Breaking Down Barriers:
Moving Out of Your Comfort Zone

Pastor Meyer’s Sermon

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Good morning. Is it just me or has sports begun to become more extreme lately? For instance, you don’t have downhill skiing anymore, right? You have extreme downhill skiing. You don’t have surfing anymore. No, you have extreme surfing. We’re not even happy with the moves that are made on a regular skateboard. No, we have extreme skateboarding where the moves are done with a skateboard that has four off wheel size tires. I bet you know this one coming, extreme golf.

But the weirdest one I’ve seen, the most interesting one I have seen is extreme ironing. I’m not making it up. It’s extreme ironing. In fact, this year is going to be the second year of the World Class Extreme Ironing Contest, believe it or not. And it is a sport. If you go to extremeironing.com, they have a description of what it is. It says this sport is an outdoor activity that combines all of the danger and the risk involved in an extreme sport with the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt. You see, the idea is you take an iron and a board and you go to a remote location and you iron a couple pieces of laundry. We have some examples here. This one, this guy is tied to the side of a cliff and he is ironing. The next one, you have someone who is tied in between two cliffs and ironing. Now this one was actually the person who won the championship last year. Now the next picture is someone who is on the bow or stern, the front of the stern of the ship and he is ironing. The next one is some soldiers in Iraq with one standing on top of the truck ironing. And this next one is a guarantee to get wrinkles out of your shirt. You iron under water and then the next one is the contestant for this year’s world championship, he is ironing upside down while dangling on a wire in between two cliffs.

Now the question is what attracts us to these extreme sports? Oh, yeah, it’s the danger and the risks involved but within our culture, we’re kind of conflicted about all this risk taking, aren’t we? To some degree, we love it. We revel in it. We even look up to those people who are risk takers because of the thrill of it all but there’s another side to us, isn’t there? There’s a big side of us that hates risk, that does not like change.

Most people aren’t looking for a thrill. That’s why they call it extreme. It takes a rare individual to want to strap themselves to the side of a cliff or to want to ski down a hill in a straight line, to want to iron under water. But the rest of us, while we might enjoy the extreme sports, we’re just happy with the idea of playing it safe, to stay inside our comfort zone. You see, change requires risk and sometimes we’d rather stay in our ruts than to risk change.

There is a psychologist and author by the name of William Backus and he’s quoted as saying that some people would actually rather die than change or take a chance. It is not wisdom that causes a person to refuse risk. It is fear, the fear of losing health and security and safety, familiarity, comfort, predictability, control, and power. These are the threats too great to risk.

But you know what, here’s the rub for us because, you see, God wants to help us grow. God wants us to experience more out of life than we are right now. God wants us to work with Him in this kingdom. He wants us to use the gifts He has given us to help those who are hurting, to comfort those in need, to tell people about what it means to be a follower of Jesus and so everything God wants us to do in our lives will push us outside of our comfort zones. Every change in our life, every step we take in our faith, every venture into service is going to require us to take risks. And that means possibly changing habits. It means for us we may have to say goodbye to things we’ve always been leaning on to help us to get through. And it’s hard for us to let go, isn’t it? Those things we are comfortable with, it’s hard for us to just let them go and do something different. And so it becomes a barrier for us, a barrier for us in our relationship with God.

And that, My Friends, is exactly where we find Jonah. We first hear about Jonah, not in Jonah 1, no, we first hear about Jonah in 2 Kings 14 and it’s important we read it because it gives us a clue as to where Jonah was in his life before the word of the Lord came to him. It says here, “King Jeroboam was the one who restored the boundaries of Israel in accordance with the word of the Lord. The God of Israel spoken through His servant, Jonah, son of Amitai, the prophet.” You see, Jonah was a very important person in Israel. Not only was he the prophet of God but he also had a year of the king. The king would come to him to ask him for advice. He was in a very prestigious position but not only that, Israel at this time was enjoying kind of a revival where their borders had been pushed out to where their borders were during the time of King David and King Solomon. Things were going well. There’s a national feeling about their country that things were going well and things were going well for Jonah and then God comes to him and tells him to go to Nineveh.

