Soul Care and Story
Use this guide to help your group discussion as you meet this week.
Transcript
So we have four pastors, we have four, we use elders as well as one of the biblical words that we use for the men who oversee this church. We had an elder retreat this week, we got to go away for a few days, pray, plan, and then come back. And it's reminding me of the things that we oversee and that actually be helpful for you to know who our different elders are and what they oversee. We have four elders who oversee four different sets of areas. Raz Bradley is one of our elders, he's the one with the Australian accent. He oversees basically everything hospitality.
So that's Connect, that's Events, that's our host team on Sunday mornings. Chet Phillips is one of our elders, he oversees community groups and basically anything that has to do with operations, executive leadership, all the things that kind of make our week go well. Matt Freeman, who was just leading worship, he oversees worship, basically anything that happens in this room on a Sunday morning. And he also oversees communications. And then I oversee teaching is one of the things that I oversee. I oversee missions, so our efforts with the connection with the Rockies in Honduras and our connections in Egypt.
I oversee spiritual formation, which is kind of our attempt to grow in knowing more of Christ together. It's some of the things we're doing like training weekend. And then I also oversee counseling and care. So that's one of the things that I oversee. And in counseling and care, I get to have a front row seat to watching Jesus heal people. And it is awesome.
I love being involved with and overseeing counseling and care. I get to see people that are struggling. I get to walk with someone who has been wrestling with pornography for over a decade. And they are feeling hopeless. And as we walk together, I get to see Jesus start to change their affections, that they would no longer be enslaved to sin, but they would behold Christ so much in His glory and His goodness that they would say, no, I don't want this anymore. I get to have a front row seat to watching Jesus heal people.
And it's incredible. I love it. I also have a front row seat to seeing people who are in pain, to seeing people who are struggling, to see people who are wrestling with sin and brokenness. I mean, there is a reason, y'all. Well, there are a thousand different ways to distract yourselves, right? You can distract yourself from reality on a thousand different ways.
Our culture offers so many things to escape reality. There's a reason why there's so many different substances that you can enjoy that will numb the pain of life. Because life is hard. It is incredibly difficult. And when I talk to people, they're in the midst of a sea of emotion and frustration and pain. Because they have sin and brokenness that they're struggling with.
And they can't pinpoint why. Sometimes it's anxiety. They're so overwhelmed with anxiety they can't begin to even pinpoint what causes it, what deepens it. Sometimes it's depression. And those who struggle with depression, even gathering the energy to begin to articulate how they feel when they are depressed is hard enough. Sometimes it's addiction to substances, to pornography, and the shame that comes with addiction.
Sometimes it's a cycle of cruel communication, an inability to resolve conflict in marriage that leaves couples at the end of their rope. There are a lot of different reasons for why I meet with people in our church family. But there's one common thread that you can stream throughout each of them. It's that there largely is an inability to understand our current struggles in light of our bigger story. It's a difficulty in understanding our sin and our brokenness in light of our story. So we are doing a four-week series where we're introducing this idea of soul care.
And in this week, what we're going to tackle is understanding our brokenness and our sin in light of our story. Soul care is exactly what it sounds like. It is caring for your soul and addressing the sin and brokenness that is within us. That is what we're going to be doing over the next four weeks. But it's very difficult to do this if we don't have a bigger picture on what's going on.
And we don't have a zoomed out picture of what's going on in our soul. So that's what we're going to do this morning. We talk a lot about the heart and we will get to that a little bit this morning. But more next week. But largely what we want to tackle is zooming out and understanding ourselves in light of our greater story.
We're going to be a little bit in Psalm 139 and different places of Psalm 139 today. As we see a Psalm that David wrote that kind of is this heart exposure before the Lord. And my hope for today and the next four weeks is that we would take steps towards healing. That we would see that we have a good shepherd in Christ who wants to lead us to joy in Him. That's the hope this morning. So let me pray.
