Breaking Free: Week One 1 Remember the song My Way by Frank Sinatra? The start of the second verse says Regrets, I've had a few, But then again, too few to mention I did what I had to do And saw it through without exemption Frank you had Too few to mention"? Not most people. If you don't have regrets, it means you haven't screwed up. It means you haven't had your heart broken. It means you haven't been bloodied. It means you haven't failed, you haven't failed. Then you aren t human we all have regrets most likely too many to mention! We re beginning a new series today we are calling Breaking Free. The whole concept of this series is about you and me and the hurts in our lives, habits that are messing up our lives and hangups that have caused pain in our lives. Hurts, habits, and hangups, the truth is that we all have them, whether we recognize them or not, and here is the best truth God wants us to find freedom from them. Listen to what God says in Isaiah 57:18-19: I have seen his ways, but I will heal him; I will lead him and restore comfort to him and his mourners, creating the fruit of the lips. Peace, peace, to the far and to the near, says the Lord, and I will heal him. Isn t that great? If you have hurts God says I will heal you if you are lost and and the end of your rope, God says I will lead you. If you are frustrated and anxious and angry, God says I will restore comfort, and if you are restless and tired from struggling God says I will bring you peace. The truth is life is tough. We hurt and we are hurt by other people and we hurt ourselves and we hurt other people. The Bible tells us that we all have sinned, that no one is perfect. That is why this series is for everybody. We all need recovery. Many times when you think of someone who is in recovery it is easy to say those people. We are quick to think it s recovery from addiction something that maybe we have never dealt with But the truth is when it comes to hurts, habits, and hangups there are no those people, it is us and we! Because we haven t lived a perfect life we need recovery! But from what? Recovery from what? Do you ever stay up late when you know you need sleep? Do you ever eat or drink more calories than your body needs? Do you ever feel you ought to exercise but you don t? Do you ever know the right thing to do, but you don t do it? Do you ever know something is wrong, but you do it anyway? Have you ever known you should be unselfish, but you re selfish instead? Have you ever tried to control somebody or something and found it was uncontrollable? If your answer is yes to any of those questions, good news, that means you are human! But is also means that we are in need recovery. The good news is this: regardless of the problem you need the steps to recovery are always the same. In 1935 a couple of guys formulated, based on the the Beatitudes, what are now known as the classic 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and used by hundreds of other recovery groups. The basis is God s Word. Many recovery groups have removed God totally from these steps, but the basis was God s Word initially. Over the next 8 weeks we are going to use the eight letters that spell the word Recovery and look at the 8 principles of recovery.
Breaking Free: Week One 2 The first step THE R IN RECOVERY STANDS FOR REALIZE. Realize I m not God. You might have heard it said like this I admit I am powerless to control my tendency to do wrong things and my life is unmanageable. This tendency to do wrong is what the Bible calls my sin nature. It s that desire to serve ourselves at all costs to be our own god. When we give into our sin well then comes all kinds of problems. We do things that are destructive to ourselves even though they feel good at the moment. We respond to people in ways that hurt them and the relationship. We try to fix the problem and wind up making it worse, many times. Proverbs 14:12 - There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death. This is the struggle of being human with a fallen sin nature. Even after becoming a Christian, our sinful nature still pulls and tugs us the wrong way. The Apostle Paul understood this Romans 7:15-17, For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. Can anyone relate to Paul? We end up doing what we don t want to and not doing what we want to. The first step in recovery is understanding the cause of this problem. There are consequences too that we must deal with then we will look to a cure. So what is the cause of all of our problems We want to be God. We want control.we want to be the one who says what is right and what is wrong. We want to be in charge our lives, we want to call the shots and be at the center of the universe. We want to be the boss, if we want something we get it, if something looks good we take it. Just look at what happened with Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve - You can do anything you want in this beautiful paradise, except one thing don t eat from this certain tree. What did they do? They hightailed it to that tree. Do you remember what Satan said, If you eat this fruit, you will be like God. There it is from the very start, we wanted to be god. We want to be in control. And the more insecure we are the more we want to control, control ourselves, control other people, control what happens around us, in our families, in our work places, in our church. Hundreds of millions of people around the world do crossword puzzles, play Sudoku, or participate in puzzles on their computers, phones, or tablets. Why are puzzles so wildly popular all around the globe? Will Shortz, the crossword editor of The New York Times and NPR, has this to say: We're faced with problems every day in life, and we almost never get clarity. We jump into the middle of a problem, we carry it through to whatever extent we can to find an answer, and then we just find the next thing. [But] with a human made puzzle you have the satisfaction of being completely in control: you start the challenge from the beginning, and you move all the way to the end. That's a satisfaction you don't get much in real life. You feel in control, and that's a great feeling.