Now Nineveh is the sworn enemy of Israel. Not only that but Nineveh is 500 miles away but even more, Nineveh has a reputation. And we get a clue to what that reputation is in the Old Testament in the book called Nahum where the prophet Nahum talks a little bit about Nineveh. He says, “Nineveh is the city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder, where people are stumbling over the corpses without number that are piled up in the streets.” You see, Nineveh had a reputation on how they handled foreigners. They also had a reputation of how they did war. They were the first to go into a city, destroy the city but not only that, take the people who inhabited that city and deport them to another country. Some of their war practices were despicable and so it’s not a wonder that Jonah was somewhat hesitant about going to Nineveh.

In fact, Jonah was dealing with an internal battle. He was being asked to move outside of his comfort zone and he wasn’t happy about that. Have you ever been there? Have you ever been asked to serve God and you had that internal battle within yourself? But when you say, “Yes,” you know you’re going to be saying no to something else you would like to do, that saying yes means you’re going to be making a commitment and that means you’re going to be a little more busy, that you’re not going to have as much time as you would like.

And so it’s hard when we’re in the midst of the battle. And sometimes we ignore the call. Sometimes we just run away from it and that’s exactly what Jonah did. He ran away from his responsibility. Because when God came and gave him His plan, it involved some risky steps. It involved him moving outside of his comfort zones. Now granted, being asked to teach Sunday School or being asked to do other things within the congregation or even being asked to talk to your neighbor about Jesus, it might pale, it might even seem ordinary compared to what Jonah was asked to do. But you see, God wants to help us to break down that barrier that prevents us from moving outside of our comfort zone, that prevents us from living the life God so much wants us to live.

Last week, we talked about God sightings and I received several e-mails over the week when people were just telling me, “Hey, I’ve seen God. I’ve seen God working in my life.” And my prayer is you have seen God close to you and working in your life. And the question becomes now what are some things we can learn from Jonah to help us to break down this particular barrier of moving outside of our comfort zones? Now that we know God is with us, God is in our lives, what can we do to break down that barrier? What can we take with us as we move outside of our comfort zones to follow God’s leading?

Now I want to do something different with this sermon. If you look at the Weekly Word, the front cover of the Weekly Word over in the corner, the lower right hand corner, you’ll see sermon notes and I have four points I’d like to go through just to talk about some of the things you can keep in mind when you are called to move out of your comfort zone. And the first one is the call to move out of your comfort zone comes from the one who loves us. Sometimes, we think about the story of Jonah as just some guy who runs away from his responsibility and, at the end, he doesn’t really end up getting it. It can’t be any further from the truth because Jonah did get it.

He shows us that when you look at Jonah 4, he gives the reason for why he wants to leave and run the other way. He says, “Oh, Lord, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love.” You see, Jonah knew exactly what God was going to do. And for Jonah, it was more important for him to be in his comfort zone than to be concerned about what God wanted him to do. You see, God was giving Nineveh a second chance, a second opportunity to repent and to come before God and to turn to Him. You even see in the story God even gives Jonah a second chance despite his crying, his whining, complaining, and his running away. But most importantly, throughout the story, we see that no matter where Jonah runs to, God is right there with Him and God loves Him so much and it’s something we can remember, too. Because when we are asked to move out of our comfort zone to go into a territory we’ve never been before, we can take heart that God loves us and He is there with us.

Now our second point is when the call to move outside of our comfort zones comes, it is for a noble purpose. It’s not simply to just take risks just for the sake of taking risks like the extreme sports are. No, it is all about following God’s direction because He has an important mission for us to fulfill. We know what Jonah’s mission was all about. And he had an extraordinary mission. He was going to a city that had more than 120,000 people there who didn’t know God and didn’t know they were going down the wrong path.

But for us, wouldn’t it be nice if God wanted to do something that He would just kind of shout out and say, “Hey, Kendall, why don’t you go over here and do this.” Wouldn’t it be nice if God would kind of sky write in the sky what my directions are for the day? Wouldn’t it be nice to do that? But we constantly struggle that way. We constantly struggle in our lives by asking the question, “Is what I feel is what God is leading me to do? Is it really God leading me to do it? Or is it my own desire that’s wanting me to do it? How can I distinguish between my desires and God’s calling?” What I want to encourage you to do is when you’re thinking about this, first think about who you are. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 12, he says, “You are the body of Christ and each one of you is a part of it.” You see, God’s call is where the gifts we’ve been blessed with intersect with the needs of people. You see, God’s call for us always involves glorifying God when serving the needs of people. God has created us to be a part of the body, the body of Christ, and each of us have particular talents and gifts. And if your gifts match a specific opportunity to serve, then you can be certain that is a calling from God.