And then we'll jump in. Lord, we love You. And I thank You that You care for our souls. That You care about all the sin and brokenness that we brought into this room this morning. God, I pray You'd help us understand this better this week and over the next four weeks. We ask this in Jesus' name.
Amen. Alright, so. We're going to get to our bigger story in a moment. But I want to lay some foundations for soul care as we begin. At the core of understanding how to care for your soul is understanding our heart. Alright?
The Bible talks about this. This is key to understanding how to care for your soul. It's understanding the heart. Now that is not the physical, literal organ of your heart. Okay? It's not what our culture reduces the heart down to, which is mostly just love and emotions.
It's deeper than that. A biblical understanding of heart is your inner self. It is the core of who we are. The early church father, Basil of Caesarea, is quoted as saying that the heart is the internal court of the soul. The internal courtroom of the soul. The seat of judgment in your soul.
It is where you determine what is right and what is wrong. It is where you determine what is good from bad. It's where you determine what is beautiful and worth your pursuit. And what is ugly and worth your disdain. Your heart is the core of who you are. So if our souls are our immaterial self, right?
So we have a body, but we also have a soul. If our souls are our immaterial selves that exist for eternity, your soul, if you have placed faith in Jesus, will one day be united with Him in heaven for eternal fellowship. And if you have rejected Christ, it will be suffered judgment in hell. If our souls are our immaterial selves, our heart is at the center of our souls. It is the judgment seat. It is what directs us ultimately towards worship.
Our hearts direct us towards what we will worship, what we ultimately find to be good. So that's at the center of soul care is our heart. The central aspect is understanding what's happening in our hearts. Psalm 139 is bookended by this. If you read the whole, which we won't read all of Psalm 139 today, I'd encourage you to read it when you go home today. But it starts with this and it ends with this idea.
In verse 1 it says, O Lord, You have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up. You discern my thoughts from afar. Search me, verse 23, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts. And see if there be any grievous way in me.
And lead me in the way of everlasting. David is saying, You know me. You know my heart. Down to the core of who I am. You know when I sit up, when I get down. You know my thoughts.
You know my heart. Search me. Expose me. Help me see the grievous ways in the inner court of my soul. Help me understand what's happening in here. He wants to know God and behold God for who He is.
But He also wants to know Himself. To understand what's happening within His soul. John Calvin at the beginning of the Institutes of Christian Religion says that wisdom, true wisdom, consists in two things. Knowledge of God and knowledge of self. That we would know God. And hear this.
Not just know about God. Alright? Not just know things. We'd actually know Him personally. And as we know God and behold Him, we'd see ourselves for who we are. In light of who God is.
That we know our true selves in light of God. Over the past few years, I've been battling some chronic back pain and back issues. And a few months back, I went to a rheumatologist. And when I met with a rheumatologist, he has a theory on what type of possible degenerative back disease it might be. He said, you know, you'll know this more. It'll set in more about the time that you're 40.
But what we can do is send you for an MRI so we can see what's happening in your spine to see if the disease has begun its work. So he said, but I don't want you to just go anywhere. He said, I want you to go to a machine called a 3T machine. And I was like, awesome. Where are they? He's like, there's not many of them.
There's a few in the state. Alright? But you're going to have to track one down. You need to get an MRI from this machine because this machine is so powerful, it's going to give you the most accurate picture of what's happening in your spine. And that's what the Lord does for us. That as we're exposed to who God is and all of His power and all of His infinite knowledge and His infinite wisdom, as we're exposed to God, He gives us an accurate picture of the brokenness and the disease of sin that's happening in our soul.
The psalmist is saying, David says, verse 4, even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O Lord, You know it altogether. You hem me in, behind and before, and lay Your hand upon me. He said, You know, You're behind me, You're before me, You know all of this, Lord. Reveal what is broken within me. Thomas Merton, who's a Catholic monk in the 20th century, He said once, What can we gain, What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? He said, What can you gain by accomplishing all these things, by going to the moon?
