Welcome to the Bethel Church Sermon of the Week.

We hope you enjoy this message by our special guest speaker.

For more information about this podcast and other resources, visit bethel.com.

I want to talk to you guys about something I'm deeply passionate about and that I think is probably so essential that it's overlooked.

I want to talk about something so simple and so basic and so easy to let go of because popular culture rewards the outworked.

Rewards the overworking, the hustle, the grind,

your productivity.

And it's so easy to overlook this part because popular culture rewards what you can show them.

And I want to talk to you about something no one else will see, except when it shows the fruit of it. I don't know if you

know this about bamboo trees, but they'll grow underground for really long periods of time.

Really long periods of time, they'll grow underground. And you could like think, I planted this

bamboo tree and it is not succeeding.

It is not working, but it is going down.

And then all of a sudden, in a matter of weeks or days, that thing will shoot 80 feet and skyrocket.

But if you measure a bamboo tree's growth, the same way you would measure another tree's

growth, you would consider that bamboo tree a failure.

And popular culture sometimes wants to see all these things that you can show them to gauge

your success, who you are in the world, but you're growing something so deep, no one knows about it.

No one can see it. You don't really talk about it in a way that makes it so that they know exactly what's

going down, but something is happening for you. But I know the altar of productivity is full of

offerings. The altar of productivity is full of offerings and it's people who are burnt out, tired,

exhausted, digitally distracted, feeling inner chaos, impatient, restless, and wondering why.

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