Psalm 139: Search My Heart
Use this guide to help your group discussion as you meet this week.
Transcript
It's good to see you guys this morning. My name is Matt. I'm one of the pastors here. If you would, go ahead and grab a Bible. We are going to hop right in this morning, and I want you to go ahead and turn to Psalm 139. Psalm 139.
If you don't have a Bible, go ahead and grab one of the blue Bibles that we have that are tucked under some of the seats. It's going to be on page 300 in those. We're going to be looking at Psalm 139. As a worship leader, I love the Psalms. It's the Psalm book of the Bible, you guys. I'm obligated to actually love the book of Psalms.
But I do. I love the book of Psalms, and specifically Psalm 139. What we get in the Psalms is the entire range of human emotion. John Piper says that you can always find yourself in the Psalms, and I believe that. I believe that's true. Regardless of whatever you're going through in your life, whatever circumstance, you can always find yourself in the Psalms.
And so I'm excited to be teaching from one of my favorite passages today. So if you'll look, go ahead and look in your Bible. We don't always point this out. But if you look at the top, right underneath Psalm 139, it says, to the choir master, a Psalm of David. Okay, so it tells us that this is one of the Psalms of David. In fact, nearly half of the Psalms in the book of Psalms are David's.
And it's important for us to know that David wrote this and to think about his life because it colors how we're going to understand this Psalm, how we study it. But as we're getting started, I want you to go ahead and look. We're going to look at the first verse and the final two verses before we even start because they actually frame in what David is talking about in the Psalms. So you can look in your Bible or you can look up here on the screen. It says, Oh Lord, you have searched me and known me. Oh Lord, you have searched me and known me.
And then at the very end, David's praying and he says, Search me, oh 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. So David starts with saying to God, God, you have searched me and known me. You know everything about me. Nothing is hidden from you. And then he concludes by asking God to continue to search him, to know his heart, to know his thoughts, to show him his sins and to lead him on the right path.
Now there's a lot of things that we're going to look at in between this frame, but I think it's important to just highlight part of David's life before we hop in because of what he's talking about here. So this is the David that the Bible presents to us. He's the youngest of seven sons of his father. He's kind of the runt of the litter. He's the shepherd boy out tending the sheep, but God saw fit to anoint him to be the next king of Israel. This is the David that the Bible talks about who goes up against the giant Goliath with a sling and a stone and takes him down.
This is the David that wins the hearts of the people of Israel. In fact, the Bible describes David as a man after God's own heart. And while there's a lot of great things we can point out about David, sometimes we forget to talk about the darker side, that David wasn't perfect. And maybe you're not as familiar with this story, but there was a time when the Israelite army went out to war and David didn't go with them. He stayed back. And he's walking on the rooftop of the palace and he sees a beautiful woman bathing.
And he desires her. And so he brings her to his palace and he sleeps with her. Her name is Bathsheba and she becomes pregnant. And David's trying to figure out how to cover this thing up. So he sends for her husband, Uriah, who's one of his best soldiers, sends for him to bring him home so that maybe he'll go back to his house and sleep with Bathsheba and this thing will be all covered up and they'll never know it was his child.
But Uriah was so faithful, he wouldn't do it. He wouldn't leave the king's house. And so David sends Uriah back out into battle and tells the commander to pull back from him. And Uriah's killed. David was responsible for the murder of somebody else. And so it makes you wonder, as we look at this Psalm, as we looked at this framework we just created, that how can he pray this at the end?
How can he pray, continue to search me, continue to examine me and see my grievous ways in light of everything that he has done? And if I'm David, I don't want that. I don't. In fact, I don't want that. And I would bet for most of us, we don't want that either. The things that we've hidden, the skeletons in our closet, the things that we wish and hope that nobody ever finds out about us.
But it seems that David has discovered something better. What we're going to see is that in spite of everything that David has done, God still desires relationship with him. He gets the offer of redemption and forgiveness. And so that's what we're looking at this morning, how David can have such confidence in his relationship with God that no matter what he had done, he still saw it better that the Lord would know him deeply and intimately rather than keeping things hidden from the Lord. And that hopefully we'll actually leave here with that same kind of confidence, that same kind of confidence and vulnerability and freedom that we can have in our relationship with God.
Okay? So that's what we're looking at this morning. Why don't we pause and pray as we go further? God, what a bold prayer that you would search us and know us. And it's difficult for us to even comprehend how we could do that. And so we pray that you would speak from your word, that you would help us understand what David had come to know, what David had come to know, and that you would lead us in the way everlasting.
It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen. All right, so look at your Bibles. Let's hop into the text. Okay, verse 1. Oh, 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. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, oh, Lord, you know it altogether. You hem me in behind and before and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me.
It is high. I cannot attain it. So he's talking about this God, this God who searches and knows, and he's trying to color that in and describe it. Verses 2 and 3, David says, when I sit down and when I rise up, he says, you know my path and my lying down, and you're acquainted with all my ways. He says, God sees you when you're sleeping. He knows when you're awake.