If you can't actually cross the abyss, to actually know yourself, to know what's happening within you, we desperately need the Lord to help us cross that abyss, to help us know ourselves. Now, we make very clear what I'm not arguing out the gate as we walk through this. I am not saying that what the psalmist is saying here, what David is saying here, I'm not saying that he's advocating that we would know ourselves, search me, so that I can be the best version of me possible. That's not what he's arguing for. This isn't self-discovery for the sake of worshipping self. Much of the self-help movement, self-love movement, maybe you've heard self-care described on Facebook, much of the philosophical underlining of those movements is post-enlightenment, meaning after the enlightenment, we focused on ourselves.
We rejected God and we said, look at humanity, look how great we are. Much of that is, look and focus on yourself so that you can be a better version of yourself. And it's like, no, that's not what the psalmist, the Bible is not arguing for you to focus on yourself. John Calvin is not saying that true wisdom is self-knowledge for the sake of self-worship. It's not for you to focus on yourself. The goal here is to focus on God and as we focus on God, He reveals what's within us so that we might rightly worship Him.
So that is the goal of knowing ourselves. Alright, so, if you've been following Jesus for a bit, many of you know some of your sin and your brokenness and even your idolatry. Right? I know, I know the sin and brokenness. You don't have to tell me that I have a porn addiction. You don't have to tell me that I struggle with anger.
You don't have to tell me that I'm in the middle of anxiety or depression. I don't need a four-week series to tell me what I already know. What I want to explore is not what type of brokenness that you have, though I hope the Lord reveals some of the what. My hope is, is He reveals why. That's what we're getting at. That's the more complicated answer that we're searching for.
Is that we would expose our hearts before the Lord. We would, God would reveal what's happening in the inner court of our soul. But the reality is, is that it's, it's not the what sometimes that we need help with. It's the, it's the why. And part of that is not just examining our heart, but examining really some complex layers around the heart that involve our story. That involve kind of who we are in light of who God is.
Verse 3 says, You search out my path and my lying down and you are acquainted with all my ways. He says, God, you know all my ways. My question for us is do we? Are we acquainted with our ways? Are we acquainted with our story? That's what we're aiming for.
I was, a few months back, I was talking with, with an individual walking through some stuff. He gave me permission to share this, though I'm not going to share his name. And we're working through some of his, some of his sin and brokenness that he's trying to figure out. And we started to work through some of his story. And as we're working through his story, he started to, to talk a little bit about his upbringing. He talked about his stepdad.
And I was talking about his stepdad. He was, he was learning, we were talking about how, how some of the things he'd learned, some of the patterns that his stepdad modeled for him. And then over the next few months he started to make some connections. Some of the ways he operates as a husband and as a father can be traced back to his relationship with his stepdad. Some of the things that his stepdad did or didn't do. And when he started to make some of those connections, it colored in the picture and it gave him more of a why to help him understand the heart issues that we're within.
That's the kind of stuff that we're going for. That's the kind of stuff that we're asking God to reveal in us. We need to see this kind of stuff. And guys, I see some version of that story over and over and over again in counseling and care. We just, we don't know ourselves well enough. We don't understand these complex layers of our story and how that affects our heart and how that affects how we operate, how it affects how we view God, how we view ourselves in light of who God is.
We have an inability to understand our stories. So, I want to introduce you to something that I use in counseling. This is my attempt at showing how we get to the heart. And it's going to show up on the screen hopefully there. All right.
So, I know, first off, a couple things. I know you can't read that. All right. Also, I made this. This is my, this is my graphic that I use for counseling. So, if you look at that and go, oh, that needs some love in graphic design and you're gifted in graphic design, come see me because I really want this to look better and it would be helpful to have something that is easier to explain.
But I got a zoomed in version a little bit that you can see which is even more beautiful. But I have, what I'm trying to articulate and show here is that at the core of who we are is our heart. It's what I was just talking about. It's our view of God and our view of self in light of who God is. That's the core of who we are. Now, if you could just pinpoint what the problem is at your heart level, solve it and move on, then, I mean, we'd all be okay.
