Barriers to Engaging in the Mission

Big Idea: What are the barriers that we face when engaging in the mission of Jesus? There are three barriers found in Luke 9:57-62 that keep people from actually engaging in the mission of Jesus. Unpack all of these barriers and how they keep us from engaging in the mission of Jesus (paying specific attention to the practical outworking). Failure to do this is a failure to live into the purpose for which we were created. At the end of message, we will key into the idea that this is what it looks like to follow after Jesus. Not just in mission but in general. To follow Jesus means we are to be about his mission. There is no such thing as a true follower of Jesus who isn’t on mission.

ME:

Show uncle Rico video.

Talk about Napoleon Dynamite and how it is a commentary on the search for meaning, purpose, and significance that every person engages in. Talk about how it does this in the little dead end town filled with cringy weird characters.

Uncle Rico is the cringiest of them all…explain how he is a middle aged dude who still thinks he’s got game and is living in the glory days. But what is Uncle Rico’s hangup? He never stopped to ask the question of why he didn’t get put in in that all important fourth quarter…he just blamed his failures on the coach. But there was a reason. Maybe it’s just because he was never as good as he thought he was. Maybe it was because he didn’t show up to practice and put in the hard work. Maybe its because he was a showboat and the coach didn’t want to risk the game on putting him in. We don’t know why, but we know there were barriers to him being put in and he has obviously struggled for a long time with the feeling of un-obtained potential.

Now, Uncle Rico is obviously a case of hyperbole, although I’ve known people just like him in the past. But this is the great struggle of being human.

Talk about this culturally...

Maybe this is the unmet desires of a career choice that you didn’t get to see played out. Perhaps it is the promotion or career advancement that you’ve been passed over year after year for but that you perhaps deserve more than anyone. Perhaps it is something lacking in your family dynamic. (Inability to have kids, or maybe its relationship after relationship that have fallen through and maybe you feel like you’ll never find the one). Maybe you are on the back end of your career and raising a family and as you look back over it, you are struggling with the question of: Did the thing I devoted my life to really matter all that much? Perhaps your vocation never really satisfied and now you wonder what was the point all together.

The reality is that I could go on and on with the examples. They are unending. The reality is that people struggle with the big question of, does my life matter? And if you struggle with a sense of significance and satisfaction around what you have given yourself to, maybe you feel like that is an easy question to answer.

Now…we have been in this series entitled “For the One” in which we have been talking about how we are to engage in the mission of Jesus in our city. You may be wondering what in the world Uncle Rico and the conversation around satisfaction and purpose have to do with this topic but they are incredibly interrelated.

WE:

You see:

We were created to have a purpose and with intentional design…explain the whole purpose of humans…we are gardeners.

Explain why there is still dissatisfaction from a lot of believers…it’s because they are not partnering with their creator to carry out the mission of bringing His kingdom reality to earth.

This is the hope of our cities, our schools, our families, the purpose in our jobs, the hope for society, and medicine, technology, and science, and the list goes on.

Explain that all of these things find their fullest expression when lived out in God’s kingdom and Jesus came to inaugurate that kingdom. To follow Jesus means that we follow him on mission.

And this is what we’ve been talking about in our For the One series. Last week we talked about the thresholds that people must walk through on their way to faith and it is our job to help them through that. That is what it means to engage in the mission of Jesus to bring about His kingdom on earth. It isn’t a social agenda, better politics, better science and medicine, better whatever…the hope of the world is a renewed humanity following after Jesus. That is how the kingdom comes. And if part one of the conversation about how to make that happen is in identifying the barriers that stand between people and experiencing that renewed humanity in Jesus, then part two of that conversation is the barriers that keep us from engaging in that mission.

And so, here in lies the link between winding up an Uncle Rico and engaging in the mission of Jesus. Our greatest satisfaction is met, our true potential is reached, our purpose is realized as we engage in the mission of Jesus. The claim of the Bible is that following after Jesus to pursue the One connects us with all of those things in a way that we will never be able to do on our own.

And so, I want to look at a passage where Jesus clearly shows us the barriers that stand in our way to engaging in the mission and how we can move beyond them. When we do this, not only do we see success in the mission of Jesus, but we are actually being connected back to the purpose for which we were created and will find the greatest sense of satisfaction, fulfillment, and purpose.

