Do you think of yourself as a skeptical person. you know, kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Do you see kind of the world with that. half empty glass instead of half full. That mentality is what some people call cynicism.
And today we're gonna learn how pervasive it is, how it steals our joy. and how we can learn. to make it go away. Stay with me. Thanks for listening to this Edition of Living on the Edge with Shipping Room.
We are an international teaching and discipleship ministry that motivates Christians to live like Christians.
Well, as many of you know, Chip's our regular Bible teacher for this daily program, but for this series, he's passed the mic to our friend Jenny Allen.
Now Jenny is an accomplished author, national speaker, and founder of the If Gathering Events. We're a little over halfway through her series, Get Out of Your Head.
So far, Jenny's identified a handful of toxic thoughts that can rot our minds and provided biblical remedies to combat them. And to help you continue to get the most out of this series, let me encourage you to download our message notes. They contain Jenny's outline, scripture references, and more. Get them by visiting the broadcasts tab at livingonthege.org. App Listeners tap Fill in Notes.
Okay, if you're ready, here's Jenny with her message, The Antidote for Cynicism.
So we are diving into the different enemies that attack our mind. And today we're going to talk about one that I see everywhere. And the tricky one with this is it's actually valued by most of us. It's not something we typically fight because I think it's something that we respect in people. It's something we think is really helpful in life.
And it's called cynicism. And I see it everywhere.
So I don't know if you even notice it in yourself.
So I wanted to read a few questions because honestly, I think we've all become cynical, but it's kind of the air we breathe.
So we don't even notice it. I want to ask you a few questions that would kind of be a good self-diagnostic tool to see if you are cynical.
So, do you get annoyed when people are optimistic?
So, I want you to answer these. If you can jot them down, if you're sitting somewhere, if you can't, just answer them in your head. Do you get annoyed when people are optimistic? When someone is nice to you, do you wonder what that person wants? Do you constantly feel misunderstood?
When things are going well, are you waiting for the bottom to fall out? Do you quickly notice people's flaws or faults? Do you worry about getting taken advantage of? Are you guarded when you meet someone new? Do you wonder sometimes why people just can't get it together?
Are you sarcastic? Yeah. I asked these questions to my team and they all started out. The reason I actually wrote those questions was because they all started out like, yeah, I struggle with all these enemies. I know all these enemies that you wrote about, except for cynicism.
I don't think I'm very cynical.
So I thought, I bet they are. I know they are.
So I wrote these questions and then I made them answer them. And they all were like, oh my gosh, I had no idea I was so cynical.
So I don't know how you feel right now, but I think a lot of us relate to those questions and struggle with these things. Cynicism is an especially powerful tool from the enemy because when you and I are struck by it, we don't see our need to be helped. We get arrogant and we separate ourselves from getting help, from needing people we think we know more than everybody else. I want to talk about what cynicism is. Cynicism is this idea that we're looking for the bad to keep the bad from hurting us.
It's protection. It's making sure that we're not getting taken advantage of, making sure that somebody's not using us. And in a world where people can be really hurtful, Cynicism can sometimes be helpful, so we start to prize it. We start to feel educated, like we're not naive. I want to tell you a story about my team.
My team is so amazing. I love them so much. And they're great friends, all of them. And when I think about them, they're not notably cynical for crying out loud. They moved to Dallas, a lot of them, to serve God and to be a part of this ministry.
They're so surrendered and they're constantly obedient. But we were sitting around dinner when I was working on this book and this project. And one of the girls there was like, if I just choose to see the good in things and I just choose to think positively, I'm going to get taken advantage of. And one of the girls that was there, she doesn't work for us any longer, but she is just delightful, literally the girl, like little sunshine on a stick. Like she just is happy, smiley all the time, positive about everything.
Even her voice is like sweet as syrup. Like she is just so sweet and kind. And so she's sitting next to me. And I looked at Elizabeth and I said, Elizabeth, you tell me what you think about that because she is that. She models it.