He knows if you've been bad or good. But seriously, he knows everything about you. He knows when you're sleeping. He knows when your feet hit the floor. He knows what I do throughout the day. David crafts this song to show that there is no activity, no action that escapes what God sees.
He knows. He knows. Not only that, look at verse 3. It says here, you discern my thoughts. I'm sorry, verse 2. You discern my thoughts from afar.
Come on. Like, not only does he know our activities, he discerns our thoughts. He knows what you're thinking. Right now. And right now. And right now.
So the thing I thought when that person cut me off in traffic, God knows. The thing I was thinking when my co-worker asked me how I was doing, he knows. The thing I'm daydreaming about right now while Matt's talking, he knows. He knows. Not only that, look at verse 4. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, oh Lord, you know it all together.
So that's a crazy progression. He knows our actions. He knows our thoughts. And even before we formulate words, he knows it. I have two daughters, a 7-year-old and a 5-year-old. My 7-year-old is named Emmy.
And if you know Emmy, this story will make perfect sense to you. We like to cook. Like specifically, my girls love to cook pancakes. And so that's usually a group effort for us. When Emmy was really young, we had the griddle out. We had the bowl of pancake mix.
And we were doing the whole thing. And I walked across the kitchen to grab something. And I got to the other side of the kitchen with my back turned to her and said, don't touch that. And I turn. And her hand is over the griddle. And she's just looking at me like, are you a wizard?
Like, child, I know you. And I'm way smarter than you. Like, I knew what you were going to do. I know what you were going for. And that multiplied times infinity is God towards us. He knows you.
He created you. Verse 5 says, You hem me in behind and before and lay your hand upon me. You hem me in. Now, he's drawing from shepherding terms here. Okay, so it's a little bit lost on us. But this is, he's drawing from his experience.
Shepherds would be out in the fields with the sheep. And they would be tending them and keeping them together and making sure that they went on the right path, that they didn't fall off of a cliff, that they were able to find fresh water and fresh food. And then at night, they would try to kind of hem them into an area for protection. And then oftentimes, the shepherds would just lay in harm's way so that if a wolf or a predator was coming, they would know it. They would be first in line. It's a beautiful picture here.
You hem me in behind and before. And then you get to verse 6. And he just exclaims it. He says, Such knowledge is too wonderful and high for me. I can't grasp it. And I feel that.
I bet you do too. That's David's point. He's giving glory to God for his all-knowing power. We use big words for this sometimes like God's omniscience, which just means that he is all-knowing or his omnipotence, which means that he is all-powerful. God knows everything and he is all-powerful. And even though David can't fully comprehend it, and neither can we, he's still able to glory in it.
And there are two things I want to point out from these six verses and then we'll move on. The first one is this. This is terrifying, right? Like God knows your actions, your words, and your thoughts. For those of you who are into stranger things, this isn't like a Vecna scenario where God's going to use your thoughts and stuff to torture you. Like we're not all headed for a Chrissy wake up situation.
Okay? But it is terrifying that God knows everything about you. Hear that clearly. What David is saying here is that God knows everything about every person in this room without exception. And for most of us, even those of us who are Christians, that's terrifying. We don't want God to know everything.
If he did, we think things like, how could God love me? How could God accept me? There's no way he could use me. There's no way I could belong to his people and be loved. And as Christians, we know these things aren't true. Yet we convince ourselves all too often that they are.
We give in to the lies and the false beliefs instead of glorying in who God is and knowing that he's all powerful and all knowing. And I will say this. I think part of the reason we do this is because in our lives we've experienced people who have used knowledge of us to hurt us. Okay? You've been there before. You've told something to someone and they told everyone else.
You shared a struggle with someone and then they used that in your relationship to manipulate you. We've all been there. But that's not God. The God who sees you and knows everything about you is wholly other than that. And because that's true, the other part of this passage is that this ought to be incredibly comforting to us. That even though he knows all of our thoughts and words and actions, his posture towards us is that of a shepherd.
With his sheep, he wants, even though we would rebel and try to run, God, his posture towards us is that of a shepherd. That's what verse 5 is talking about. It says, you hem me in behind and before. You keep me. God keeps us. And I'll be honest with you guys.
This is something that I pray on a regular basis. I pray this on a regular basis underneath my breath. God, you hem me in behind and before. You hem me in behind and before. I have a tough day parenting with the kids. You hem me in behind and before.
When I want to run to the fridge at 10 o'clock at night for some comfort, you hem me in behind and before. When we've got a difficult situation going on in our church, when we need wisdom and we don't know it, you hem me in behind and before. God's knowledge of us is both terrifying and comforting. So what do we do with that? What do we do with that? Look at verse 7.
It says, where shall I go from your spirit or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there. If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me and your right hand shall hold me. If I say, surely the darkness shall cover me and the light about me be night. Even the darkness is not dark to you.
The night is bright as the day for darkness is as light with you. It's as if David tries to illustrate what all of us are prone to, right? Run. Like, run. He says, but where would I go? Where would I flee from your presence?
