriers and when I transitioned our church away from labels and titles and badges which we had many from people that had those titles and badges but weren't really carrying the weight of the burden of the vision of the church I said let's just see who pops up in this new empowering culture who steps up and who voluntarily with no title with no badge or position or authority who just who just volunteers themselves into making this thing happen I was surprised who stepped up and surprised who didn't I was surprised how the titled and the positioned complained about when the youth stepped up or the teenagers stepped up and those with no experience of leadership stepped up and became in my opinion God's carriers and this church was built on the backs of hundreds of God's carriers it was not built on the backs of a few that stand up here and I think if we continue to make sure that that is how we do life and that is how we build our churches then there is no limit to how large and how significant our churches can become but if we build churches in lives where we're all paying each of those bills and there's disproportionate sharing of the Lord because of erroneous transfers then there's huge limitation on what God can do through us because if I'm exhausted trying to pay the energy demands you place on my life God can't get done through me what I'm supposed to be doing and some of you are here tonight and you are just worn out and don't know why maybe it's because of this and I wonder if you would at least go home with a language tonight for something you couldn't explain before tonight that gives you a heads up an awareness I think I'm paying my wife's bill my husband's bill my children's bill my parents bill my friends bill my teens bill and I am not going to do that anymore I am going to make sure that we get all of these numbers reassigned that would be a massive relational gift to all of us as we step into the remainder of 2017 and a great setup for an outstanding 2018 let's stand together come on every eye closed for a couple of minutes what if you would have the courage and the confidence and the willingness to just all across the room while eyes are closed would you just lift a hand to say I think I am involved in erroneous transfer tonight I definitely think that's me because I have been there for large seasons of my life I think so we want that not to be true for you come on all across the room come on so many you kind of feeling here I definitely think this is true for me tonight I think I'm paying someone else's bill and I'm done with it I want to change and I want to stop father for every hand raised and we could have all raised our hands at different seasons of our lives I pray for every hand raised that you would give them the courage and the confidence and the clarity to be able to discern where their consumption ends and someone else's is kicking in I pray you give them the clarity and the strength and the confidence to say to someone we're sinking a straw into their life and draining them dry no more enough is enough I pray for strength today this week in the coming days for everyone here who feels they're involved in an erroneous transfer to get their lives back and to stop financing and resourcing someone else's issues and dramas and offenses and hurts and pains and I pray that with the restoration of all of that life and energy that they have been wasting for years will come new beginnings for every one of you will come new vitality will come new passion will come new strength new energy and with that comes new usefulness new application of that new found strength that others have been borrowing from you and that out of your life will flow a greater sense of usefulness and significance and contribution and freshness and meaning becomes yours in this next season of your life and I pray for these massive users in the room tonight I pray for those that listen to this later who are the ones that are demanding from us more than they should that are the cause of our high bills I pray that you will find the strength to let that go and that you would be the one that would initiate the call and the conversation and the idea to stop making us pay the high cost that we are involved in with you and release us from paying your bill a moment longer than we should be in Jesus name let our lives and our church be free from erroneous transfers