She walks around with joy in her heart every minute of every day. She sees the best in everybody.
Some people would think of it as naive. And she said, so what?
So what if I get taken advantage of? I'm happier. I was like, that's so brilliant. Like, we're choosing, it's our mind, y'all. We're not talking about our circumstances.
We're talking about the thing we live with day in and day out, day in and day out. And if it's conditioned and constantly looking for the negative, it will find the negative. It will find the negative in our family members. It will find the negative in our friendships. It will find the negative in our circumstances, in our jobs, in our callings.
It will find the negative in everything if we let it. And so, this idea of cynicism has actually, I feel like it's this slow leak. Like, right now, my tire, every time I get in the car, it's going down and it's taking like weeks to get to where it's a dangerous level. But, like, I've noticed there's a slow leak and it's extra slow, but it keeps alerting me. Like, it's getting lower and lower and lower.
And that's exactly what cynicism is: it's a slow leak of joy in our lives. Because if we fixate on negative, then we are not ever going to be happy. You know, and I know as Christians, we've got a lot bigger goals than happiness, right? Like that's not our ultimate goal. But at the end of the day, what we think about and the joy that inhabits our mind and our hearts is and should be a goal of Christianity.
Who wants to follow after people that are following after a God that doesn't issue joy? You know, I mean, I don't want that. We have a God that issues ultimate joy, like ultimate hope, ultimate peace, peace that surpasses understanding, scripture tells us.
So we should be reflecting those things if we actually believe this and if we're actually following God. And yet, what cynicism does is it makes us question all of our authorities so we never submit. It makes us question all of our institutions so we never participate. It makes us question all of our friendships so we never connect. It makes us question our family members so we never ever feel safe.
I mean, it will erode our confidence and our joy in all of the gifts that God's given us to help us follow him, to help us grow up in the faith, to help us live out full and abundant and obedient lives.
So, how do we change this?
Well, one, I think we've got to be careful what we're feeding our souls. And for me, really candidly, I had to get off Twitter. If you go there right now, you will see one tweet that I've written like in the last six months, because even though I'm sure that's a mechanism that could grow my platform, it was not feeding my soul. And I just decided, you know what? I'm not closing my account yet, but I'm never going there.
And I would say I go there maybe every few months just to check in, see what's happening with friends because some of my friends are only on Twitter. And then I'll also just browse through, you know, messages and that kind of thing. But I don't participate on Twitter. And the reason why is because it always made me cynical. Every time I got off Twitter, I doubted every single thing about God, everything about church, everything about the hope for humanity.
It just felt like everything there is believing the worst and everything. And I wanted to believe the best. And I didn't know how to fight for that when that was the constant input in my life.
So I just left.
Now, that is not to say I do not stay educated, guys. I'm a political person. I was a poli sci minor in. college. Like I care about politics.
I just don't think they're the ultimate hope.
So I don't over engage there, but I care.
So I stay up to date. And when something's really interesting, I'll go read more about it. If there's a war that's brewing that I want to know more about, I'll go read more about it. But I don't sit there and consume my news from angry people on Twitter. You know, we moved to Dallas and I decided I'm going to be really careful about who are my friends.
I'm just going to choose the people that are going to input into my life, not the people I love, because we need to be loving people that are not healthy and that need us, you know, but I'm talking about the people that are going to be in my ear every day that are really close to me. I'm going to make sure that they are positive people. I know this sounds so cheesy, but. I needed people that were life-giving, people that saw the good in the world and saw the good in me and saw the good and not naively so, but I want to speak to the naivety issue because I think sometimes we can just see positive people and assume they're naive. When I think of my friend Elizabeth, she has actually been through a lot.
When you hear her story, you're like, gosh, you have been through a lot.
So she's not naive to suffering. She's not naive to disappointment. She's not naive to people hurting her. She just has chosen a better way. And she, you know, she's selfish about it.
She's like, I mean, it's just a better way to live. I don't enjoy being negative about everyone all the time. I don't want to live that way. And I think that's what we've got to do: we need to get a little bit selfish and zealous for ourselves and our minds and saying, you know what? This is not leading to life and peace for me.