He says, if I go up to heaven, you're there. Which, obvious David, but I understand it's a progression. You've got to start somewhere. You're there. If I go down to Sheol, you are there. When we have Sheol in Scripture, it's just a poetic way of saying, it's a poetic name for the place of the dead.
He says, if I go up to heaven, you're there. If I go down to the place of the dead, you are there. He says, if I take the wings of the morning or dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, you're there. He says, if I take flight in the morning, okay, the morning sun rises in the east. If I head towards the east or if I dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, the uttermost parts of the sea for them was the Mediterranean. If I go up, down, north, south, east, west, you're there.
Where can I flee from your presence? So where do I go? The dark. I'll hide in the dark. You guys, you guys ever play hide and go seek with some kids? All right?
Come around the corner. You know the kids behind the couch. So you go and look behind the couch and as soon as you make eye contact that with the kid, they go, I can see you. No, you can't. Well, now I can hear you too. Like I, but that's us.
That's us when it comes to the fact that we think that we can hide in the dark from God or that even in the midst of our darkness, God somehow is not there. So I love what verse 11 and 12 say. If I say, surely the darkness shall cover me and the light about me be night, even the darkness is not dark to you. The night is bright as the day for darkness is as light with you. Guys, are you seeing what David's saying in these first 12 verses? That God is all-knowing.
He knows everything. Your words, thoughts, actions. He's all-powerful and He's all-present. There's no place that you can flee from His presence. And I do just want to take a second and highlight this here. If you've run to the dark or you feel like right now you are in the dark, God's there and it is not dark to Him.
It is not dark to Him. He's with you and He sees you. And we're going to talk more about that in a minute, but I just want you to know that. He sees you and He's with you. And as David continues on from here, what he's going to do now is give us an example of God seeing us, knowing us, and being with us in the darkness. That's why verse 13 begins with 4.
It's an illustration. It's an example of God being with us in the dark. Here's what it says. For you formed my inward parts. You knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works. My soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret. Intricately woven in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed substance. In your book were written every one of them the days that were formed for me when as yet there was none of them. David gives us this beautiful picture of God being with us in the midst of darkness by describing a baby in its mother's womb.
And specifically he tells it from his perspective. He says, you formed my inward parts. You knit me together. I am wonderfully made. Extravagantly, miraculously, uniquely made. My frame wasn't hidden from you.
You wove every detail together. You formed my substance. And not only that, my days were written in your book even before I was born. Not only does David say that God was active in forming him in the womb, he says, even at that time God had established purpose for his steps and his life. David's saying that God was with him, forming him and shaping him in the womb. And that's the big picture of what David's driving at in this Psalm is that the God who knows and sees us is with us.
And that's amazing. Y'all, how good is this picture? The God of the universe fashions and forms each one of us. It's just beautiful. And in fact, it's not the only place in scripture that says this. I actually want to highlight a couple of others.
They're not going to be on the screen. I'm going to read them for us. It says, in Job 10, this is Job talking, he says, your hands fashioned and made me and now you have destroyed me altogether. Remember that you have made me like clay and will you return me to the dust? Did you not pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese? You clothed me with skin and flesh and knit me together with bones and sinews.
You have granted me life and steadfast love and your care has preserved my spirit. It's beautiful. He's picking up on the same kind of language that is used later by David. He says later in Job. Job says this. He says, if I have rejected the cause of my manservant or my maidservant when they brought a complaint against me, what then shall I do when God rises up?
When he makes inquiry, what shall I answer him? Did not he who made me in the womb make him? And did not one fashion us in the womb? He's saying, if God as creator comes to question me, what am I to say? He made me. He formed me.
And not only that, if I'm in a dispute with someone else, he made them too. In Jeremiah, beginning of Jeremiah, this is directly, this is the words of the Lord. 1 verses 4 and 5 says, now the word of the Lord came to me saying, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. And before you were born, I consecrated you. I appointed you a prophet to the nations. It's that same idea that David was talking about, that God knew him before he was in the womb.
He had predestined his steps. He had purpose for his life. He had been consecrated. And one of my favorites is once we get to the New Testament, the angel comes to Mary, says she's going to give birth to the Son of God. But Mary's aunt is pregnant at the same time.
And she goes to visit Elizabeth. And here's what Elizabeth says. She says, for behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. This child has personhood and is able to express joy. And the point that the Bible is trying to make clear in multiple places across multiple time periods is that life begins in the womb. And while David is using this as an illustration of God seeing and knowing and being with us in the dark, it's not just an illustration.
It's truth. It's a reality. And it's one that has taken center stage in our country over the last month or so. And so what we're going to do is we're going to press pause for a second. And we're going to take the next 10 to 12 minutes and talk about what is a current topic in our culture right now, which is life beginning at conception and the topic of abortion. And now, that's not the main point of this passage.
But it is most certainly a direct application and an ethic that is derived from this idea of a God who knows us and sees us and forms us. Okay? So we're going to press pause and talk about this as an application and then jump back into the text. Now, I realize that I have just polarized the room. I'm aware of that. Some of you just thought, yes, get them.
