What is Shaping You?
Pastor Curt Taylor continues the Reset series with a powerful reminder that what shapes us ultimately determines who we become. In this message, he invites us to pursue a fresh start by making time for God and letting His Word speak into our everyday lives. Rather than approaching the Bible as a task to complete, we’re encouraged to slow down, reflect, and meditate on the Scripture. As we build a consistent rhythm of being with the Lord, our lives become steadier, healthier, and more fruitful. This sermon is a practical and hope-filled invitation to seek God in a way that genuinely changes us from the inside out.
Slide 1
What different countries call this:
American English: Cotton Candy
British English: Fairy Floss
Spanish, German: Sugar Cotton
French: Daddy’s Beard
Slide 2
What is shaping you?
• Family & upbringing
• Friends & social circles
• Media intake (news, entertainment, social)
• Algorithms & advertising
• Schooling & training
• Major life experiences (wins/losses/trauma)
• Habits
Slide 3
Over time, they form our reflexes:
• What we assume about people
• What we expect from relationships
• What we do with anger
• What we do with temptation
• What we do with pain
• What we do when we're alone
Slide 3
The real question:
Is what’s shaping you actually making you better?
Slide 4
Psalm 1:1-3
1 Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
2 but his delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
3 He is like a tree
planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers.
Slide 5
Psalm 1 isn’t a poem about Bible reading.
It’s a poem about the kind of person everyone wants to become.
Slide 6
Blessed (stable/whole/constant/enviable) because their life is rooted.
Slide 7
“delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law. He meditates day and night"
Slide 8
Meditate means you stay with God’s Word long enough for it to stay with you.
Slide 9
Delight + Meditation = Roots.
Roots = Fruit.
Slide 10
Mark 1:35
And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed.
Slide 11
When was the last time you were alone… and you weren’t reaching for something?
Slide 12
It’s hard to build a deep life in a loud life.
Slide 13
Roots grow in the quiet with God’s Word.
Slide 14
2 Timothy 3:16-17
16 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
Slide 15
Teaching: what is true
Reproof: what is wrong
Correction: how to fix it
Training: how to grow
Slide 16
Step 1: Pick a place
Step 2: Pick a time
Step 3: Start small
Step 4: Be consistent
Slide 17
Hope of Psalm 1:
A planted life.
A nourished life.
A fruitful life.
If you've got young kids, one of the things that they do a really good job of is asking why. Asking why all the time about all the things. And, and sometimes you, you know the answer to the questions that they are asking why, and then sometimes you're really not sure the answer that they're asking why? And so you give one of these lines, you say something like, well, it's just the way that it is, or just because, or because that's what I said. So and kids are great at asking why, but sometimes when we become adults, we stop asking why. But, but it's important sometimes to take a step back and say, well, why, why is this the way that it is? I, I ran into something a few weeks ago that, that caused me to scratch my head and really ask, well, okay, now why is that?
I'll share it with you. This is a picture I wanna put up that we all know. And we all call this cotton candy, right? Cotton candy. But I learned that cotton candy has different names. If you translate their native language into English, different names all across the world. So, so in English, we call it cotton candy, the way it's supposed to be called. But did you know that in Britain also English, they don't call it cotton candy. They call it fairy floss, which is wrong, but they don't know that apparently because why would you call it fairy floss? Like that sounds just odd. And why would anybody want to eat floss? And all kinds of questions that you've got not as good of an answer as cotton candy, but, but you can kind of understand it. That there's also another one that, that, that if you're in Spain or if you're in Germany they actually call it sugar cotton, which I can understand that name doesn't sound as cool as cotton candy, but I totally get it.
But then there's France. And France, their name for it is Daddy's beard. And, and that's a terrible name. Let me just go ahead. It, it's a, it's so bad of a name that it causes you to scratch your head and say, wait, why? Wait, who, who thought that this was a good idea? Like, surely the people that hate that name the most are the people that make cotton candy in France, because, you know, it's really hard to convince someone to eat something called daddy's beard. Like who wants to eat that at all? So surely at some point someone's gonna take a step back and say, Hey, why do we collectively call this this when there's a better name out there that does exist in cotton candy, is kind of a silly way to think about it, but in so many ways, probably we don't ever think why something is named the way that it is, because that's just the way that it is.
