THE SHARING CHOICE Life s Healing Choices: Part 8

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1 Special thanks to Rick Warren and Saddleback Church for allowing us to be a part of this great series. THE SHARING CHOICE Life s Healing Choices: Part 8 Because we live on a broken planet pain is a part of life. Jesus does not eliminate all your pain in life. He transforms it. He gives purpose to it. You see the significance of it. Three great truths about pain in your life: 1. God says if you give it to Me I will use it for your benefit. 2. God says I will use it for My purposes. 3. God says I will use it to help other people. God never wastes a hurt. But we do. We waste hurts all the time. If you don t learn from your hurts you are destined to repeat them. If we will give God the pieces of our lives, He can transform our problems. Jesus said, Blessed are the peacemakers. God wants to make you a peacemaker. Not just a keeper but a peacemaker. That s what recovery from the habits and hurts and hang-ups is all about. When you begin to help other people in the exact area of your hurt then you have begun true recovery. 2 Corinthians 5 God was in Christ, offering peace and forgiveness to the people of this world. And he has given us the work of sharing his message about peace. God cannot use perfect people because there are none. God only uses broken people because that s all He s got to work with. To help someone else, you don t have to have it all together. You never will here on this side of eternity. You may learn much from the strengths of other people. On the other hand, when I stand up here and tell you my pain or my hurt or my failure then you can not only learn from that but you can relate to it as well. Our weaknesses help other people. This is the Sharing Choice:

2 I choose to yield myself to God to be used to bring God s Good News to others, both by my example and my words. Paul said, I pray that God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ will be kind to you and will bless you with peace! The Father is a merciful God, who always gives us comfort. He comforts us when we re in trouble, so that we can share that same comfort with others in trouble. He comforts us when we re in trouble so we can share the same comfort with others in trouble. We share in the terrible sufferings of Christ, but also in the wonderful comfort that He gives. The greatest ministry of your life will flow out of your pain and not out of your strengths. Who can be more sympathetic to somebody than somebody who has already been through what that person is going through right now? Don t waste your pain. If you hold it in and you hide it and you hold it back, it doesn t do any good. But if you re honest to God and if you re honest to yourself and you re honest with other people, God can use the very thing you hate the most in your life, that you re most disappointed by and you reject the most in your life and wish had never happened. GOD WANTS TO TAKE YOUR BROKENNESS AND BLESS OTHER PEOPLE WITH IT. Four things God wants you to learn to share from your life: 1. The Bible teaches that we need to learn how to share with other people how pain got my attention. Proverbs 20:30 Sometimes it takes a painful situation to make us change our ways. We do not change when we see the light but when we feel the heat. We change when the pain exceeds our fear of change. We change when the pain exceeds the pleasure. It is pain that motivates us. God uses pain for a lot of different reasons in our life. God uses pain to inspect us. Pain will show us what s in us that needs changing.

3 God uses pain to correct us: Pain will make you change the way you do something. Don t do that; do it this way. God uses pain to direct us: Pain will show you the path to go on. God uses pain to perfect us: Pain will build character in your life. Pain is God saying, Hello! Are you listening? Do you think I made you to live a little self-centered clod of a life and to ignore Me forever? God whispers to us in our pleasure. But He shouts to us in our pain. Pain is a warning light. Pain is the bells going off and the wake-up call. 1 Kings 17:7 And it came to pass after a while, that the brook dried up, because there had been no rain in the land. In this story God lets Elijah take a little vacation during a drought. Elijah got quite comfortable. It was like a little resort spa. Birds supernaturally brought food and he didn t have to go hunt for it. It says the water was clear and fresh and there were trees to sleep under. Have you ever had the brook dry up in your life? Like when you lose a job or something you were depending on isn t there anymore. You were depending on that friend for support or on that family member who died. Or you have some kind of structure that you were counting on. The brook will often dry up in your life. Sometimes, God dries the brook up in your life because He doesn t want you doing what He wanted you doing a year ago. He, God, led Elijah to the brook and just as soon as Elijah stayed there he got comfortable and God said, that s not what I want you to do forever. So He dries the brook up. When you talk about your pain with other people, you re going to have a willing ear. But for God to use the pain that s happened in your life for the good of other people and for His purposes and for your benefit, you have to be authentic. To help other people I must be honest about these five things. My feelings.