Roe fell a couple of weeks ago and it's time for us to plant our flag in the ground. Some of you just thought, if you say what I think you were about to say, I'm walking out of this building and I'm never coming back again. And some of us are just too disengaged from the conversation because you don't feel like it impacts you. And so I want to make a suggestion and a request this morning. Okay? Here's my suggestion.
Can we just press pause on all of our political arguments for a moment and realize that whatever you think about this, that this is an incredibly difficult and painful situation for a prospective mother and father to walk through. Can we be a people of compassion? Can we do that? Can you set your political leanings to the side for a second and just own that? This is incredibly painful and difficult. And out of that suggestion, I want to make a request.
Okay? If we set that aside, I want to make a request. Can we just take an honest look at what God says to us in His Word out of this passage? Can we just be honest about what it says? Because here's the deal. If we are, if we'll be honest, we can't read this passage and the others that I mentioned without agreeing what it says, that life begins in the womb.
That God is working, He's knitting us together and forming us in our mother's womb. That God predestines our steps from the womb. And to reject this is to reject the authority of Scripture. We must trust God and His Word here, which means that the overall thrust of the Bible is for life, which means that a rejection of life through abortion is sin. Period. In the majority of conversations that I have had with both believers and unbelievers on this topic, pretty much everyone, not everyone, but most of the people I have talked to show some level of discomfort with someone having an abortion just because they don't want the baby for elective reasons, just for no reason.
There's varying levels of discomfort with that, but often the conversation shifts towards the most painful and difficult kinds of situations for why someone might get an abortion. And I feel this tension. What about the 10-year-old who was raped by her father and is now pregnant? What about the 35-year-old mother who has health complications and might die giving birth? What if there's a serious fetal abnormality and the child might have incredible life complications? Guys, I can't imagine.
I cannot imagine having to wrestle with those deep questions. Those are incredibly difficult and painful circumstances. And I can tell you this, the initial response as the church, as the church comes in contact with these situations has got to be to love, to be present, to sit and to weep, to hear their story, to pray with them, to be someone who can listen. That's got to be the initial response. Got to be. But the reality of this conversation is that those exceptional types of abortions are just that.
They are exceptional. That the vast, they're in the vast minority of reasons why someone might would get an abortion. Now, I'm not a chart guy. I don't love statistics. Okay? But in my research on this topic, I care about it.
And so I wanted to read widely and soak things in. I came across some statistics that I thought were helpful for showing this. Okay? So in the state of Florida in 2020, in the state of Florida, they have to record a reason for every abortion. If someone goes to get an abortion, they record the reason. In the state of Florida in 2020, there were 74,868 abortions in one state in one year.
And so what we're going to do is I want to show you a chart that shows the reasons for those abortions and then it also gives you kind of a percentage of why the reason, okay, the percentage of the whole. Okay? So I just want to walk through this. Let's show the first one..01% were some kind of family incest situation. I, goodness, I can't, I can't even like fathom the difficulty of a situation like that. But you see the percentage.
The next one, rape. Not only had they dealt with that such a difficult circumstance, but now they're pregnant. The next one, okay,.20% is that the mother's life is in danger. Okay? The mother's life is, this could be fatal for the mother. But even if you, as you look at this, we're at, we're at.36% and then you add in fetal abnormality.
Now it doesn't say that this is a life-threatening fetal abnormality, but there's some type of abnormality in the baby. And you can see these are, these are small Numbers and if you look at the, just the total here, 1.34%. And guys, these are exceptionally difficult. Reasons, they are. They're hard to wrestle with. Kind of going on in the statistics, we kind of jump out of that into, you know, we're moving away from these exceptions.
1.48% Were for physical health. Non-life-threatening physical health. And it doesn't even tell us like how, how much physical health was at play here. And then the next one is psychological health, mental health. 1.88%. If you add that up, you get to 3.36%.
And again, we can just kind of agree that these are outside of those first exceptions that we kind of looked at that are really, really exceptional situations. We've got two more categories. 20.4% for social reasons or for economic reasons. And if you're good at math, you know that the final category is 74.9% for no reason. they were elective, which brings the total to 95.3%. If you add in the physical health reasons or the psychological health reasons and broaden that category, it gets you to over 97% of those abortions. That means that 72,500 of those over that number were done for those reasons, for reasons outside of those.
How did we get here? How did we get to a place in our country where we can terminate life for elective reasons? And we can all agree that this is a complex issue, but one thing is crystal clear is that our culture has separated sex from its original God ordained design. God designed sex to be enjoyed within a marriage for the purpose of enjoyment and procreation. And our culture has hijacked this definition and said that sex is for your enjoyment and that conception of life is a consequence rather than a gift. But that's not the ethic of the Bible.
God is for life. That's what scripture says over and over again. In my preparation for this message, I felt led to reach out to my Old Testament professor from seminary. Her name is Dr. Ingrid Pharaoh and she is a brilliant woman. She's a Greek scholar and a Hebrew scholar and I just reached out to her and I said, here's what I'm teaching, here's the Psalm I'm looking at, can we talk about it?