That's the way we've always thought. We've always believed that, and therefore, that's just what we think. And it leads me to this question, and I think as we kick off a brand new year, this is an important question for all of us to wrestle with. And it's simply this, what is shaping you? Like, like if you ask yourself, why do I believe the things that I believe? But why do I think the way that I think it comes down to a handful of different things in your life, my life that have shaped us. Probably the most foundational thing is your family and your upbringing. That shapes your culture. It shapes a lot of your ideology. It shapes a lot of your moral values. Sometimes your, your family shapes you in really positive ways. Probably there are people in this room that your, your family shaped you in some negative ways.
There, there's also your friends in your social circles that who you're spending time around those opinions and their influences, they are shaping us. Of course, the media shapes us the way that we intake media with movies and with TV shows and with all kinds of news stations that, that our social media, those things are influencing us. Of course, now on social media, you've got an algorithm and that algorithm based off of everything that you click and everything that you spend time with your eyeball watching, it decides that these marketers now know you really well. And so they're gonna put things in front of you that you didn't know that you wanted until you see it in front of you. And so it shapes how we spend our money because of the algorithm, because of the advertising. Our schools shape us, our training shape us.
Probably you've had some major events in life that shaped you some good and some bad. Maybe you can think back of a moment that you experienced tremendous tragedy or loss, or maybe you had a betrayal or a heartache and it changed the trajectory of your life. Or maybe on the positive side, you had a moment of triumph, something amazing happened and, and it gave you confidence that has shaped who you are. Of course, we have habits and those habits repeated over and over and over again are constantly shaping us. But, but here's the thing about those things. Those things are shaping our beliefs, but ultimately our beliefs are, are shaping who we are becoming over time. Our beliefs are shaping our reflexes, but what we think about things. And so all of those different influences, they now affect us. So what we assume about people is based off of those different things and maybe what we expect from relationships or what we do when we're angry or what we do with temptation or what we do with pain, or maybe what we do when we're all alone.
And so really at the root of all of this, here's the real question that I wanna pose. The real question that I want us to wrestle with is simply is what's shaping you is what's shaping me actually making us better. Like when you think of who you want to be, the person that you are trying to become, you have all these different influences that are shaping you, are those influences shaping you in the direction that you truly want to go or not? As we kick off a brand new year, we're, we're in a series that we've kicked off called Reset. And Reset is this idea of when you need to start over with something, the best thing you can do is reset it. Your phone's not working the right way, you turn it off and you turn it back on. Back in the day, if you had the original Nintendo, occasionally the original Nintendo, you you'd get to a place and it would just pause, it would freeze.
And there's only one way to fix that. You would pull the cartridge out. And if you're old school, you know exactly what I'm gonna say. You just blew in that thing. And it actually gave you a warning. It said, don't blow in the cartridge. But if you knew, you knew, like it made all the difference in the world, you blew the dust right outta that thing. You popped it back in good to go. It needed a reset. And what if right now in your life, my life, we need a reset? Well, what if we need to reset and recognize, okay, there's all these different things influencing my life, but what would it look like if I allowed God to be the primary influence in my life? And the way that we see that God wants to primarily influence your life and my life is through the Bible now.
Now I get it. Like you come into church today and you say, okay, the most cliche thing that you could possibly talk about is that I need to read the Bible. And maybe you're coming in today and you're not even a Christian, that, that you just decided, hey, a friend invited you, or you just ended up here because it's a new year and maybe you're, you're trying something different. And so maybe you've got questions about God or even questions about the Bible. But, but here's what I'd say about the Bible. If you objectively, purely from an intellectual standpoint, take a step back and look at the Bible. It's pretty amazing. Last year, 150 million Bibles were printed. Now it never shows up on a New York Times bestseller list. And here's the reason why. 'cause There's a thousand different versions of the Bible. So there's ESV and NIV and King James version and New King James version and Living translation version.