And I don't know what your Twitter is or what your thing is that just is not leading to life and peace, but you need to notice it in yourself. Like, gosh, this is causing a cynical spirit in me towards people. And that could be gossipy friends. That could be friends that are always complaining about their husbands. That could be friends that are always complaining about their job.
It could be coworkers. And I'm not saying you never spend time with them, but you guard your mind and you don't spend all your time with them. And when you're spending time with them, you have a plan of attack. I do this with my kids when they go through seasons where their friends are making bad choices with their words and like gossiping all the time. I'm like, you don't need to cut off your friends and not have them anymore necessarily because that's, you know, certain years of our lives.
Gossip is just part of it. But how do we turn the conversation? How do we bring life and peace into a conversation? And you, you have those little sound bites that turn the conversation around. And so I think we've just got to be light in dark places, but we also need places that are full of light and that bring energy and life and joy into us.
You're listening to Living on the Edge will return you to Jenny Allen's message in just a minute. But let me quickly share with you: God has called us to do incredible ministry work all around the world. And when you partner with us financially, you're part of what we do.
So if you'd like to join us, go to livingonthege.org. And we appreciate you giving whatever God leads you to give.
Well, with that, here's Jenny.
So then the question is: if I'm already cynical, how do I fight this? What does it look like? And I'm going to tell you, this one took me on a journey, but it didn't end up in an obvious place. This one for me was when I thought back. to what has interrupted my cynicism.
I saw a theme. And that theme was delight that I get less cynical when I see Delight because we don't see it coming. It is delightful. It hits something in us that our rational, reasonable self didn't see coming. And that's what happened to me.
A song can do that to me. Beauty is God's evidence of something far more wonderful that's coming. It's this hope. It paints a picture of a world that is beyond the one that we live in now. a world that is coming.
That's what beauty does. It reminds us there's something coming that's bigger and better and more beautiful than what we live in right now. Evidence that there's a creator who is loving and profoundly delightful. And so when we see beauty, we find ourselves delighted. We find ourselves enjoying God again.
We find ourselves our hearts tender. That's how I feel in worship so often is that I'll be worshiping and all of a sudden I'm in tears, even though my heart has been hard for a week. I'll all of a sudden be. Crying before God because worship has just pierced something in me that isn't rational, but it causes me to delight and enjoy God's delight over me. And so I want to talk about this because I don't think we value delight.
I think we don't value a lot of these things that God's given us as weapons. And we've talked about in the past about God delighting over us, but think of the ways God delights you. Like just look outside right now, out of your window, whether it's raining or snowing or leaves are falling or whatever it looks like right now, or it's bright and sunny, whatever it looks like outside, there's delight. In God's creation, there's delight in the way he built seasons, the way he built, you know, trees, the way he built a leaf. I remember looking at a leaf one time, and I actually led a bunch of girls through a whole Bible study one time, just looking at leaves and realizing, like, gosh, he made every leaf on earth differently.
Like, that should blow our minds. Like, there is delight and power of God expressed to us daily through creation. There is delight over, have you ever seen a baby born? I mean, when you see a life brought into the world, there's something just so delightful. My little niece right now is probably the cutest human I have ever met.
Like, literally, I have the cutest human as a niece that I have. I know my own children are like, Mom, what about us?
Well, I'm sorry, she is the cutest baby I've ever met in my whole life. And I literally, when I'm with her, I'm, it's like a, I'm mesmerized. I can't even stand it. I like study every finger, every toe. I look at fingers and toes all the time, never think anything about it.
But what about a baby like expresses something? About God and his delight over us. And I think these are the things that God's given us to remind us: like, hey, I'm safe, I'm trustworthy, I'm likable, and my world is good. And yes, there is sin in institutions sometimes. And yes, there is sin in people.
And what cynicism says is: so never trust people.
So, never trust the church.