And she gave me an hour of her time. And we just had a Zoom call where we wrestled with what this says and she agrees. She agrees with what we're talking about here. In fact, she's an expert on the book of Genesis and she pointed this out and I thought it was helpful for us. That God is the giver of life. He's the creator of life and he gives the gift of life to his creation.
To Adam and Eve and he looks at Adam and Eve and he says, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and have dominion over life. And he tells them, don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because in the day that you do it, you will die. He says, choose life. And Adam and Eve eat of the fruit and sin enters the world and death enters the world. And you know what the first thing that happens is in Genesis 4 after sin has entered the world? Murder.
Cain kills his brother and God has judgment on it. Incredibly painful and the difficult truth that we've got to face this morning is that a rejection of life in favor of death is sin. It is the taking of life. It breaks one of the original Ten Commandments. And regardless of the situation or circumstance, however tragic and difficult, it is outside of God's design. And I know that it's devastating.
Our church family is not untouched by this pain. sin. We have walked with mothers who have had an abortion. We have walked with fathers who have encouraged their significant other to go get an abortion. Maybe you've encouraged someone to have an abortion or you helped fund it or you took them to the clinic. But God's answer from his word is that it's sin and God has judgment for us.
He has judgment for it. But we've got to remember who's writing this Psalm. David. The same David who says that God sees us and knows us. The same David who said that God formed him and knitted him in the womb is also the same David who slept with Bathsheba and then had her husband murdered. David was a murderer.
And David's response is where hope can be offered to everyone in this room. What David had done was deceitful and heinous and wicked. But remember David serves the God who knows and sees. And God sends Nathan to confront David and David responds in complete humility and brokenness and confesses his sin. He owns it. He doesn't hide it in the dark anymore.
He doesn't justify his actions. He just says I have sinned against the Lord. And you know what happens next in the very next verse? Nathan says the Lord has put away your sin. Like how beautiful is that? David was a murderer.
We should expect judgment and condemnation and maybe even God to strike David dead but he doesn't. The God who knows and sees offers David grace and forgiveness when he confesses his sin and seeks him for mercy. And that's the reality for every person in this room. That's one of the things you've got to walk away with. If you've had an abortion, if you were pressured into it or supported someone, if you're considered, God sees you. He knows you and God is with you.
You are not outside of his grasp or his love. Even after what David had done, God didn't leave him or forsake him. When David was confronted with his sin, he went running into the arms of God for forgiveness and that's what's offered to you. Go read Psalm 51. It is David's confession specifically over this. And it's forever memorialized in Scripture to help lead us back to God.
Brother, sister, you are not outside of the reach and the love of God. Just run to God and confess and accept his forgiveness. Receive his love. And lastly, God, listen, I know this has been long, but I wanted to cover it well. One last thing before we jump back into the text. We desperately need this last thing.
Christians have to recover and embody what it means to be pro-life in all of its forms. The church in America as a whole, on the whole, has been overwhelmingly unhelpful and unkind to people who are in this situation. And the reality is, when you close your heart to someone in judgment, you no longer have capacity for grace and mercy in the mission of God to offer people hope. And that's what we're called to do. That means, first of all, for mothers and fathers who would choose to say no to abortion, we have to be willing to step in. They don't know how to raise their children.
Christians have to say yes to adoption. Christians have to say yes to fostering and helping the support system for abandoned children. Yes to supporting people financially who are pursuing adoptions. Yes to volunteering and supporting organizations that work with mothers and fathers who need to know what their other options are besides abortion. Yes to being the people that walk with single moms and single dads as they deal with mental and emotional and the socioeconomic toll of raising children. Yes to walking alongside families that have children with special needs and the difficulty of that venture.
Yes to being a place of refuge and help for those that have been abused and neglected and left. What we just saw in this Psalm is that God is the God who is with people in the darkness. That God's presence is with those in the pit of hell and if God is there, that's where his people are supposed to be. Supposed to go into the darkness to love and to help people. Let's not be a people who are just against abortion.
Let's be a people who are for life and all of what that means. Now there's, listen, there's more that could be said about this and if you want to talk about it, we're here. Your pastors are here to talk about it. But again, this application comes directly out of what David is saying. It's exactly about a God who knows and sees us. So we're going to shift back into the text because it sits within that framework.
God knows everything about you. Your actions, your thoughts, your words, you can't flee from his presence. And once again, David just has a praise break here. He just erupts in praise again of this God. He says, verse 17, how precious to me are your thoughts, O God, how vast is the sum of them. If I would count them, they are more than the sand.
I awake and I am still with you. It's just too much for David at this point. He just erupts in praise. It's like he gets praising and like he passes out. And then he's like, oh, I woke up and I'm still with you. Sweet, it wasn't a dream.
Like he's just overwhelmed with who God is. And then continuing on in verse 19, it takes an interesting twist here. Oh, that you would slay the wicked, O God. What on earth? Like we were, I thought we were in a praise break. I thought we were taking a praise lap, David.
Why? Why are we? Oh, men of blood, depart from me. They speak against you with malicious intent. Your enemies take your name in vain. Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord?