But the reality is we have these complex layers that surround us in our story. And as I work through this, there's different aspects of who we are and how God has made us in different parts of our story. There's a physical layer that we walk through, a mental layer, there's personality type, there's a behavioral layer, there's some family history, there's some relational history, there's some spiritual warfare that we work through. I work through these different layers not in any order. That when I meet with people, I'm not saying, all right, we're going to do this next, we're going to do this next, all right?
Also, there are other people that could parse this out differently, right? You could break this out into finer subjects, you could hit different layers of who we are. This is just what I use as to help us see that our stories are complicated, how we tick in light of who God is is complicated. So what I want to do this story, this morning, is walk through some of these layers to help us see how complicated we are and how this actually helps us understand our heart in light of who God is first. So, let me go through this first layer, you can pull it down, Brandon, and go to the first layer that we're going to talk about.
That is the physical layer. It's the physical layer. The reality is is that our souls reside in physical bodies. And you need to understand that your physical body can affect your view of yourself and your view of God. We're not just disembodied souls. We have bodies.
And I remember years ago, my wife and I, we moved to Louisville, Kentucky for seminary. We moved up there. I thought that we were going to church plant in Boston. And we spent one summer or one winter in Louisville and that totally killed that. Louisville is about six hours south of Canada. It is colder up there.
There is less light up there. The winters are darker. And we've come to find that my wife suffers from seasonal affect depression. And during the winter time, there is less sunlight. And when you have less sunlight, that can affect you. There's less vitamin D that you actually get.
And some people struggle with this with vitamin D deficiencies. And seasonal affect is somewhat connected to that. That's a physical reality. Unless you understand that, unless you know yourself, you might not realize that that's a part of your reality. One of the things that I see often is that people who are prone to anxiety, they have this persistent struggle with anxiety. One of the things that makes that so much worse, that it's like gasoline on fire, is caffeine.
It's coffee. And I tell people who struggle with anxiety that this is a daily battle. You probably should stop drinking coffee. Alright? You probably should stop drinking caffeine. And I'm dead serious about it.
I mean, the reality is it's gasoline on fire. For someone who struggles with anxiety and their thoughts are racing and racing and racing, you put caffeine on that, it amps it up even worse. And people who have stopped drinking coffee, who struggle with anxiety have gotten some freedom. It doesn't solve the problem. But it's a part of the reality.
So if you drink lots of coffee and you're prone to anxiety, you should start cutting back immediately. I mean, listen, I know, we're addicted, it's a drug, alright? I'm with you. But the reality is you've got to know yourself well enough to know that this is not good for your body. You've got to know that if you struggle with depression that actually working out is good for you, that exercising is good for you, that it releases endorphins into your body, if you struggle with depression, you need to start walking, you need to start running, you need to start doing things that are good for you. I mean, you should probably, if you're struggling, one of the things, I had a counseling pastor who said this, he said, one of the things I do with people when I meet with them, is sometimes I just go and tell them, you need to go get a physical.
You need to go see a doctor and let them test levels complete picture of who you are. We've got to understand that our bodies matter and we've got to have help with this. One of the things that Matt Freeman and I hold each other accountable to is that he knows I've got back problems and one of the ways to help treat that is exercise and stretching, so he holds me accountable and asks me about this on a regular basis and one of the things that I know about him is he has an unhealthy relationship with food historically and he's just said, hey, listen, hold me accountable on this, that I might have a right reproach to food and exercise. We do this with one another because we care about this, we understand this, we need this.
We have physical bodies and that's a part of understanding who you are and how God has made you in a fallen world. Alright, the next layer that I walk through sometimes is the mental layer. It's the mental layer. Now, this is probably one of the more debated layers out there, right, is mental health. I have been thankful that our culture and the American church has grown in awareness of mental health. Two decades ago, it was a taboo subject, even before that, even more so.
We didn't talk about these things. People ask, do mental disorders affect your view of God and view of self? Does it affect you? Are they real? And I would say absolutely yes. Absolutely.