So, never trust God. And what delight says is: there is good too, and there is truth. trustworthy too, and there is redemption too. And what delight says is there's joy. And when we think about God, we can get in these places where my team and I were doing a little devo on this recently, and they all shared this idea that there's this guilt they feel when things go well for them.
Like there's something about to happen that's bad, something's going to come that's bad. Again, there's no promise that it won't. But why is that our immediate thing when something good happens to us? Why is that our immediate thing when there's something joyful to celebrate rather than sitting in the joy, delighting in the gift? Enjoying what God has given us as a good thing because He is good, because He gives good things, Scripture says.
Romans 8:28. And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good for those who are called according to His purpose. This is true. God is doing that. And yes, some days.
And some people In some situations, will disappoint us. But I would rather live full of joy, believing the good and get burned every once in a while than constantly waiting to get burned and constantly seeing the negative. That is, A sad way to live, and I'm not gonna do it. I'm going to keep believing good for our country. I'm going to keep believing good for my church.
I'm going to keep believing good for my family. I'm going to keep believing good for this generation. I'm going to believe good because I believe we rise to what we believe. I believe we rise to that. I see this in my kids all the time.
When I watch Cooper, when I speak life over my son, he will rise to that. This was yesterday morning. I'm sending him to school and I'm saying, buddy, you're a leader. You are a leader. Act like one today.
And he came in, and afterwards, after school, he's like, Mom, it was a great day. It was a great day. He rose to that compliment. He rose to what I saw him as. And we've got to realize that how we think influences what we say.
And what we believe about ourselves, and what we believe about the people around us. And if we can start to speak life over them. It's called being life-giving. The opposite of cynical, it's life-giving. It's life speaking, it's life thinking, it's a different way to live, and the world is aching.
For it. When you live this way, yes, some people will think you're naive, but most people will just want to go to coffee because they need people that can speak truth and not just speak it, but actually believe it for them. This is Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram, and we're in the middle of our guest teacher Jenny Allen series, Get Out of Your Head. Chip will join us in studio in just a minute to share his application for today's message, The Antidote for Cynicism. Let me ask you, what drives your thought life?
What influences the way you think? Is it anxiety, loneliness, insecurity? Whatever it is, do you feel trapped by it? Like, no matter how hard you try, your mind drifts back to these harmful patterns. In this series, author and speaker Jenny Allen calls out seven toxic thoughts that derail our connection to God.
Discover the powerful antidotes God's given us to break free from these dangerous mindsets. Join Jenny to learn what you can do to fight and win the war for your mind. And if you're wanting to do a deeper study on this topic, let me encourage you to get Jenny's book, Get Out of Your Head. For complete details, go to livingontheedge.org or call us at 888-333-6003. That's 888-333-6003 or livingontheedge.org.
App Listeners Tap Special Offers.
Well, our Bible teacher Chip Ingram is with me in the studio now. And Chip, Jenny wrapped up her message on the harmfulness of cynicism with a challenge to us to be life-giving. And that's really what we're all about here at Living on the Edge, isn't it? Helping Christians really live like Christians. Do you have a story that really drives that idea home?
I sure do, Dave. At some point, you wonder, you know, is Living on the Edge really making a difference? And I got a note in the mail that I just have to share. Listen to this, dear Chip. We don't have enough words to show our gratitude.
At one point, my husband and I both thought things were so bad they'd never get better. But thankfully, I heard one of your sermons that spoke to our situation.
So I started listening on a regular basis.
Now my husband listens too. Through God's transformation in our lives, we started seeing restoration in our family. Even though we're still a work in progress, we can see God's hand making direct changes in our lives. Recently, we decided to make a monthly donation to help keep your broadcast going. We realize that if your ministry helped us this much, then it can help others too.
Thank you for all that you're doing to further in God's kingdom. Signed, DR. And I just remind you, you know, we're all so personally focused and we're human that, you know, over a million people this week will hear what you're hearing. And not only that, but then the broadcast and the teaching and the small groups will go to China, to the Middle East, and places all around the world. Because people pray and because people partner financially.