Do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with complete hatred. I count them my enemies. Like what on earth, David? All right.
A couple of things I want to point out here. First of all, this is raw emotion. And the Psalms give us raw emotion, which is actually really, really good news for us. Okay? Because the Psalms give us permission to take all of who we are and all of what we're feeling and thinking to the Lord and letting him sort it out. Okay?
God doesn't want the canned version of you. He wants it all. So you can take it to him. Just take it to him. And the truth is, the other thing is, if you actually see God the way David does, that he's all-knowing and all- powerful and always present, he's holy and good, then it's not a far step to want that God to exercise justice. Right?
That we actually want God to do something about wickedness. And specifically David. David was the king of the people of God. And God at times would use his people to be the instrument of his justice in the world. But we, like we actually want this.
We want God to be just. Right? We want him to deal with wickedness and sin. Just as long as it doesn't, it's not us. You know? But we want, we want someone to hold Russia responsible for what they're doing in the Ukraine.
We wanted someone to be held responsible at 9-11. Okay? We want someone to be held responsible for sex trafficking. Right? And so as David has this big picture of who God is, he just, he lays his petition before this God who is all-powerful and all-knowing and can do anything. It makes sense.
Even if it catches us off guard. And then we're right back where we started. Verses 23 and 24. 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.
The reason that David can actually pray this is because he found refuge in the God he described in this Psalm. As painful as it was for him, David recognized that God knows everything about him. The good, the bad, and the ugly. And David knows there's no place he can flee from God's presence. And in spite of everything David has done, God still wants to be in relationship with him. That's because the relationship that David had with God was not based primarily on who David was or what David had done.
But it was based off of who God was and what God had done. You see, God had promised David that there would never cease to be one of his sons on the throne of Israel forever. And that's exactly what happened. That from his line would come the Messiah. David had Solomon by way of Bathsheba. And then hundreds of years later, Jesus was born.
Son of Adam. Son of David. Jesus came so that we might have life. He lived the perfect sinless life on our behalf. Jesus died on the cross to pay for anything and everything we've ever done. And then he rose from the grave so that we might have life everlasting with him forever.
And that's the good news that's offered to you today. Just like David was offered forgiveness in light of everything that he had done, the same offer is given to you. Our relationship with God, hear me, is not based off of what we have done or who we are. It's based off of who God is and what Jesus has done for you. So it doesn't matter what you've done.
David was a liar, an adulterer, and a murderer. What about you? What about you? What are the things that you've done, the things that you've thought, and the things that you've said that you think keep you from God? What are the things that you have hidden in the dark that think disqualify you from a relationship with God? There's no thing that could have just come to your mind that can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
The offer of mercy and forgiveness is for you today no matter what you've done. God sees you and knows you and you can't hide it from him. David tried. He tried to hide it, but God loved him so much that he sent Nathan to confront him so that the relationship could be restored. God was pursuing for the relationship to be restored. And that same offer is given to you in Jesus today.
So there's a couple just little points of application as we close up here. How do we apply this? First, we do exactly what this Psalm does at the end. We pray and ask God to search us and to examine us. We actually want that. We want God to point out our mess.
And the truth is, guys, we can't see it sometimes. I challenge you, sit down with a piece of paper and a pen and just pray, God, reveal anything to me that is hidden from you or hidden from me. Anything that I'm trying to hide from you, point out any sin and just write down whatever God brings to your mind. And then pray and ask God for forgiveness and receive it. Maybe you go to people in your group and you ask them, we've got blind spots. Ask the people in your group, they'll point out your sin.
They may have a better grasp on it than you do. But we can do that. And when they point it out, don't be defensive, confess it, ask for forgiveness. Second point is that we ask the Lord to lead us in the way everlasting. Just like David does. To lead you on the right path, to hem you in, behind and before, to lead you on the path of everlasting life, to keep you.
In fact, it may be that you have to put feet to the prayers that you just prayed asking for the Lord to reveal it, that He might help you to be obedient. And if you're in the room this morning and you're not a Christian, I want you to understand something. God knows and sees everything and there actually is judgment for sin. But His desire is that you might run to Him and accept His love and His grace and His forgiveness. Your steps are exactly the same as what I said above. Ask God to show you your sin and confess it and accept His love and forgiveness and then walk in it.
You don't leave terrified. You've been offered something better. We all have. Kelly and Isaac are going to come back up and we're going to take communion. Communion is the tangible reminder of what Jesus did so that we can actually receive the grace and forgiveness that I'm talking about. That Jesus' body was broken and His blood was shed so that no matter what we've done, we can receive forgiveness.
And so if you aren't a Christian, I beg you to see God for who He is. He knows you. He knows your words and your thoughts and your actions and you can't hide it from Him. He chose. He chose to make a way for you to be in relationship with Him. So that's what we're asking you to do is to consider.
Consider that. Confess it before the Lord. And the truth is if you do that, then come. Come take communion for the first time and celebrate what Jesus has done for you. But if you're not ready to do that, we want you to sit and consider the weight of what we've talked about this morning.