GOD:

Give background behind Luke 9 passage:

Sum this up however quickly you want to…read the below or sum up briefly.

Jesus has just sent out his apostles on their first solo flight. He brings them back and debriefs on their successes and failures.

Right after the passage we are going to look at, Jesus sends out the seventy on mission. We see another debrief that comes at the end of that.

But in between both of these passages, we get this little snippet of three different interactions between people who want to follow Jesus.

So what is important to note here is that this passage is in the immediate context of how Jesus’ followers engage in the mission to make disciples. We see Jesus talking with and training a group of twelve about how to engage in this mission. Then we see Jesus talking with and training a group of 70 and sandwiched right between is this weird little interaction with three different people who have different reasons for not engaging in the mission. Whats more, we don’t exactly know what they choose to do. Just like I told you last week, that is incredibly intentional on Luke’s part (the author of this particular story) and is really meant to turn this story into a mirror. It isn’t about what these people chose to do, whether or not they overcame their barriers around engaging in the mission of Jesus. The story is meant to turn the mirror back at you and make you answer the question of whether or not you will overcome these same barriers on your journey of engaging in the mission of Jesus. Because…as we are going to see, these three barriers are not just unique to them…we all face these same three barriers in our pursuit of following Jesus on mission.

Are you guys ready? Here we go!

Luke 9:57–58 NASB95

As they were going along the road, someone said to Him, “I will follow You wherever You go.” And Jesus said to him, “The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.”

The Gospel of Matthew actually tells this same exact story but adds a detail that is of importance to note:

Matthew 8:19–20 NASB95

Then a scribe came and said to Him, “Teacher, I will follow You wherever You go.” Jesus said to him, “The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.”

Jesus is immediately aware of an enormous barrier to this mans (and subsequently our) ability to follow Him on mission. It is:

The barrier of our comfort zone.

Scribes were a step above blue collar in Jesus’ day. They weren’t quite the wealthy religious leaders that Jesus spent most of his time sparring with but they were educated and honestly lacked nothing. This sort of wealth produces a sort of scarcity mindest. Here is what I mean:

I worked really hard to provide the type of lifestyle I enjoy. I put the hours in going to school and grinding it out on the ground floor to get the job that I have now and subsequently the house, and stuff that I really enjoy. If you carry that logic out, the conclusion is: This stuff belongs to me.

But if the heart is the pinnacle of our personhood and that is what we have to surrender to Jesus then that means that everything below that, to include our stuff, our schedules, and even our comfort is surrendered to him as well. We don’t see our stuff as our stuff. We see our stuff as Jesus’ stuff that he has given us to steward for His kingdom purposes. And yet, look at what Jesus told his disciples just a few sentences earlier:

Luke 9:3 NASB95

And He said to them, “Take nothing for your journey, neither a staff, nor a bag, nor bread, nor money; and do not even have two tunics apiece.

Jesus is asking the disciples:

Can you trust me with just what you have on you, even if that is NOTHING, to complete the mission I am sending you on?

Here is the deal, our stuff gives us security. Our home, our job, our things, our comfort zone brings a sense of security and accomplishment. We really strive to create a comfort zone that we get to live within. That definition is different for everyone but it typically sounds something like this:

We can live on x amount per month. We really enjoy the place we live now, we have worked for years to have the home of our dreams. Our family doesn’t really enjoy stuff as much as we enjoy traveling and being able to get away whenever we want to. We really like the circle of friends that we hang out with. Its comfortable and we will go to some incredibly extreme lengths to create a comfort zone for us to live within and yet Jesus is telling His disciples that to follow him means that they are going to have to re-define their comfort zone. It isn’t in things like homes, or money, or stuff. Instead:

Our comfort zone is no longer defined by stuff it is defined by being where Jesus is and Jesus is on mission to reach The One.

Here is what I mean:

Do you see your finances as the thing that provides the level of comfort you are good with or are your finances the thing that you get to leverage to impact the kingdom of God?

Have you ever wanted to help someone but not been able to? I don’t mean throwing twenty dollars at someone I mean like genuinely helping someone with a significant need that your finances would be able impact. Like I know some people that a thousand dollars could radically change their life. Like without a thousand dollars their car is going to be repossessed and that is their only transportation to the job that is keeping their heads above water. And yet if we live with zero margin in our finances to be able to do that, how does that effect our ability to engage in the mission of Jesus to that person?