And so, if you're one of those partners, can I just tell you thank you very, very much? If you're one of those partners that kind of gives now and then and would ever consider prayerfully to say, you know, I bet I could give just a little a month, boy, those monthly partners really help us understand what we can project and making budgets. It's a huge help. And if you have never partnered with us financially, would you just today say, Lord, is this something you want me to do? And if He nudges you and says yes, follow that good prompting.
Great encouragement, Chip.
So if you'd like to be a part of growing this ministry, pray about becoming a monthly partner. Your gifts will go places and accomplish ministry work like you wouldn't believe. Set up a monthly donation today at livingonthege.org or by calling 888-333-6003. That's 888-333-6003 or visit livingonthege.org. App Listeners tap donate.
Thanks for your support.
Well, before we go, Chip, let's get to that application you promised. Mm-hmm. Thanks, Dave. Out of everything that Jenny's been teaching so far, I'd have to say that fighting cynicism has been a battle that I've just had to, I mean. Fight over and over and over and over again.
You know, when your desire is to see things healed, your desire is to see new life, you want restoration, you just are longing and longing for things to get better. And it just seems on some days that Nothing gets better. At least that's the way you feel. And you get this lens, and you'll meet someone young and zealous with all these great ideas. And here's how you know you're cynical.
You just sort of nod your head and think, yeah, I remember when I used to believe that stuff and say that stuff. And I've really tried to battle not becoming cynical because over the years I've had a lot of Great opportunities given by God to sit in a back room with a bunch of speakers, Christian leaders. And it's interesting, I'll hear people get up. in front of some very large audiences. But then have some private conversations where You know they Down deep, don't believe that there can be any real change, that they're very, very discouraged.
And don't get me wrong, the great majority of Christian leaders that I've had the privilege of hanging out with are very godly men and women. But what I saw was as people got older, especially. They didn't just lose their idealism, they started to lose the belief. And see, I think there's a false paradigm that we get. It's the all or nothing paradigm.
And when we see evil and tragedy and difficulty and division like we're seeing, and when there's pandemics and wars and all those things, especially if you allow your mind to be filled with multiple news broadcasts or be around really negative people, all those things are toxic over time to breed cynicism. And I would just remind you. That life is a patchwork affair. And the patchwork affair in a fallen world is there is magnificent beauty. The beauty of a child being born, the beauty of a sunset, the beauty of that amazing sense and feeling of being in love, the beauty of watching someone recover from a tragic accident, the beauty of building something together, the beauty of watching orphans and widows being taken care of, the beauty of just all around us.
But that beauty is always mixed in with sadness and sorrow, betrayals and disappointments. What I love about the scriptures and what Jenny's trying to help us see is we can't just look through the filter of the difficult, the painful. I love her reminder that heaven There's an eternal perspective. There is a place. There is a future when everything is going to be right.
but it's not here. And when you expect heavenlike circumstances in a fallen world, you set yourself up. to be a cynic. And you know, when you're a cynic, you don't believe. You don't trust, and over time you get negative.
And so, let me just encourage you. Look for the beauty. Thank God for all the good. and in the difficult, in the darkness, in the challenges, in the corruption, Pray. And just say, Lord, I know.
It won't always be like this, but let me be a light. Let me refuse to stop believing and becoming negative and cynical. Let me in my little world. Be positive. Be biblical.
Be loving. and make a difference where I live. Thanks, Chip. And as we close, I want you to know that as a staff, we ask the Lord to help you take whatever your next faith step is.
Now, if there's a way we can help, we'd love to do that. Give us a call at 888-333-6003 or connect with us at livingontheedge.org. And while you're there, take a moment to look through our resources on various topics, many of them absolutely free.
Well, coming up on the next edition of Living on the Edge, we'll continue our guest teacher Jenny Allen series, Get Out of Your Head.
So we hope you'll join us then. But until then, I'm Dave Drewy. Thanks for listening.