And if you're a Christian, I want you to sit and ask the Lord to expose any grievous ways in us to lead us in the way everlasting, to quit hiding, to bring it into the light. Maybe there's something in your past that is haunting you. It doesn't have to. It doesn't have to. He offers you grace and forgiveness. Accept it.
And then when you're ready, come and take communion. Come and celebrate what Jesus has done for you. Let's pray. God, you know us and you see us and you're with us. And in spite of everything that we've done, you desire for us to be in relationship with you. And you have made a way for that to be possible.
So all across the room right now, Lord, I pray that you would go to work on our hearts, that we would confess our sins before you, we would confess our fears before you and bring it into the light so that you might forgive us. And we can walk in freedom, Lord. We're not chained by our past. We're not chained by the things that we've done. Lord, we can be free in Jesus. And it's in his name we pray.
Amen. I'm just going to play for a minute. I want to ask you to just pray and to consider all around the room.
Soul Care Until the End
Use this guide to help your group discussion as you meet this week.
Transcript
Good morning. My name is Chet. I'm one of the pastors here. Grab your Bibles, go to Philippians chapter 1. This is the last week in our soul care series. We've taken four weeks to just try to uncover some of our sin, some of our idolatry, some of the things that have affected how we view God and how we relate to Him and relate to each other.
And it hopefully has been heavy and helpful. When I was growing up, if you were, if you'd hurt yourself and you were telling my dad, if you'd say like, yeah, I hurt my arm or whatever, I got a bruise here. He'd say, come here, let me see. You get close to him and he put his hands around it real tenderly. He's a very gentle man. And then he would take his thumb and he would press it and say, is it hurt right here?
And just push down on whatever was painful. Um, cause he thought it was funny. And when I was about seven, my grandmother had hurt her arm and it was very bruised. Y'all see where this is going? And so I said, let me see. I'm so sorry that happened.
And she gave me her arm and I said, does it hurt right here? And she had my thumb into it. Uh, and apparently this was inappropriate. And it's hard for a seven year old to gauge what, what the context of things are, but it's different from father to son than from grandson to grandmother. Uh, when we do series like this, when we take time to investigate sin and pain and drag up some things from the past and try to look at our lives, sometimes it can feel like this is all we've done. Look at something painful and go, does it hurt right here?
And just kind of poke at it rather than actually being helpful. But that's, that's not the goal. The goal is as we investigate these things, we want to, to view this a lot more. Like if you had a rock in your shoe, you don't just muscle through. You stop, you take your shoe off, you get the rock out and life gets to be better. And so the hope is, as we've investigated some of this, as we walk through this together, that we've seen some of our sin, but that we seen some of the things that have hurt us from our past and some of the ways that we're affected by what people have done to us and the things that we've done.
And that we take the time to stop and to get rid of it so that we can move forward without a limp. That's, that's our hope in this series. And last week Spencer talked to us about the fact that we're capable of change, that you can change. And he kind of laid out for us a bit of a roadmap for that. But today, as we finish up the series, what we want to see is that if you belong to Jesus, you will change.
Not just you're capable of it, but you will change. That he is going to make us into something whole and complete and cured. That if you're struggling with sin, if you're struggling with depression and anxiety, if you're struggling with past things that seem like they loom over you like a cloud and dictate to you what life is going to be like from here on. If you have this thought of, I better just get used to this because this is how it's going to be forever. I want us to take courage this morning from Philippians to see that you are incorrect. If you belong to Jesus, it will not be like this forever.
So let's pray and let's study this section of scripture together. God, we thank you for your word. And more than that, we thank you for your salvation in Christ. We pray that as we study your words, that we would understand your work. So that we might take courage and rest.
And that we might continue. To move forward in the hope of what you have accomplished for us and what you will accomplish in us. We love you and we praise you in Jesus name. Amen. So in Philippians chapter 1, Paul is writing from prison to the church in Philippi.
He was arrested for going around and presenting the gospel. It was causing a lot of trouble, but he kept at it. And he was arrested. He's writing to the church in Philippi. He's writing to the Philippians. And he has a good relationship with them.
And they have consistently been good to him and partnered with him in ministry. And so we're going to pick up in verse 3. And we're going to take some encouragement from his words to them. And we're going to see that they apply to us in Christ. So it says, I thank my God in all my remembrance of you.
Always in every prayer of mine for you all. Making my prayer with joy. Because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. So Paul in prison says, Every time I pray for you, I'm just filled with joy. I'm filled with thankfulness because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. Now the gospel is the message, the news, the good news of what Jesus has done for us.
That Jesus Christ is the son of God who came, who lived a perfect, sinless life. Who did not come to teach us how to be better, but came to save us out of our sin. That he was crucified, that he was dead, that he was buried, that he rose again. And that we have hope in him. That all those who place their faith in him will be saved. And Paul went around proclaiming this message and the people in Philippi believed and then partnered with him so that more people could know this news.
So he's in jail. And he writes, I'm so thankful for your partnership in the gospel. And one of the things that Paul's taking to encourage him in his walk with the Lord, in his midst of his difficulty as he faces persecution, is that he's not alone. He's in prison, but he's writing and said, I'm so thankful that I'm not alone. That y'all have partnered with me in this. And that's one of the first things I want you to see.