4 As men there are two feelings we re honest about: When we re hungry and when we want sex. But that s about it. Paul says, We have spoken frankly to you. We have opened our hearts wide. Paul says I didn t just teach you. I opened my heart. I shared my feelings. To have an impact in the lives of others you ve got to learn to share your feelings. My faults. Each of us must bear the faults and burdens of his own. For none of us is perfect. That s pretty easy to admit. Be honest about our faults, and specific about them. My failures. Paul says, Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners - of whom I am the worst. If you read the rest of the passage it says, I helped kill a guy. I stood there while they were stoning Stephen. I persecuted the church. My frustrations. We ve got to stop saying, it doesn t bother me. It s no big deal. Forget it. No, you be honest about your frustrations, the things in your life that you can t seem to get control of. That helps other people. My fears. Paul says, I do admit that I have fears that when I come to you, you ll disappoint me and I ll disappoint you. Paul is saying we re all broken. Why don t we just admit it? If I hold it in, it makes me miserable. It doesn t help anybody else. 2. I need to learn to share what I ve learned through the pain.

5 Since that crisis in your life, since that trouble, since that problem, since that pain, what have I learned from it? It is wise to learn from experience. It is wiser to learn from the experience of others. It s less painful and it s quicker. That s why you need to read the Bible. That s why you need a mentor in your life, no matter how old you are. That s why you need spiritual partners. That s why you need a spiritual small group. Three things that God wants us to learn from our pain: We learn to depend on God s love. Before we know God and His love there are other things we turn to for comfort and to stop pain. When we begin to strip those away, we begin to let God be our comfort; we realize that He s really all we need. 2 Corinthians 1:8-10 We were crushed and overwhelmed and saw how powerless we were to help ourselves; but that was good, because then we put everything in the hands of God, who alone could save us and he did help us! That was good? Crushed and overwhelmed? Yes, it was good because when we finally turn to God we learn He is truly all we need. We often don t learn God is all we need until God is all we have. We learn to follow God s Word. God wants to teach us about himself His power and His love, His grace and His wisdom. He does that through His Word. Often we don t fill our minds with Scripture until it s too late. We learn that we need other people. This is why it s so important that we re in small groups. We need other people when we go through hard times. God uses other people to teach us about ourselves.

6 1 Corinthians 11:11 Remember that in God s plan men and women need each other. He says I created you in my image. I put some of my traits in men and some in women. You need each other. Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 Two people are better than one If one falls down, the other can help him up. But it is bad for the person who is alone and falls, because no one is there to help him up. Usually, we re not willing to face the truth about ourselves until we re forced to. Other people in our lives can encourage us and pray for us. They can also point out these flaws in our character that can help us to grow in Christ and get better. 3. We learn that God can bring good out of bad. You can look at your life and think of times when God brought good out of bad. Romans 8:28 We know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God... Let s look at what this says. First, what does it not say? It doesn t say we know that everything will work out the way I want it to work out. It does not promise that all things will have a happy ending here on earth. This is a broken planet. It s not heaven. Everything doesn t have a happy ending here on earth. We know. In other words, we re not guessing. We know for certain. This is a fact of life. We can be confident. We can be absolutely certain. What do we know? We know God causes. What does that mean? It means your life is not an accident. There s no such thing as random chance. We make mistakes but God never makes mistakes. There are choices God has made, choices I have made, and choices you have made. It s not chance; it s a choice. We know that God causes all things to work together for good. Notice, that verse does not say all things are good. They re not.