Does Jesus have anything to say about the way we structure our finances? YES! Does Jesus demonize people with a lot of money? NO! In fact it is quite the opposite. Jesus over and over again teaches that we should structure our finances with a kingdom mindset first so that there is margin for us to engage in His mission to change the world.

What about our time?

Ask a few questions about how people are doing with their time...

Have you ever wanted to seriously invest in the lives of other people and yet you have eaten up every single free minute of every day of the week such that you have zero margin in your schedule to be able to do that?

Tell about how this looks like for our family…if we ever get to the end of a week and find out that we’ve actually got a free day where there is nothing else we protect that thing like it was the last surviving animal of its species. We are so worn out from burning the candle at both ends all week long on other things that all we can even think about doing is closing the doors and drawing the curtains for some alone time…or getting away for the day to do something alone. Do any of you ever find yourself in that place?

Or how about just our literal comfort zone?

I have this circle of friends that I really like. We get along. They believe the way I do. When they come over to the house, I know that they don’t have sexual ethics that I fear I have to talk with my kids about before they come over. They don’t use language or talk about things I fear my kids will repeat in school. And yet, if we are engaging in the mission of Jesus the way He showed us how to, those are the very people we should be serving and practicing radical hospitality and generosity with.

What about our home?

Do we see our homes as our sacred space dedicated to our comfort? Or do we see our homes as perhaps the single greatest tool to be used for God’s kingdom purposes?

Do you realize that your dinner table is, hands down, the most powerful weapon against the darkness that threatens our city? And yet, if it is like mine, there are empty seats around it almost every night.

Probably because of either money that I’ve not set aside to practice radical hospitality (well we’ve already eaten up our entire grocery budget going out to chick-fil-a three times this week) or a scheduled that is so crammed full that there aren’t any margins to be able to leverage it.

Ya’ll we are in a battle for the soul of our city and when we operate this way, when we fail to heed the call to operate outside of our comfort zone, it is the equivalent of the most deadly fighting force in the world trading in their weapons for water guns and convincing themselves they are going to be effective. Not only are we ineffective because we have traded our most powerful weapons in for the water guns of comfort, but we are going to end up a casualty in the fight. We are watching as an entire generation is walking away from the faith because we have made following Jesus a part of the equation of successfully achieving the american dream.

Ya’ll I am wanting our church to cause some trouble in our city! I am wanting our church to disrupt the status quo that has elevated self and by extension produced the fruit of isolation and loneliness that is KILLING OUR SOCIETY. I am wanting our church to disrupt the status quo of abuse and broken families. I want statisticians and the census bureau ten years from now to look at the map in bewilderment and wonder why in the heck this little town of Yelm Washington has the highest percentage of nuclear families in the nation, the lowest cases of unaddressed mental illness, the lowest poverty rate, the highest employment rate, the lowest crime rate, and the lowest population per-capita of homelessness in the nation, and a foster care system that is finding families for every child!

You realize that is what the power of God’s kingdom has to offer and yet we have sidelined ourselves from the fight because we are clinging to things that aren’t even ours in the first place. They are things given to us by God to leverage for His kingdom. Ya’ll I ain’t trying to get you to give more money to the church, I am not trying to solicit more volunteer hours for church stuff here! Because the fight isn’t in here. All of those things are in your neighborhoods, in the PTO meetings you attend, at the baseball fields you take your kids to, in the jobs you spend 8+ hours a day in. But in order for us to cause that trouble, we have to get out of our comfort zone and begin leveraging the things Jesus has given us.

Jesus says this in Matthew 16:26

Matthew 16:26 NASB95

“For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?

The answer to that last question is supposed to be our comfort zone. Jesus wants us to surrender our comfort zone as we follow after Him on the great rescue mission. Jesus isn’t telling His followers they are destined to be homeless in this passage. No, Jesus just wants to know if we will hold anything back or, instead, if we will leverage everything we have as we engage in the mission.

