Welcome back to Blessed are the spiraling. We greet you at every Fresh Life Church,

Artner Church is on the Open Network. Those of you listening in on the podcast, it's an honor and a

privilege to have you here as we talk about how the chaotic search for significance can lead

to joy through life's shifting seasons. And today, the title of the message is self-inflicted spiraling. Self-inflicted spiraling.

Because for all of us, there are going to be difficult times, challenging seasons in our lives

that are unwelcome, unwanted, and unwarranted in many ways. We didn't do anything to deserve them.

We didn't go inviting them. We didn't do anything to deserve them, right? We didn't go

inviting them. We didn't go poke any bees nest or anything like that. And those are hard enough

to deal with. The existential crisis that comes just because of the natural process of time and

aging and one season giving way to another or loss of some kind, where you didn't do anything,

you didn't cause it, you didn't trigger it, you didn't precipitate it, those are hard to face,

those are hard to handle. But there are also in our lives storms that come our way through our

own making that we did, in fact, bring them about.

And that's what we see in scripture.

Hosea chapter 8, verse 7, says,

they sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.

The stock has no bud.

It shall never produce meal.

If it should produce, aliens would swallow it up.

One of the things we read about in scripture from beginning to end is the law of sewing and

reaping, that God has designed it in this universe to where what we sew leads to what comes out

by way of reaping. What you sow to the flesh, you reap according to the flesh, what we sow leads to what comes out by way of reap. What you sow to the flesh,

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