by Brandon Cox: Sometimes God takes me back to kindergarten, spiritually speaking. I spend time reading theological treatises, but I sometimes forget the most basic and simple of truths. Here’s one of those basic truths I sometimes struggle with: We choose our attitudes.

We don’t choose our circumstances. We don’t choose the weather, the direction of the economy, what people around us will do, or the direction of world events. If we could choose our circumstances, we would avoid discomfort every time, and in doing so, we would miss out on some amazing opportunities for growth. So we don’t get to choose our situation, but we do get to choose our attitudes.

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

~ Philippians 4:8 NIV

In other words, focus your thinking on better alternatives. Here are at least four attitudes we get to choose:

I Can Choose Confidence In Spite of My Circumstances

My situation might stink, but God always alive, awake, actively working, and attentive to my situation. He saw it coming. He’s fully prepared. He wants to grow me through it and He’s on my side. Those are little truths to throw in the face of the enemy when he plants seeds of doubt. If God is for us (and we know He is) then who or what can possibly be against us?

I Can Choose to Be Positive In Spite of Criticism

Anyone who has ever had any influence on their surrounding culture has endured criticism. And often that criticism comes from the circles of people from whom we would least expect it. But criticism doesn’t have to defeat us. We should draw out of criticism anything that might be true and use it to our advantage. Everything else, we should throw at the feet of Jesus and turn our desire to be defensive over to Him (this is one of my biggest struggles). And we should be tenacious and stubborn enough to keep pressing toward God’s goal for us regardless of what others might say.

I Can Be Hopeful When Nothing Seems Certain

Some of the toughest times we go through aren’t necessarily times of deep loss, but rather are times of waiting, times of uncertainty and unrest. When our presumed reality seems to be threatened and the positive things we were counting on seem to fall through, we can still be hopeful. God’s goal for us doesn’t change. He still intends to shape us into the image of Christ. He’s still going to return in absolute victory someday. He’s still causing us to be more than conquerors through Christ.

I Can Choose to Be Content with Christ Alone

Of the four choices I’m mentioning, this one is by far the toughest. In fact, it really takes a lifetime for us to get this one down. Being content with Christ alone is a difficult attitude to gauge in our western culture because we have so much more than Jesus. I have a family, a home, two cars, food on the table, cable television, air conditioning, and gadgets galore. Will I ever know if I would truly be content with Christ alone? I’m not sure, but what I can do is walk in this attitude on a daily basis when deals fall through, when people let me down, when losses come. I can practice the discipline of saying “Jesus, You are enough. If all I have is You, I’m okay.” Contentment boils down to accepting with gratitude whatever God has in mind for us, surrendering our own idea of what is necessary in exchange for His idea of it.

These are tough. Adopting healthy attitudes is a daily discipline that requires our enjoying time with God in prayer, yielding to others, and cultivating thoughts of gratitude for God’s grace. Regardless of the size of the challenge, I know that all of these attitudes are possible because they are all commanded and exemplified in Scripture.

So choose wisely.

by Brandon Cox: When my wife and I were first married, we lived in Beebe, Arkansas where I served as pastor of a small church and we commuted several days per week to Conway, an hour away, for classes at Central Baptist College. The chariot that carried us back and forth was a 1991 Dodge Spirit. It wasn’t fancy, but it was faithful. Until…

One day I noticed that, while I was driving normally, the car started slowing down. The engine was running. The RPM’s were normal. The battery was fine. But the speed would drop until we were only driving 15 or 20 mph, even with the gas pedal almost floored.

Some guys in our church offered to take care of the problem, so they borrowed it for a day and removed the catalytic converter, then returned it to us, having diagnosed the problem as a backup of exhaust. Nevermind that the car was now illegal and missing a fairly important part of the exhaust system.

But that didn’t fix the problem. The next time we made the long commute, the car slowed down again. This time, I wheeled into a mechanic’s shop in the edge of Conway and they put it up on the rack to check it out.

The head mechanic showed us the problem. Upon removing the front wheel, they’d found that the brake rotor was bright red, essentially on fire. The master cylinder was faulty and had been applying the front brakes the entire time we’d been driving, even though I wasn’t pushing the brake pedal at all.

All that gas and energy spent, with nothing to show for it!

And that’s exactly how far too many of us are living life.

We’re working all the hours we can, and filling the rest of our time with activity until we don’t have any time or energy left. Then we spend all the money we make trying to obtain the nicest things we can afford.

We’re spending ourselves. Our time. Our money. Our lives. The critical question is, of course… does it matter? Is it a worthy expense?

Tragically, we’re often left unfulfilled and unsatisfied, wondering what life is really all about. Just skim the book of Ecclesiastes and hear the heart of a man who had come to his final days and wondered, is this all there is?

Solomon proclaimed that all the working and grinding and hustling was just “vanity” and “more vanity.” Keep reading until the end and you’ll see that the light dawned on this seemingly cynical writer. He concluded that life does make sense in light of our being created by God for eternal purposes and not merely earthly, temporal pursuits.

The Apostle Paul once said,

So if you’re serious about living this new resurrection life with Christ, act like it. Pursue the things over which Christ presides. Don’t shuffle along, eyes to the ground, absorbed with the things right in front of you. Look up, and be alert to what is going on around Christ—that’s where the action is. See things from his perspective.

– Colossians 3:1-2, The Message

Paul gives us, in this passage, a fairly simple way to make sure we’re maximizing the investment potential of our time and money.

Put your energy into spiritual things, for which you were created!