So you have all these different translations, but if you, if you count them all as the Bible, 150 million were printed last year. And do you know that there have been over 2 billion Bibles printed over the course of history, 2 billion that they now have that the YouTube, or not YouTube, you version Bible app, it's been downloaded a billion times or a billion times. The the Bible has been translated, at least in part, into over 4,000 different languages, which I, I didn't even know that there were 4,000 different languages, but it's been translated into over 4,000 different languages. And interestingly, if you look back at the history of the Bible, the, the, the guy Dale's the first person that took the Bible and translated it into English, and he died for it. He was tortured and killed because he translated the Bible into English. And so throughout human history, you have all these people that are trying to prevent you and I from having the Bible while simultaneously, somehow miraculously, the Bible continues to get into more and more and more and more people's hands. And so if you just, even if you don't value God or or value the Bible, if you just objectively take a step back, you've gotta recognize, man, there's something about this thing that's different. And for it to be printed by so many different people, in so many different nations and so many different languages, to to have radically transformed so much of the world, maybe it's worth looking at and investigating. If
You've got
A Bible, turn me to Psalm, the book of Psalms. We're gonna look at Psalm chapter one. So if you've
Got a physical Bible,
Psalms is the easiest book to find. 'cause It's smack dab in the middle of the Bible.
It's also the biggest book of the Bible.
And so if you get
Roughly
In the middle, you're gonna find the Book of Psalms. And we're gonna go
All
The way to the beginning, not just the
Very first
Psalm, but also
The very first verse of the first book
Of Psalms. Here's what it says.
Blessed
Is the man who walks not in the council of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seats
Of scoffers. But his delight
Is in the law
Of the Lord.
Law is another way of talking about scripture
Or the Bible. So his delight
Is in the Bible,
The law, the scripture of the Lord.
And on his law, on the Bible, he meditates day and night.
He,
That person that delights in the law and meditates in the law, that person is like
A
Tree planted by streams of water
That yields
Its fruit in its season. And its leaf does not wither in all that
He does. He prospers.
And now I think one of the dangers of reading that, that passage is
We can read it
And we can come to the false conclusion that, well, Psalm one is a poem about
Reading
The Bible. And although
It is
That, that that's not really what it's about. That instead it's a
Poem
About the kind of person that we
All want to
Become. And we become that person through reading the
Bible. That, that it's
Describing someone first and foremost by saying that they are
Blessed, very first word,
Saying, blessed. Now, now that word
Has a
Whole bunch of different cultural meanings and connotations, but in its original Hebrew language, here's that,
That word
Blessed and what it means, it's talking about someone who's stable.
It's
Talking about someone who's
Whole.
It's talking about someone who's constant.
It's
Called talking about someone who's enviable. And here here's their meaning of enviable.
This is the type of person that you would look at that
Person and you'd say, I want
Whatever they've got.
Like, I don't know what they have in their life, but there is just something about their
Joy.
There's something about their life. There's something about
Who they are that
I'm looking at them, and I'm saying, I want that in my
Life.
Someone says that that person, that blessed person is in
Fact blessed because their life is rooted. It gives us this picture, this idea of this tree that is
By a stream of water,
That it's rooted and it's healthy
And
It's stable
And it's growing fruit. And then in the second verse, it gives us the how, what? Well,
How do I get that? It tells us that we have to delight
In the law of the
Lord,
That we find our delight in scripture, and then we meditate on it day and night. Now. Now here's the challenge I I think that always happens with the Bible, is it's very hard to delight in the Bible most of the time when, when someone decides that they need to read the Bible, more rarely is the motivator delight. Most of the time the motivator is guilt. Well, like par probably right now, some of you are already feeling guilty. You're like, gosh, he's talking about the Bible. And I don't read it nearly enough. Like, like there's very few people in the room right now that if you said, how many of you think you read the Bible too much? They're like, that's me just way too much of my time, energy, and effort spent in the Bible. But if we said, how many of you think that you don't spend enough time reading the Bible?
I mean, that's just pretty much universally all of us. And here's the thing about our motivations. Oftentimes what motivates us is the wrong thing. So, so maybe the motivation is just a New Year's resolution. Hey, I'm gonna do it this time. I'm gonna try harder. And we jump into it and it doesn't work. 'cause Billy's trying more. Maybe, maybe you just felt guilty, and so you're like, oh, I, I just, I, I felt shame and I felt guilted. And so guilt will will take us a certain distance, but it won't take us all the way. Guilt ultimately is a bad motivator. So, so maybe your experience with the Bible has been this, that you start a new year or you get guilted into it and you say, I'm gonna read the whole Bible. And so, so what we do is we tend to start a genesis, the very beginning of the Bible first page.