I said this last week but you eat 21 meals a week. How many of those are you using to engage in the mission of Jesus as you gather around the table with other people. You have about 54 hours of freedom during the week when you are not working or sleeping…that’s over two days worth of time…what are you filling them with? Have you ever stopped to do the math on that? Maybe this next week, you track that… make a me column and an other person column and just begin to take assessment. What about the comfort zone of people. How many of the engagements in your week are spent with your one and how many are spent in the echo chambers filled with people who think, speak, and believe the way you do?

Before we move on, I just want to call out a really beautiful example at work of this in our midst. Some of our ladies get together on the last Tuesday of every month and sit around the IF:Table. This is a space designed specifically to create the type of community where we can walk with one another along our individual journeys of faith. You don’t have to be a Bible scholar to come to this or even to lead one at your home. There are four questions pertaining to real life issues that the Bible has a lot to say about. What’s more, the questions are specifically designed so that someone who is not a follower of Jesus can come and engage in the conversation and find community on their journey of faith long before they would even call it that.

I’ve burned a lot of time with this one so we are going to move on to our last two rather quickly.

Luke 9:59–60 NASB95

And He said to another, “Follow Me.” But he said, “Lord, permit me first to go and bury my father.” But He said to him, “Allow the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim everywhere the kingdom of God.”

Here is the deal. This was an excuse. Jewish tradition would show that if this mans father had really just died, this man would not have been there talking with Jesus. And Jesus knew this. This was an excuse to postpone following Jesus on mission perhaps indefinitely. Maybe dad was sick or maybe he was just old.

Here we see the barrier of urgency.

I want you to think for just a second about the relationships and people who have drifted in and out of your life over the years. If you are in the military, how many people have you forged great friendships with only to have them ripped away and sent to another state or country? How about that co-worker that comes and goes? How about the neighbor that you never thought would go anywhere and yet your heart breaks a little bit that day you drive home and see a realtors sign in their driveway. And all of a sudden a little spike of hatred wells up inside your heart for that realtors sign.

For those people you come to love, when it is time for them to go, you are never satisfied with the amount of time you got to spend with them are you? How many times have you come to that point and felt the pain of dissatisfaction around the way you spent your time with them?

Now, I want you to think back a couple of weeks to that journey of faith thing we talked about. If you know that that person you love is on the left side of that zero mark and is not a follower of Jesus and you did not leverage that time to help them take even one step along that journey of faith. I am not trying to be dark or cast shame on anyone so I will just use myself as the example here.

I have people in that first category and yeah man it is heartbreaking when they move out of my life. I long for their friendship and to be able to get together with them and see their face. But that second category…that second category haunts my dreams. I can tell you the name of every single person I had an opportunity to walk with along their journey of faith and yet chose not to out of a lack of urgency or squandered that chance because of my own hypocritical actions or attitudes. I don’t even have to think about them because even the mention of their name brings a sharp pain to my heart.

77.8

That is how many years we get here on this earth according to the U.S. Census Bureau. A single day over that number is a blessing. Ya’ll I have never heard of a single person coming to the end of their life and wishing they had had more money. I have never heard of someone who wishes they would’ve spent more time at the office. I have never heard of anyone who wishes they could’ve had more alone time.

It is always regrets about the relationships they failed to engage in that haunt people as their greatest failure and greatest unfulfilled sense of purpose and significance at the end of their life.

And our failure to engage is almost always about a lack of urgency. We just think we have more time and so we put off this critical thing we are supposed to be about.

If we are a follower of Jesus then you can undoubtedly voice why it is an urgent mission. But here are a few of the reasons I have found that we typically fail to engage with urgency:

We fail to engage in the mission with urgency because we fear we don’t know the answers. What if someone asks me something that I don’t know the answer to? Hopefully I destroyed that excuse last week. People could honestly care less about your theologically deep answers to existential questions. They want to know your story and why Jesus matters to you.

We fail to engage in the mission because we are busy with other things. Well this thing…rules my life right now but here soon we should have more free time and more room in the budget to practice the type of hospitality you are talking about. I call crap on that. Here is why I can make that rather shocking statement about your excuses...

Because it isn’t just YOUR excuse...it is my excuse…I need to publicly repent before you as your pastor…business and here soon I’ll be able to __________.

Alright…on to our final barrier.

Luke 9:61–62 NASB95

Another also said, “I will follow You, Lord; but first permit me to say good-bye to those at home.” But Jesus said to him, “No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Here we see the barrier of compartmentalization.