Breaking Free: Week One 3 How we control 1. We try to control our image. We want to control what others think of us. Because of this we can be guarded, we can fake it, we can wear masks, we can hide certain parts of our personalities, we can deny our feelings I m not angry, I m not worried, I m not afraid. We don t want people to see the real us so we try to control our image. 2. We try to control other people. Parents try to control kids; kids try to control parents. Wives try to control husbands; husbands try to control wives. People try to control other people. Sometimes to get a decision made you need to play politics we try to manipulate people we use fear or guilt to control or give someone the silent treatment to control them. 3. We try to control our problems. We might be in denial and think, I can handle this it s not a problem. We think we got in all under control and we don t need help, we don t need a counselor or a pair of outside eyes looking at the issue, I will work it out on my own. Hey, we can always quit right and not deal with it anymore. 4. We try to control our pain. Fight or flight right? We can get angry with others or God and fight them try to get them to see the pain that they have brought us. Sometimes this can go extreme and we get abusive, or extremely critical with others all in effort to hide our own pain. Or we try to flee from it. Maybe food has become a way to postpone dealing with it. Or we self-medicate with prescription drugs or alcohol or even relationships to help numb the pain we feel. It s tough to realize that we are not God, we can t control everything. I had a professor in seminary who would say, Bob is Bob and God is God. That s the first step to recovery. We can t control everything, we can t fix everything on our own. Consequences of control What happens when we try to be God and control everything? Fear happens When I try to control everything I get afraid. When God came looking for Adam and Eve remember what Adam said, I was afraid, because I was naked and I hid. Adam is saying, God I didn t want you to see me for who I really am. We are afraid somebody s going to find out who we really are, that we re fakes, we re phony, we really don t have it all together, we re not perfect. So we give everyone a stiff arm and not get too close. We live afraid that somebody s going to reject us, not love us, or not like us because they don t really know what I m like. If they really knew what I was like, they wouldn t like me. So the image is on display, but inside is filled with fear. Frustration happens Have you ever played the game wack-a-mole? There are 6-10 holes and you have a mallet and inside a hole is a mole when a mole pops up you hit it with your mallet. But as soon as you hit one mole another 1 or 2 pop up. It s frustrating because those stupid moles keep popping up. That s just like life. You get one problem figured out and then up pops another one. One health concern on the mend and then another concern pops up. One relational conflict healed and then another on breaks! You simply can t control it all it s frustrating. If you re frustrated it is a symptom of a deeper problem that you have not dealt with: the root issue. You re not God. You re trying to control everything and it doesn t work. Let Liza come over.