And probably for that first month, you're like, man, I'm cruising. Genesis kind of reads like a narrative, like a story. It's not bad, it's got some weird stuff in it, but I, I can track through that. And then you get to Exodus, and that's not bad. There's some cool stuff that happens in Exodus, and then you hit Leviticus. And Leviticus is where reading plans go to die because you start reading a Leviticus, you're like, man, this is boring. You're like, this is maybe the worst narratives novel I've ever read in my entire life. And so maybe let just maybe you slog through Leviticus enough to get done with it. Then you hit the book of numbers. And as the name implies, it's a lot of numbers in that book. A lot of genealogies, lots of counting. And, and then you just, you just give up and, and you stop.
You say, Hey, this doesn't work for me. So, so what psalms one is telling us is that the way that we are motivated to, to reading scripture shouldn't just be out of, oh, I have to do it. But instead delight that, that it gives us this, this idea that when we delight that, that leads us to meditate on God's word. Now, now probably if you're like me, I, I grew up and, and I was taught this about the Bible, okay? The way that you read the Bible is you open it up and you read a passage. And after you read the passage, you try and understand the passage. You try and figure out, okay, what is that passage trying to say? And, and then you try and figure out the application, okay, what does this mean for me? And then you end by saying, okay, now I'm gonna pray a prayer and say, God, please help apply this to my life through the Father, the Holy Spirit, in Jesus name.
Amen. And while that is a, a, there's a value to that method. That's not really the right way to read scripture be because scripture tells us the right read to read scripture. It tells us right there in Psalm one, it says that, that we first delight in the law in scripture. And then it says that we should meditate on it. So, so what does it mean? 'cause That word meditate has all kinds of different feelings to it. But that's what the word says, that we should meditate on scripture. That to meditate means that you stay with God's word long enough for it to stay with you. And so, so instead of approaching the Bible, as I'm reading this for information, that that's the wrong way to approach the Bible. Instead, we, we should approach the Bible and read it for transformation. And the way that we do that I is by meditating on it.
So it's better to meditate on a single verse than it is to read 19 chapters and just read through it, read through it, read through it, read through it, check the box now to meditate on it, to, to spend time dwelling on what it is and what it's saying and how it applies to my life. And so Psalm one gives us, it gives us this equation. It says that if we have delight in God's word, and then you add to that meditating on God's word, that's gonna lead us to having roots, deep roots like a tree. And if we have those deep roots that will produce fruit. Now, now here's the challenge of that. I have found in life. Everybody wants fruit in our life, but rarely do we wanna do the work to get the roots, like just in general, fruit sounds great, results sound great, but the roots part, man, that sounds challenging and difficult, eh, new Year's resolutions is a great example.
I like, I think everybody wants to be in better shape than we are right now. Like, I'd love to be in better shape. Like, I'd love to be healthier. I'd love to eat healthier, but the work it takes to do those things, that's the part that's really hard and challenging. I remember when I was in sixth grade, my, my guy who ended up mentoring me, who was our junior high intern, he taught me how to play golf. I'd never played golf before. And I, I found that either you grew up in a golf family or you didn't grow up in a golf family. And I did not grow up in a golf family. And so sixth grade is when I started playing the game. People ask sometimes, are you a golfer? And I said, well, I, I enjoy golf. I wouldn't describe myself as a golfer.