There are things about the brain that are complex. There absolutely are mental disorders. Now, what happens is that culture and the church are a pendulum swing. This is what happens. Martin Luther says the church is like a drunk man on a horse. He's on one side and he gets up and he falls off onto the other.
This is what we do. So there's been this huge pendulum swing towards mental health and this celebration of mental health in a way that has been unhealthy at times. It says it's an immovable, unremovable label that you can't get rid of, that it defines exactly who you are. There are people that get really excited about the DSM-5, the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual for Mental Disorders. It's basically the Bible for psychology. They're like, yes, the DSM, absolutely.
And it's like, well, no, take it with a grain of salt. There are helpful disorders, between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, that absolutely are helpful to know. The DSM has a whole lot of terrible stuff in it too. I mean, if you really love the DSM, you need to know something. The DSM is made for insurance companies. It is made so insurance companies can have billing codes for disorders that they can cover.
It is not inerrant, not even close. So there's been this pendulum swing towards absolutely embracing and celebrating mental health. And it's like, no, we need to have some sobriety and some wisdom in how we approach this. Right? We need godly doctors and nurse practitioners and psychiatrists who can help. I mean, because the reality is that medicine can be incredibly helpful sometimes.
For people who take SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, Paxil, Zoloft, take certain drugs, it can be very helpful. It can actually help with the physical side of depression and anxiety. But a lot of times, these scripts are thrown out without thinking about it. I mean, it's very easy to get that stuff and it's very hard to manage it. If you talk to neuroscientists who approach this, the ones who have the most humble approach understand we don't exactly know how all these drugs work. It is a very complicated science.
So we need to have a sober approach to this, a humbling approach to this, and we need godly men and women in this field to be able to help navigate this. The last thing I'll say on the mental layer, I don't have a whole lot of time to spend on this, but there is a reality also in the mental layer that we have patterns of thoughts that absolutely can set us up for success or failure. Right? I would encourage you that if you want to understand how the way you think and the way you approach things can affect your reality, I would encourage you to go back and listen to the sermon from two weeks ago.
It was a sermon in Proverbs that Chet Phillips did. I think he did an unbelievable Job in helping explain how our attitude and our approach and our thought patterns help inform how we operate. And that's a part of this that sometimes I walk through as well. The next layer that I walk through in counseling sometimes is personality type. It's your personality type, how you were made. You were made differently.
There's something about you that's different from others. Psalm 139 says, 13 and 14 says, For you formed my inward parts. You knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you for I'm fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works. My soul knows it very well.
I'm so thankful for passages like this. I mean, one of the ways this passage is helpful is it helps us see that God cares about the unborn, that in the womb he's knitting children together who have souls. I'm thankful for that aspect for us that helps us fight for the unborn. But one of the things that we miss in this is that God has made us fearfully and wonderfully made us and that we're uniquely designed in this image. We all reflect a different aspect of the image of God beautifully. And that means that we have different personalities.
So I encourage taking personality type tests, right? Those of you that are into Enneagram, Enneagram, Disc, Myers-Briggs, I think those things can be incredibly helpful. You can also go up the deep end, right? Like you can get on BuzzFeed or Facebook and figure out what character of friends you would be or what house of Hogwarts you'd be or if your spirit animal is a bear or a beaver and it's like, nah, like that, that's just weird. You should slow your roll a little bit. But the reality is that knowing your personality type is helpful.
I personally use Enneagram because Enneagram is a helpful kind of gauge on certain personalities. Now the caveat I give, because I know some of you are very excited about Enneagram, is that Enneagram is not inerrant, okay? In fact, Enneagram is based in some really weird mystic, like Kabbalah religion, weird stuff, like some psychology. A psychologist from the 90s grabbed a hold of it and made a test, all right? So those of you that get really excited about Enneagram, breathe, okay?
You're not defined by your number. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, that's okay too, all right? But the reality is that you need to know, here's why it's important for you to know your personality. It is important for you to know your personality and how you relate to other people. If you don't know yourself, you're not going to know how you relate to others. One of the things that I see over and over again is you might have a couple that's, the husband's introverted or the wife is extroverted or vice versa.