For this man, following Jesus was just one of his obligations. He had other obligations, other things he had given himself to. And so he had compartmentalized these different areas of his life and because you can’t operate in two compartments at the same time, you can only give priority to one at a time.

This barrier is ultimately about a split devotion.

Do you know why Jesus said the whole “No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” thing?

Explain the donkey and goad and reigns and keeping it straight. DO NOT EXPLAIN THE PART ABOUT RUINING YOUR FIELD AND YOUR FARMING EQUIPMENT AND THEREBY NOT BEING ABLE TO PROVIDE FOR YOUR FAMILY.

Let me explain what I mean by compartmentalization. This whole Jesus thing is just a part of your life. Perhaps you relegate it to what happens here on a Sunday morning and then give it relatively little thought the rest of the week. Your work life is separate. What you do with your free time isn’t informed by it. There is Jesus and then there are all of these other areas of your life and Jesus only affects those things insomuch as he changes our morals, or ethics, or how patient we are, or informs the worldview that we raise our children with. And so we have these compartments of our life and Jesus probably rules a few of those, maybe he is one of the informing factors in a few other, and he’s probably all-together missing in the rest.

And so, as you think about engaging in the mission of Jesus, up to this point you’ve been thinking, how in the world am I going to make time for all of this.

Please listen super closely here because this is where this thing goes cosmic. This is where this whole mission of Jesus unlocks our purpose, significance, and keeps us from realizing we are Uncle Rico at the end of our 77.8.

To follow Jesus means you only have one compartment in your life and Jesus runs it.

So let me help carry out that logic.

That means your job isn’t just the place where you go make money at. It is the specific mission field that Jesus has put you in to love and serve others. It is the place where you go every single week that I don’t have any access of influence at…in fact, you might be the only follower of Jesus in that place capable of walking with people along their journey of faith. And I can immediately hear the backlash over that… “If I were to go into my office and proselytize other people it would get me fired.” Good…because proselytization isn’t what we are talking about and we have already established that a heavy handed approach and a well polished theological argument drives more people away from the faith than it draws. No it means approaching your work the way Jesus has called us to. With integrity and hard work. Being the one that is quick to listen, slow to get angry, and quick to lift others up. It means being the one that can be trusted in your office. It means being the one who makes relationships a priority over your own self interests. It means being a servant to all. It means inspiring curiosity in other because of your own life of radical sacrifice, hospitality, and generosity. And I could go on.

That means your free time isn’t something you have to curtail so you’ve got more time to go out on mission. NO! It means you are already going to the baseball fields so be the best parent volunteer there is. It means seeing the people you are sitting next to in the stands for an hour and a half as an opportunity to show interest in and cheer on the one thing they probably love most in this world…their kid.

Ya’ll our ladies are killing it. Let me tell you what I mean. It looks like going hiking with intentionality. Setting up a space where we just get to be with other people and inviting others into that space to truly take an interest in their life, see how we can best serve and love them, and walk through the journey with them. That happened this week with a group of our ladies.

That means your finances don’t simply terminate on you. It means that Jesus is the giver of all that is good and we are merely stewards of that and we are constantly asking how we can use our money, our homes, our dinner tables to engage in the mission.

NO…Jesus isn’t just something that you add to your schedule.

Jesus and his mission informs us towards an intentionality that changes how we approach every aspect of our life and is what gives our schedule, our stuff, our homes, and our comfort zone meaning. This connects us with the purpose and significance for which we were created and for which our hearts hunger for.

This is what it means to follow Jesus.

Jesus is on mission and so if we are going to follow him that means we are on mission as well.

So lets go back to the whole hand to the plow example that we talked about a few minutes ago...

Bring their minds back to the plowing example. EXPLAIN THE RUING YOUR FIELD, RUIN YOUR PLOW AND NOT BE ABLE TO FEED YOUR FAMILY BIT.

Explain that this is how it works with Jesus. We searching for fulfillment in our families, in our marriages, in our jobs, in our leisure, in our homes. When we don’t split all those down into separate compartments with a separate Jesus compartment that we walk into on Sundays, but view them all as one compartment that Jesus and His mission informs it gives purpose and fulfillment to all of them.