Like that's a high bar. And it all started in sixth grade when we go to a golf range. And, and, and we, we hit a handful of buckets of balls. And I, I'm hinting for probably 30, 45 minutes. And eventually I turn to him and, and I ask this question, I say, how much longer will it take for me to get good at this? And he just kind of chuckles. And I remember he, he said, here's what's gonna happen in golf is you're gonna go play golf. And all of a sudden you, you're gonna maybe be having a terrible game, but you're gonna hit a shot. And that shot is gonna be perfect. It's gonna go exactly where it's supposed to go. It's gonna land exactly where it's supposed to land. It's gonna feel right when the ball hits the club, the swing, everything about it. And that moment, you're gonna fall in love with the game. And, and there's gonna be a small voice in the back of your mind that says, I'm pretty good at this
With a little bit of practice. I
Could be awesome at this. And he said, and in the very next shot, you're gonna, you're gonna think you're doing the exact same thing and you're gonna top the ball and it's gonna dribble out like six feet in front of you, and you're gonna hate the game of golf. And he said that in a nutshell is the next 30 years of
Your life that
Welcome to the game of golf. And, and that's, we
Wanna be good
Like instantaneously, but that's not how
It works.
And if we want the roots
That God
Is talking about, that can spiritually happen in our life, it doesn't happen instantaneously. The first time that I read the Bible, it happens when I
Delight
In God's word and I meditate on God's word, that that starts leading to roots. And ultimately those
Roots lead to fruit. So, so, so
How then do I do that if Psalm one says, I'm
Supposed to delight,
I'm supposed to meditate. How
Do I accomplish
That? Turn with me to Mark chapter one, verse 35, if you've
Got
Your devotional and you started last Sunday, then today's
Devotional verse is this verse,
Here's what it says in Mark 1 35 And rising very early in the morning, while it
Was still dark, he, Jesus departed
And went out to a desolate
Place.
And there he
Prayed.
Now, mark does something a little bit different than a couple of
The other
Gospels that, that mark just jumps right into the action. So he doesn't tell the birth of Jesus, he doesn't tell the genealogy of Jesus, that Mark just
Opens
The page and Jesus is doing ministry. And so in the first
Chapter, we see Jesus
Performing miracles and teaching, and the crowd is all of a sudden pressing up against Jesus. They want his time 'cause he's a really important person. And the verse before this, we see that he stayed up the night before,
Very, very late,
Possibly all night long ministering to people and healing people and teaching people. And then verse 35 says that very
Early
In the morning, while
It is still dark
Outside, Jesus
Gets up, goes away to a solitary place
And spends time in prayer. Now, the myth that that we tend to have
Is, is that we are just so
Busy and so important, have so many things going on that we just don't to have time for this. And, and if Jesus was healing people and everybody wanted to be around him, he could have spent time that morning, very early in the morning while it's still
Dark, get up, goes off
And starts healing some more people. But he doesn't do that. That would've been a good thing to do with his time. And yet he intentionally says that's not the best thing to do with his time. So instead of doing that,
He
Chooses instead of doing something that could have been good and does something that he's modeling to us
That is better,
That the most important person that has
Ever lived
Recognized that he needed a rhythm in his life where
He
Got alone by himself and spent time in prayer. And it leads me to this question. It's a hard question for me. And that is simply this, when was the last time that you
Were alone
And, and I mean truly alone, alone, and you weren't reaching for something, specifically reaching for your phone. When was the last time you were in a room that had no screens and your cell phone was either off or it was out of your reach or in a completely different room and you just sat alone by yourself? For most of us, we don't like doing that because it's a terrifying experience. It's an intimidating experience. Be because initially my, my, my mind is going through all kinds of different things, but then once it starts to settle, it starts to contemplate and evaluate. And there's a part of me that, that wants to go grab my phone and, and check an email or check a text message or check what's going on. Because what we live in this anxious generation where every time we, we see those things, we get this dopamine hit and we're so addicted to that dopamine hit.
But but here's the danger of that, that it's really hard to build a deep life when we're in a loud life and we have so much noise and so much stuff and so many things and voices and distractions around us. When was the last time that you just got alone and spent time by yourself and had deep thoughts and specifically leaned into the word of God? Because here's what the truth of scripture would tell us. It's that roots, those those roots that Psalm one is talking about. Roots grow in the quiet when we're alone by ourselves with God's word. Now. Now let me show you the why. Why do we spend time with God's word? Look what it says in second Timothy chapter three, verse 16 and 17, second Timothy chapter three, starting in verse 16. It says, all scripture is breathed out by God.