Breaking Free: Week One 4 Fatigue happens It s tiring trying to be God. Trying to control everything, pretending you ve got it all together, denial takes a lot of energy. In Psalm 32, David said: My strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. I acknowledged my sin to you. David says I stopped hiding! Many people will try to hide their pain or run from their pain by keeping busy. When we slow down thats when those thoughts and feelings come I don t like that, so I will stay busy and keep busy. We run from pain by constantly being on the go, constantly working. I had a friend in STL who went from hobby to hobby, it started with darts, he would play in tournaments multiple nights a week. He got tired of that and moved onto golf wound up working in a pro shop. Started making clubs for people and giving lessons, playing multiple times per week. He was always doing something I was tired just watching him. We busy ourselves so that when we lay down we will be so fatigued we will go right to sleep and not deal with our pain. If you re always worn out and alway tired, ask yourself, What pain am I running from? What problem do I not want to face up to that motivates and drives me to work and work so that I m in the constant state of fatigue? Failure happens. When we try to be God, and control, failure is a given. Proverbs 28:13 Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy. We need to be honest and open about our weaknesses and our faults and our failures. Over the last few months there has been a massive wave of change that has stemmed from victims of sexual abuse using their voice to bring to light the wrongs that been done to them in private. It is good that many women are finding their voice in this honestly I wished we lived in a world were we didn t have to deal with abuse but that s not the case. Throughout the past few months stories have not just been coming from Hollywood, but also the church. In fact just last Sunday a pastor at a large church stood up in front of his congregation and talked about a sexual encounter he had 20 years ago with a 17 year old girl while he was a 22 year old intern. The victim recently found her voice and the news broke some 20 years later. I am not sure what he said, but after he told his story the congregation stood up and clapped for him. I read that and I am just confused how can you clap? No doubt that the church loves their pastor, but come on you don t clap for that! It makes me think that he wasn t completely honest in what he told the congregation. Obviously the church received some backlash from the community, and has currently put the pastor on leave pending while an investigation is in progress. Truth will always find us it may take a while, but it will eventually find us. That s why God says if you hide stuff you will not prosper the truth will come out. This month at GCC we are taking some serious steps in becoming a place where real people can talk about real problems, real hurts, real habits, real hang-ups in a safe place and not feel judged, but instead accepted by a family of strugglers. None of us have it all together. We are all weak in different areas and we need each other. We need each other because it s in relationship that we become a type of mirror for each other, revealing each others hurts then we can help each other. People can see things in me that I fail to see and vice versa we need each other God uses people to bring truth into our lives. We are preparing to launch Celebrate Recovery on Tuesday January 30th. In Celebrate Recovery we have people dealing with all different kinds of issues and problems and hurts, in Celebrate Recovery we are all working the steps of recovery together.
Breaking Free: Week One 5 What is the cure? The first step on the road to recovery is to realize that I m not God I am powerless! Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12:9 But he said to me, My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. This is hard because our culture tells us to Pick yourself up by your own bootstraps; don t depend on anybody else. But this is the essential first step to getting your act together. Admit you re powerless to do it on your own. You need other people and you need God. Admitting I m not God means I recognize three important facts of life. Maturity comes when you recognize these three facts of life: 1. I admit that I am powerless to change my past. It hurt, I still remember it, but all the resentment in the world isn t going to change it. I m powerless to change my past. 2. I admit that I am powerless to control other people. I try, I like to manipulate them, I use all kinds of little gimmicks, but it doesn t work. I am responsible for my actions, not theirs. I can t control other people. 3. I admit that I am powerless to cope with my harmful habits, behaviors, actions. Good intentions are not enough. How many times have you tried and failed. Will power is not enough. You need something more than will power. You need a source of power beyond yourself. You need God, because He made you to need Him. Jesus says that my grace is sufficient for you! Grace is the power to change. God knew from day one that he would send Jesus on a rescue mission that s grace. Jesus came and lived with us, laughed with us, cried with us that s grace. Jesus took our failures and sins upon himself and went to the cross in our place and died what should have been our death that s grace. Jesus was buried and three days later he rose again, promising new life to all who would believe in him that s grace! And for you to recover from hurts, hang-ups, and hassles in your life, you need God s grace. How do you get it? Only one way: James 4:6, God opposes the proud, but give grace to the humble. Realize that you are not God and turn to the one true God who can help you. What hurt or hang-up or habit have you been trying to ignore? For many of you this step will be the hardest step. It s hard for many of us to admit that because it s humbling. It says, I m not God and I don t have it all together as much as I d like everybody to think that I do. I don t have it all together. Listen to this If you tell that to somebody, they re not going to be surprised, because they know it, God knows it, you know it, you just need to admit it. If you do that you will have taken the first step towards Breaking Free.