Here is what I mean: What if your job isn’t just the place you go to to make money? What if your job has eternal significance? What if you didn’t derive your sense of satisfaction or self-worth from how much money you made at that job, how much the people at that job like you, how much you like your boss, or how much opportunity for forward advancement you have? What if instead, you derived your greatest sense of joy out of being with people in that job and walking with them along their journey of faith? How does that change the really bad assignments? Do you view it as a bad assignment or as an opportunity to show an otherworldly joy, work ethic, and integrity? What about interpersonal conflict? Do you view that as the worst part of your job that you just have to manage or is it an opportunity to carry out the mission of Jesus as the office peacemaker? Does it give you the opportunity to love your enemy and bless those who curse and spitefully use you for their own personal gain? You see what I mean…all of a sudden your joy, your satisfaction, feelings of success don’t lie in things you can’t control any longer, they are in your willingness to engage in the mission of Jesus to bring light into the darkness.

What about your kids? Chances are, if you are here and you are a follower of Jesus, you want your kids to follow after him as well. And yet, if faith is a separate compartment and is only a conversation on Sunday’s then they are going to have a really hard time answering the question of why they follow Jesus when they get older. Because, the answer is just going to be because that’s what my family did on Sundays. I’ll do you one better though, even if faith and Jesus are regularly talked about at home and yet that is done without helping them to engage in the mission of Jesus, the results will be the same. This is because, following Jesus only makes sense, large portions of the Bible only makes sense, IF we are actually following Jesus on mission.

And so here is the really dangerous thing about compartmentalization. This is how we have really seen it worked out here in our context. All of a sudden the mission of Jesus falls only on the pastor and other staff and can only happen on Sunday mornings or at some other gathering of the Church.

There are people at the soccer fields I will never reach and yet God fully intends for you to help them take their next step of faith. There are people on base that will never attend a service here and yet that doesn’t remove the responsibility from your shoulders to walk with them on their journey of faith. You are a regular at a particular restaurant and have a relationship with a waitress somewhere in this city who doesn’t know Jesus and yet has come to love your family…he or she may never step foot inside these doors and even though I might eat at the same restaurant, I will never be able to walk with that person the way you and your family can. You are a missionary. This whole Jesus thing is so much bigger than what happens here on Sunday mornings and when we can activate the great commission in every one of your individual lives and circles of influence, we can turn our city upside down!

So here is the question I want to leave you with this morning:

Which of these barriers are most effective at sidelining you from the mission of Jesus?

The barrier of the comfort zone

The barrier of a lack of urgency

The barrier of compartmentalization

Ya’ll I told you I want to cause some problems as we push back the darkness in our city. Do you know what has sidelined me? Barrier one. Talk through why I’m pretty good with the other two but why barrier one is killing my effectiveness.

I have traded my most powerful weapon, my dinner table, for the water gun of business. I regularly sacrifice the mission on the alter of business as I fail to keep enough margins in my schedule to actually be with people. And so this week, I am going to take a day off. I am going to work through my schedule. I am going to assess what I’ve been doing with those 54 hours that seem to evaporate from underneath my nose. Maybe that looks like our family doesn’t go out to eat this week unless we can go out with someone else. Maybe that looks like we aren’t going to cash in that bowling pass we bought at prairie lanes unless we can take another family with us. Maybe that looks like not getting up from my personal Bible study until I have prayed for at least three new people who I know are not followers of Jesus. Maybe that looks like committing to serve at least one of the families on our baseball team in some sort of tangible way and figuring out what that looks like before we leave our next game.

Those are a lot of maybes that my family is going to have to talk about though as we figure out how to engage in the mission of Jesus better this week than we did last. What I know for certain is that I got one of the same little sheets of paper that you did when you came in here. Write down my barrier and then thumb tack it to the cross and invite everyone else to do the same as Ben closes us out in a song of worship.

FOR THE ONE:

This is what following Jesus means. A complete re-structuring of our lives around His purpose and call for our lives. This is where we come to that threshold of ambivalence and have to make a decision. Explain why this life is better. It doesn’t mean literally selling everything you have and quitting your job. It just looks like a renewed purpose in all of those areas.

Include a baby step that helps anyone wanting to take that step do so.

Write down “I choose to follow Jesus” on your sheet and pray asking him to forgive you of your sins and commit to follow him. And I encourage you to come tack your sheet on the cross as well.