Our next point is when you’re moving outside of your comfort zone, it’s not going to be easy. You see, there’s going to be a cost involved. It’s going to be difficult. It doesn’t come without a price tag. For Jonah, the cost was to leave a prestigious position, for him to travel 500 miles to Nineveh to be in the heart of the enemy to proclaim out the judgment they were going to receive unless they repent and subject himself to persecution. Now that’s not an easy challenge.

And sometimes we have hard challenges in our lives when we’re asked to make a change, when we’re asked to step outside of our comfort zone, we’re quick to say two words and that is, “I can’t.” We’re quick to say, “I can’t overcome this temptation.” We’re quick to say, “I can’t make new friends.” “I can’t change my job.” “I can’t make this marriage work.” “I can’t pray with my own spouse.” That was a statement a friend of mine named Jim told me one day. Jim is a member of my vicarage congregation. Vicarage was the hands-on training time when you’re at seminary and Jim came into my office and he said, “It is so hard for me to be able to tell someone about my faith. When an opportunity comes up, I get so nervous and I feel like I don’t know what I’m going to say and I might as well just say nothing. In fact, I can’t even pray with my own wife. But I’m here today in your office because I want to learn how to share my faith. I feel God calling me to do that so I want to take the evangelism program with you.” So we went through the evangelism program together. He learned some tricks and some things to keep in mind, what are some of the things he wanted to be able to say when he had an opportunity to share and after we finished the evangelism program, we actually went out and we visited some people. And it just so happened that the person we visited was someone he had not seen since high school. And he had a wonderful opportunity to be able to share his faith with someone he knew and to learn from that experience. After we got done with that, he was so pumped, he was so excited. He came to me a couple of weeks later and said, “ Kendall, I’d like to lead the evangelism program.” And so he became the director and he is still the director of the evangelism program at that church today.

You know, when we receive that call to move outside of our comfort zone, it can be very fearful. But we need to trust God that He has our best interest in mind and when we do that, we’re going to be surprised at the delight He gives us that God can act through us in such a wonderful way.

And finally our fourth point that I want you to take with you as you move out of your comfort zone is a call to step outside of the comfort zone requires a response. And the question I want you to think about this week are other ways in which you are being called to step out in faith. In what ways have you seen the need to step outside of your comfort zone? Maybe it could be something as simple as praying together with your spouse. Or maybe you feel the call to increase your tithe but you’re just not sure what that’s going to look like. Or maybe you’re feeling the call to participate in a small group and you’ve never been in that kind of a situation before. Or maybe you want to help out with the youth but you’re just not sure what that looks like in your life.

But you see, in the life of this church, we are constantly challenged to step outside of our comfort zone. I started a little over a year and a half ago and at that time, we only had three services on Sunday. But there was a challenge there. There was a challenge in how can we best continue bringing Jesus to people for the first time and a lifetime. And so we added two more services that gave us an opportunity to reach those people who we would not have been able to reach before.

Our children’s programs have continued to increase. This summer, we have 18 different summer camps. Two years ago, we opened up the preschool and the preschool has doubled in its enrollment. We continue our small group ministry and also have added some care ministries like Grief Share and Divorce Care, all with the idea that we want to be a church where everyone has a network of friends who are helping them grow and study the bible, praying for one another and caring for each other.

It could be easy for us to say, “Why do we need to make these changes? Why can’t we just keep the programs the same way we’ve always done?” But, you see, we learn from Jonah that this church and even in our own lives we need to make changes. We have to do this because God is calling us to provide the best way to include the people God is bringing to us and help them grow. My Friends, God is calling us to move outside of our comfort zones. He’s calling us to break down that barrier that prevents us from doing that. He wants us to grow. He wants us to trust Him. And so let’s do that. Let’s move remembering God loves us and that what He is calling us to do is a noble purpose and it won’t be easy but God will be there to help us to respond and we will. Amen.

Copyright 2007 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church