7 There s a lot of evil in the world. When little children are stolen from their parents and sold into sex trafficking, that s evil. When world leaders take money and store it in Swiss bank accounts when their people starve to death, that s evil. When people betray each other, that s evil. When people torture each other, that s evil. So not all things are good in the world. Cancer is bad. Molestation is bad. There s a lot of bad in the world. It says God causes all things to work together for good for those who love God. Not separately, but together. There are a lot of things that don t taste good on their own, but you mix them together, they taste good. When it s worked together, individual bitter elements actually come to taste good but they are never good by themselves. There are things in your life you ve experienced that were flat out bitter. And they left a bad taste in your mouth. They weren t good. But God says, I m bigger than the bad and I can work it all together and I can make a cake out of it and it will be delicious. And your life will be delicious. All of those bitter elements put together, I will work them together for good. Can God really bring good out of bad? Oh, yes he can. How about the crucifixion? The death of his Son, that was bad. They tortured Him, they spit on Him, they beat Him, then they hung Him as a shameless criminal. Did God bring any good out of that? Just the salvation of the world. God specializes in bringing good out of bad. We know that God causes everything to work together for good for those who love God. It s not a promise for everybody. It s only for those who are giving God the pieces and saying, God I love you. Take the pieces of my broken life and put them back together. If you re not following Christ, if you don t love God, if you haven t given him every piece of your life, all things are not working together for good in your life. God owes you nothing. He owes you zip. God gives you the choice to love him back and follow His way or go your own way and turn your life into a living hell.

8 If you re going to have life your way, you re stuck with the cost of it. And one day you re going to stand before God and God is going to say, obviously you didn t love me, so have it your way for the rest of eternity. You were made to last forever. You re going to last forever either with God or without him. Note the four women mentioned in Jesus genealogy: Every one of these women had a hurt, a hang-up and a habit. a. Tamar was a mess. She was seduced by a relative. She had two different husbands and they were both total jerks. b. Rahab was a prostitute. But she did the right thing in helping some godly men, so she s on the list. c. Ruth wasn t even Jewish. She was a Moabite who illegally married a Jewish man. The Jews were forbidden to marry non-jews. So her marriage wasn t even legally recognized because she married and broke the Jewish law by marrying a Jewish man. She wasn t Jewish herself. d. Bathsheba had an affair with King David and he had her husband murdered. The point is God chose those four women to be mothers in the line of the deliverer of the Savior of the world. God weaves even our mistakes, even our disappointments, even our hurts, even our sin, into His plans. I want you to think of the biggest mistake in your life right now that you ve committed. Think of the biggest disappointment in your life that you ve experienced. Think of the biggest sins that you have committed in your life that you re most ashamed of. Realize this: that even before you were born God already knew those things were going to happen in your life. And He developed a plan in advance that would bring good out of them. That is the kind of God we worship. That s why we can be optimistic and realistic at the same time. As followers of Jesus Christ, we don t deny our mistakes. We don t hide them in the closet. We don t pretend

9 it didn t happen. God never has a plan B. There are people in your life who have hurt you. They meant it for bad. God intended it for good. It is the grace of God that gets my attention through pain. It is the grace of God that helps me learn things in the pain. And it is the grace of God that brings good out of bad. 4. We learn how Jesus gives us hope. Everybody needs hope to cope. So many people feel hopeless today. As a pastor I talk to them all the time. My life is out of control! I can t seem to change. Nothing seems to work. Life has kicked the hope out of me. God wants you to be a hope dispenser. He wants you to promote hope. It is the core message of Jackson First. I m teaching you how to witness. Jesus said, You will be my witnesses. It is the job of an attorney to press the case, to show the evidence, and to ask for a decision. Not once in Scripture does Jesus say, You will be my attorney. It s not your job to convince people to accept Christ. That s the Holy Spirit s job. But you are called to be a witness. What does a witness do? You share the lessons. Be a witness. That s what God wants you to do.