And when they get married, one is like all up in the other's business. And she's, you know, she's looking, I mean, she's fueled by other people and she wants to, you know, she's hanging out with her husband and wants to hang out with him. And he's like, I need some space. Like, I'm introverted. I need some time to myself because I'm not fueled by people. And all of a sudden, you've like, you've got some people who are upset with one another.
And it's like, you've got to know yourself. You know, you're designed a little bit differently. These things are helpful in knowing yourself and how God made you. To know yourself in life, who God is. Another thing that I walk through is the behavioral layer. I walk through behavioral layer with people.
This means that you have certain patterns of behavior that affect you in a way, affect your heart in ways you don't even begin to realize. How you act matters. I was listening to a counseling pastor once. And he was talking about a guy who he was meeting with. And this guy came in and he was having, he came in because he was struggling with sleeping. So he got really anxious right before bed and he couldn't go to sleep.
So he met with this guy for weeks and weeks trying to figure out. They're walking through his heart issues. They're walking through idolatry. They're trying to work through all this stuff. And then finally, weeks later, he just said, hey, what do you do right before you go to sleep? He said, well, actually, I like to watch scary movies.
And I watch scary and horror movies right before bed. And he said he felt so embarrassed because he's like, well, don't. You should stop and come see me any week. And shocker, he found better sleep when he stopped watching horror movies right before he went to sleep. And he was embarrassed because he's like, we should have, this should have been something that came up sooner. Right?
But that happens. We have these behavioral patterns that affect us in ways we don't realize. Some of you are tired and groggy and life feels hazy. But you stay up late every night playing video games or scrolling through your phone. And you're wondering why life is so difficult. Some of you struggle with anxiety and depression and discontentment.
And you just are so, you hate yourself. You constantly are saying, I hate myself. And you're preparing yourself to others. And then if I said, give me your phone. Let me see your screen time usage. Some of you would have hours on Instagram and Facebook.
And the reality is, is those places can be toxic if you compare yourself to others. Because everyone puts their best version of themselves on Facebook and Instagram. Their life is awesome. And I look at myself and my life and it's awful. And it's like, you should stop. You should cut this out of your life.
There is a distinct difference, y'all, between taking a book, a good book, going outside in the sunlight and reading. As opposed to being under your covers, scrolling through Twitter, just getting angry about our culture and angry at people. There's a difference there. And if you don't understand your behavioral patterns, if you don't understand how those affect you, you can't actually get to the heart and understand what's happening there. A lot of times it becomes very difficult. So behavioral patterns matter.
Also, your relational history matters. This is very much part of your story. Not just a romantic relationship, but this is friendships. This is relationships with coworkers. This also is romantic relationships. Some of you have a very difficult time opening up in group and trusting people.
And if you go back and you look at your friendships from the past, you might find some situations. Maybe you were in a church or a youth group or whatever in one time and you shared some stuff and it came back to bite you. You open up some people and it came back to, it got exposed and you felt embarrassed. That happened a decade ago. There might be a connection between your relational history, what's happened in the past, and why you have a difficult time trusting people now. Maybe there are some people that walk away from Jesus and it's actually become a kind of a popular thing to do now.
It's called deconstructing, which is so dumb. It happens on Instagram and people have to take a picture of themselves out in the mountains and say, I'm deconstructing. It's just like, oh gosh. Now the reason why Instagram's the worst. But when you hear their stories, a lot of times what they'll say is that some pastor or some ministry wrecked them and now they're walking away from Jesus and it breaks my heart because you put your faith in the wrong person.
Don't put your faith in a pastor. Put your faith in a ministry. Put your faith in a perfect savior. But the reality, that happens, y'all. And if you don't recognize that, if you don't recognize that your approach to church, to the people of God, to even to God, is affected by churches and pastors and ministries and Christians that have hurt you in the past, you won't actually understand yourself in light of who God is. Some of you struggle from relationship to relationship because you don't actually want to trust someone that you're dating.
