Welcome back to the morning mindset. This is our time to get our minds aligned with the truth of God so that we can live this day in a way that pleases him, a way that honors him.

And I don't pretend to think that that means we can get our mind right in the morning and

then perfectly live the whole day.

I know that the battle is real and all day long we're

vacillating back and forth with temptations and difficulties and struggles and

all the habits. But my friends as we get our minds aligned with the truth of God every day, as we begin

the day, we begin to see that those struggles, over time, become less and less dominant in our lives and we're able to actually make progress.

It's like any new discipline that you learn. You have to practice it. You have to keep practicing it and it's over time

that you get better. I remember when I was in junior high school and then moving into

high school I learned how to play the drum set and one of the things you have to do is you learn the drum set you know you've got four different limbs that are operating independently of each other and that's really a mental thing as much as it is a physical dexterity sort of a thing.

But one of the things you have to do is you have to slow it way down and you have to practice very deliberately. Stroke at a time, rhythm at a time and you

slow it down as much as you need to until you're able to get it right and then you keep doing it at that speed until you can do it right without fail.

And then what do you do? You gradually speed it up the next notch and

you do that until you can get it right without fail and on and on and on until you

have the particular beat you're trying to learn mastered at the regular tempo it should

be.

I didn't really intend on telling you about drumming this morning, but I do want to make a point that our Christian life is very much the same way.

We need to slow down.

We need to stop trying to push out this life of perfection all at once and recognize God has given us instruction

and tools to help us grow in our faith but we need to take it step at a time. And one of the very first steps we need to take

is the recognition of what it is we really need in order to pull those things off. In drumming, the recognition that

you need to slow down and try things at a very basic elementary level first was like a watershed moment for me. It enabled me to

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