Now pause for a second. For a long time, different translations would use this word, all scripture is inspired by God. And that's, that's a good word. It's a bad translation because if you look at the Greek word for breathed out by God, it it's one word that that is really two Greek words that are merged together. It's the word pneumo, which which is breath or spirit. And it's the word for God. And they merge those together. This is an odd Greek word that we see almost nowhere else in scripture. And and very rarely do we see it even in the first century in Greek writings. So, so, so Paul, who's the author of two Timothy, he's intentionally choosing this word for God and breath at the same time. And he's telling us that, that the Bible all scripture is the breath of God.
That's the, that's the literal understanding of it. And now, I, I think that's distinctively different than just being inspired by God because I think what Paul is doing is he's hearkening back to Genesis and the creation story. And in the creation story we see that God creates man and woman, and then he breathes life into them. That's what gives them their soul, their spirit. This picture of God breathing life into dust. And and Paul is picking up on this concept, and he's saying, for your life and my life that the, the Bible, that scripture is the breath of God breathing into us. And then he gives us the, the why that the what's the outcome? All scriptures breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training and righteousness that the man of God may be complete equipped for every good work.
So, so he talks about the breath of God and then gives us these four very tangible things that he says, here's what we get as a result of spending time in God's word. The first is teaching that, that he's saying that the word of God, the Bible helps us to know what is true in a world where there are so many voices and so many different things pressing in on us, trying to form us and trying to shape us on what we believe and who we're becoming. That the Bible is intended to help us to know what is true. It's also intended to show to us what is wrong. And specifically what reproof is talking about is pointing out what's wrong in my life, that I spend time in God's word and then it's going to step on my toes. It's gonna point out some things to me that, that are uncomfortable things to me.
And it's gonna tell me that I am sinful and it's gonna tell me that I am prideful. It's gonna tell me that I'm greedy. It's gonna tell me that I'm lustful. It's gonna tell me that I'm selfish. It's gonna step on my toes in some ways to make me uncomfortable in order then to give me correction. Correction goes with reproof. 'cause Reproof is gonna show me what's wrong. Correction is gonna show me how to fix it. It's not gonna just point out, Hey, these things are messed up. It's also gonna say, and here's what you do about it. In order to give me training, it's gonna show me how to grow those deep roots that Psalm one is talking about. How, how do I get those deep roots through training, through the training that comes through God's word? And here's the thing about the Bible.
The Bible doesn't just tell you what you want to hear. It tells you what you need to hear. And and I found in life, I, I think that's pretty rare. I think a lot of people just tell us what they think that we want to hear them say. Like, maybe you're one of those people that, that you tend to tell people whatever it is that they want hear. And so you're around one group of people and they talk a certain way, and then you just jump right in. Yeah, hey, I agree with that. And then you're with a different group of people that believe something totally different than that group. And then you hear them talk and you're like, you're right. I agree with you a hundred percent. Whatever it is that I think you want to say, I'm gonna say that. Like, I, I don't want to irritate anybody.
I don't wanna step on any toes. I just want you to like me. And so that's what I'm going to say, and that that can be enjoyable in our life. But I don't know that that's the best thing in our life. And I think the truth is there's a lot of things that just tell us what we want to hear. I think AI sometimes actually does that. Like I, I, I used tragedy PT for a handful of different things. I I used a handful of different AI stuff. I, I think there's value in it. Not too long ago I've got a 13-year-old that's, that's our oldest. He's 13, so he is a handful full of years away from going into college. So we're starting to have those conversations about what do you wanna be when you grow up? And of course you're trying to guide them in a direction that's an employable direction.
Like that's part of what you're trying to do as a parent. Like, Hey, that sounds like a great passion project on the side as a hobby, but let's talk about what pays the bills. Like that's part of what you're doing right now. And, and I I'm starting to look at AI and wonder, well, what jobs are gonna exist five years from now, or 10 years from now, or 20 years from now? And so I thought, who better to ask? What jobs will AI replace than ai? And so I asked, I asked Chad, GPTI, I simply said, Hey, what are the jobs that are the most safe from AI in the future? Tell me what jobs thinking about my kid, what jobs could he pursue that he doesn't have to worry about AI one day taking that job away from? And here's the answer that, that my Chad gave me.
Jobs most protected from AI replacement tend to involve one or more of the following. Number one, deep human relationships or trust-based roles such as pastors,