But if you look in your past, you may have had someone that cheated on you, someone that lied to you, someone that hurt you in your past. And it affects your approach to dating and your approach to marriage. You have to know yourself. You have to know yourself in light of who God is. And a big one that shows up all the time is family history. When I counsel and care for people, one of the things that shows up the majority of the time is family history.
I mean, it shows up over and over and over again. The first 20 years of someone's life are absolutely foundational. And as a parent, it is sobering to realize how much of an effect you can have on your child. It took me until I was 30 to realize that some of the sin and idolatry and brokenness within me is traced back to the fact that I have a complicated relationship with my dad and my stepdad in between the two of them. And listen, I had a great childhood. I love all three of my parents.
But I came from a family of divorce and there were things that came out of that and there were experiences that came out of that. And when I was 30, it just hit me and I was like, oh man, I've got daddy issues. I never thought I'd ever realize this. But it matters to actually realize that's a part of your story. For those of you that had fathers that hurt you, for those of you that had fathers that weren't present or your father wasn't even a part of the picture. You don't think that affects your view of God as father?
There's an absolute connection there that happens over and over and over again. You have family members that hurt you, brothers or sisters or mothers that hurt you. You don't think that affects your approach to church, family, and the language that we use over and over again? This shows up time and time again. The way that we view God often is affected by the way we were raised, which as fathers should humble us immensely. You don't think that for those of you that struggle with approval, that struggle with striving to prove yourself, whether it's at work or in life that I'm struggling to prove myself.
I want to be, I want to be, I want accolades. I want recognition. I want satisfaction. A lot of times that can be connected to the way that you were raised. You grew up in a house where you had to have straight A's, or you had to be this, you had to be that. A lot of times it's not even, I mean, you have really good parents and that makes one or two comments and all of a sudden the enemy just twists it and becomes your reality and then you don't realize until you're 30 or 40 that so much of your striving and your ceaseless work is to prove yourself to God, to others.
When the God of the universe says, you don't have to prove yourself to me, that you're, you're, you're bought and paid for in Christ. When I see you, I see the perfect work of Jesus. You don't have to gain my approval. This matters over and over again. Maybe you're raised in a, in a home where your primary caregiver was angry or, or maybe you was an animated and excited household. That shows up, shows up in friendships, shows up in marriages, showed up in our marriage.
I grew up in a house. We're animated and we're intense, which you would never guess if you knew me. But I just, I would get animated. I would get intense and I would be like this. My wife would be like, why are you yelling? And I'm like, I'm not yelling because she came from a household.
That wasn't a reality. Our family history shapes us in ways we don't want to admit. And unless we start to begin to understand that aspect of us, a lot of us are going to have a very difficult time understanding the why behind what's happening deep in our souls. The final layer that I'll walk through is spiritual warfare. This is something that we as Western Americans are not a big fan of. We are rational thinkers.
We don't have a category for spiritual warfare. Right? And in other cultures, you can go to Africa or South America or East Asia, they're a lot more comfortable with the idea of the spiritual realm. That's something they're way more willing to accept. But as Western American thinkers, we don't have a category.
I know I struggle with this. And about four years ago, I was talking with Chet Phillips, and we're working through, I'm just talking through, man, I have this really, this negative feedback loop that shows up in my life over and over again. I was just, you're going to fail. You're going to wreck your marriage. You're going to wreck your ministry. And he just said, hey, you know, do you think that's you?
Or do you think that actually might be the enemy at work? And as a Western rational thinker, I said, no, I think it's probably me. And then we walked through this process called freedom in Christ, which is a process of structured prayer, where we walked through some of this. And I absolutely, after walking through that, realized that I had this negative feedback loop in my life that was the enemy speaking, that was reinforcing this over and over again. And since then, I found a credible amount of freedom to not hear this as much anymore. Have you considered this, that maybe the negative thoughts that enter your mind on a regular basis aren't just you talking?