Don’t get to the end of this life and look back only to realize you spent all of our energy getting nowhere. Give your life to the pursuit of God’s purposes for you and you’ll never have to question the value of your investment!

by Brandon Cox: Sometimes we look for professionals to help us learn things.

I was once on a flight that was diverted from John Wayne Airport to LAX, which prompted a wave of sighs from passengers as well as a conversation between me and the guy seated next to me on the plane named Steve Springer.

He happened to have a pretty cool job helping major league baseball players become better hitters. He had text conversations going with some of baseball’s current stars and household names. All-Star player Paul Goldschmidt says, “Steve connects the dots for me.”

Steve runs a pretty cool website – Quality At Bats – where he offers his training to anyone from peewee to the pro’s.

If you want to be a better hitter in baseball, you need a pro. You need someone with skills and knowledge you don’t currently possess who can show you the exact steps you need to take to improve your game. You need Steve Springer.

When I started out in ministry, I thought what I needed most was this kind of specialized knowledge and training. I needed skills. I needed to know more about theology, about leadership, about church systems and structures, and about how to manage a nonprofit organization.

Then came the day my life was falling apart.

It’s actually possible to be highly-trained, highly-paid, and highly-regarded in your leadership role and to be absolutely crumbling to pieces on the inside.

We see it all too often, don’t we? The headlines read something like… “Super Dude {Insert Name}, Pastor of Awesome and Huge Megachurch, Author of 83 Books and Host of Syndicated Christian Television Program Resigns, Confesses to {Insert Crime, Scandal, Cover-Up}.”

I wasn’t super successful. Nor was I involved in any newsworthy scandal. But there was a widening gap between who I really was and who I wanted everyone else to think I was. And it was leaving me in pain and shame.

So I went to see Bob.

Bob was on our church’s staff and offered to other staff members (there were about 500 of us) his counseling services with the promise that, unless legally necessary, he would never share our struggles or pain with anyone, even our supervisors.

Bob was trained. And he was smart. But Bob was something else, too.

Bob was real.

As I shared with Bob my issues with anger and resentment and how I was surprised at my own behavior in conflict, Bob shared with me his own story of having been a drill sergeant in the military where he learned to yell at people, then navigating marriage, family, and ministry.

He’d learned about brokenness, about healing, and about how we recover, in community, from our hurts, habits, and hang-ups. And he’d created a pretty vast network of highly trained lay counselors to offer care to the souls of hurting people.

My small group was also real.

When we met, we’d go around the circle and ask the basic question: How are the Goleys? How are the Kotrbas? How are the Sonnenburgs?

They’d all share their high’s and low’s, prayer requests, struggles, blessings, and life issues. They’d offer each other encouragement and prayer.

Then someone would say, How are the Cox’s?

And we were fine. We were just fine.  We were okay. Really.

No issues with the Cox’s. We’re alright.

And then a few weeks in, when the question was asked, my wife didn’t say we were fine. She said we were not doing so well.

My head turned in her direction and I leaned a little closer, wondering what beans she was about to spill about me. About us. About us not being the perfect little family.

And the Goleys, Kotrbas, and Sonnenburgs helped us heal. They prayed over us and walked us through some real pain.

What we experienced among that small group of friends would shape the very heart of the church we would go on to start in Northwest Arkansas.

My pastor was real.

Rick Warren is a world-renowned pastor, best-selling author, and a philanthropist who has prayed over presidents, sat with world leaders and billionaires talking about how to fix the biggest problems on the planet.

He’s also the guy who says Mastercard saved his marriage.

A few years into planting Saddleback Church, Rick and Kay were struggling desperately. They couldn’t afford counseling back then, so they put it on credit card.

While Rick doesn’t officially recommend financing counseling services with a credit card, he does encourage anyone and everyone to go get counseling.

We all need it from time to time, just like we need to get a physical now and then and our teeth cleaned and checked.

After all, what good is a healthy body with a dying soul?

I’ve learned now, more than ever, that we need people in our lives who will be real.

And just as importantly, we need people who will let us be real and will still love us.

When you want to increase your batting average, become a more proficient public speaker, or structure your organization to develop more leaders, you need some specialized knowledge and training.

But when you’re trying to grow from the inside out, get healing for your wounded soul, or live up to your full potential, you need people who are real.

If you’re reading this and you’re involved in any kind of life-on-life ministry or business – teaching, pastoring, counseling, etc. – take to heart one of the foundational core values of our church:

We keep it real and fight against fake. We live and lead with authenticity.

Because without authenticity, proficiency just sets you up to be a much bigger disaster.

by Brandon Cox: Some decisions are so radical that there is simply no going back. They’re life-changing, and sometimes world-changing.

The problem is, only a relatively few people will ever experience them.

Out of twelve spies who scouted out the promised land, only two would inherit the blessing of ownership of the land. An entire generation of Israelites died off in the wilderness because of an inability to take massive, burn-the-ships, no-turning-back action to align completely with God’s will.

Legend tells the story of Cortes, the explorer who left Cuba for Mexico in 1519. He and his men first had to conquer Veracruz. They would face the Aztecs who were known for capturing non-Aztecs for human sacrifice, which is obviously a little scary.

When Cortes and his men made landfall, Cortes ordered all of their ships burned and sunk so as to remove any temptation of turning back. They would move forward, or perish!

I shared this story in a recent message, along with a challenge to everyone in the room or watching online to ask God about the kind of massive action that needed to be taken in their lives.

Watch the video to hear more…

So, what kind of massive action do you need to take today?