That maybe your anxiety is spiked by lies from the enemy, or your depression is deepened by spiritual forces of evil, or your sexual temptation is made worsened by the evil one. We don't like to think like that, but the Bible is very blunt about this. Ephesians 6, we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against rulers, against authorities, against cosmic powers of this present world, is an absolute reality. And I would argue that you can't actually address what's going on in your soul a lot of times until you actually work through some of this. These are just a few. You could add more layers that surround the heart.
But all this affects our heart, it affects our view of God and self. Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts and see if there be any grievous way in me and lead me in the way everlasting. Each of us have these complex layers that surround our heart, that affect our view of God and our view of self in light of who God is, that corrupt the inner court of our souls. We need to examine them. And we desperately need Christ to help us examine them.
We need Christ to help us walk through this. And the final paragraph of C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, it's one of his greatest works. He's talking about basically this approach to life where you're focusing on yourself, where you're muscling through life all on your own. And he says this, he says, look for yourself. I mean, this is the focus on self.
Look for yourself and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay, depression, anxiety, sexual sin. Sound familiar? Look for yourself and you'll find these things. But he says, but look for Christ. Look for the Christ who had his blood spilt for our sins, who conquered death at the resurrection, who stands at the heavens and reigns as the sovereign king over all eternity. Look for Christ and you will find him.
And with him, everything else thrown in. And what he's getting at is, is you don't just find Christ. You find his goodness, his kindness, his faithfulness. You find peace, love, joy, goodness, gentleness, self-control. You find the riches of Christ. It all gets thrown in with it.
The reality is, if you try to bring change on your own, if you try to change yourself, if you try to do self-care or self-love and focus on yourself, it will not work and it will not last. It is behavioral modification at best. It does not solve the root issue. We need Christ to absolutely change our hearts. And hear this, it's not just exposing the grievous ways within us. It's not just exposing, as the psalmist says, look at the grievous nature of the things in my soul.
It's not just that. We need it to be replaced with something better. It's not just the grievous ways that we need to get rid of and the sin and brokenness. We need to shed and repent stuff. We need ways everlasting is how the Psalm ends. We need the everlasting ways.
We need eternal things that resound into eternity. The only things that Christ can give us. We need that to replace the grievous ways within us. Search me, oh God. Know my heart. Try and know my thoughts and see if there be any grievous way in me and lead me in the way of everlasting.
We need this. Jesus wants this for you. He wants to care for your soul. Believe that. That the God of the universe, he wants to reveal the grievous ways in the inner court of our soul so that he can begin to heal us and repair us. That's why he says in Matthew 11, 28, come to me all who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.
Do you hear that? Do you hear your chief shepherd calling saying, come? Are you tired? Are you tired? Are you tired? Are you wrestling with sin?
Are you wrestling with brokenness? He says, come. Shepherd says, come to me. Psalm 55, 22 says, cast your cares on the Lord and he will sustain you. The God of the universe, the one who upholds everything, holds it all together, says, come. You have cares.
You have burdens. You have burdens. I'm here. I'm ready. I'm ready to take them. I'm ready to hear them.
I'm ready to replace them with everlasting ways. Psalm 34, 18 says, the Lord is near the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. You feel crushed. You feel like life is breaking you apart. He says, I'm here and I'm near. I'm ready to walk with you.
If you'll come to me, we can take the journey together. That is what our Savior offers you, if you're willing to take it. And I also would say, we are willing to walk this out with you. We have four different layers of care in our church. The first layer is community groups. We believe in our groups.
Our groups are where we get to live out the gospel together. It's where you get to come in your brokenness and your sin. And you get to share your burdens. Galatians 6, 1 says, bear one another's burdens. That's what we get to do together. Our groups are where we get to live this out.
If you're in a group and you're not trusting the people in your group, if you're not being honest and open, you're missing out. You're missing out on the gospel. The people get to share the gospel with you. As you share your brokenness, someone's going to come in and tell you how good Jesus is and how the Savior is going to meet you there.