That as you walk in your desire to follow Jesus and your struggle against sin, you're not alone. That you have gathered this morning. That's why it's a gathering of the people who belong to the Lord. This is not an individual experience. That you're not alone. That you belong to a people.
That you can be in a community group. Many of you are, most of you are, in community groups where you belong to a group of people. And they're not allowed to get rid of you. That you get to walk out in life with them, following Jesus and being known by them and being loved by them. That they are partners with you in the gospel. See, the Philippians had partnered with him in everything, as far as how you would partner in the gospel.
They partnered with him in repentance and faith. They had partnered with him in proclamation of the gospel and in persecution that comes when we proclaim the gospel. And so I want you to know that you're not alone. Every so often our community group will just take a night where we just kind of tell our stories or we'll spend a couple of weeks just doing this, reminding everybody, here's how I got here. Just kind of who I am. And I love this.
Because every time we do this, I'm reminded, oh yeah, I'm not alone. Everybody has pain. Everybody has hurt. Everybody has bad decisions and sin and struggles. And Jesus is good. I'm not the only one here who's a sinner just trying to fit in with all these well-behaved people in my group, hoping they don't find me out.
No, we all are here because Jesus is good and we're not alone. And so he takes courage in the partnership that they have. And I want you to do that as well. As you fight sin, you do not have to be alone that we have partnered in the gospel. Verse 6. And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.
We'll spend most of our time there today. But let's look at verse 7. It is right for me to feel this way about you all because I hold you in my heart for you are all partakers with me of grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. So Paul says, I'm certain that he who began a good work in you is going to bring it to completion at the day of Christ. And it's right for me to feel this way because I love you. That's nice.
I hold you in my heart. And he says, because you're a partaker of grace with me. You've joined me in ministry that we've partaken in grace together. And I want you to know that that's the qualifying thing for the statement that we're about to spend our time studying is have you partaken in grace? Have you seen your sin? Repented of your sin and asked Jesus for grace, which is unmerited favor, unearned love, that he would do the work on our behalf, that he would redeem us.
Have you partaken in grace? Because Paul says, it's right for me to feel this way because you've partaken in grace with me. And then he gives, it's active grace. It's at work grace. It's not just you partaken in grace and then you moved on, but you partook in grace in, and he says, as displayed by my imprisonment and in defending the gospel that you've joined in this. So let's go back to verse six.
And we're just going to break this statement down a little bit and spend our time here this morning. He says, I'm sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. The day of Jesus Christ is judgment day. That's the day of our Lord. That he comes and time's up. That he sets up his active rule and reign as king.
This is when we were walking through the book of Matthew. This is when he has the sheep and the goats. This is when it comes down and the master returns and sets his house in order. That's the day of Jesus Christ. And if you want to, you can go search in a Bible app or on the internet, or if you have a concordance, which is a big book, you can look up the day of the Lord or the day of Christ, and you'll see that that's what this is. And so what he's saying is that there's going to come a day when Jesus calls everybody to account and to give an account of themselves and that he's certain that on that day, you'll be complete if you've partaken in the grace of Christ.
That he's certain on that day that you'll be whole. Didn't that help your soul? Because of how incomplete we feel so often, how broken and how marred, and how much we feel like we've fallen short to think that someday I'll be whole. I'll be complete. But I want us to see what he's putting this on.
So if you will, just look ahead to your very last day. If you belong to Jesus, on that day you are complete. There's nothing out of alignment. There's nothing missing. There's nothing wrong with you. On that day you'll stand before Christ complete.
How? He says, I'm sure of this, that he... That's very important. That he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion. He does it. It's personal and it's powerful.
That it's done by Christ. That he began the work, you didn't begin the work. And he finishes the work, you don't finish the work. You're not done, but he's begun. And that he's going to bring you to completion. That he's going to fix you, finish you, complete you, make you whole.
That's good news. That he is the one who empowers this. Jesus says, he gives a parable at one point in the Gospels, and he says that the kingdom of heaven is like yeast. It's like leaven that's put in a lump and it takes over. Guess what? Your sin doesn't win if you belong to Jesus.
And your desire to hold on to your sin doesn't win if you belong to Jesus. Sometimes it feels like we're wounded and we come to Jesus and he binds us up. Other times it feels like he hunts us down and wounds us and then binds us up. Sometimes we're on board with the fixing that we're getting and other times we're going, please, please, please just let me keep this. And he's like, no, it's bad for you. That he actively works in you.
It's not an impersonal thing, but it's Christ himself at work to bring us to fullness. So he is the one who supplies the power and it's a promise. Paul says, I am sure of this. It's a certainty. Do you belong to Jesus? I'm sure that you will be brought and made complete.
You will be whole. You will be fixed. You will be repentant. You will be changed. It's a certainty. And it's not because Paul believes in you.
It's not because he believes in the Philippians. It's because he believes in Jesus. He says this elsewhere in 1 Thessalonians 5, 23. He's 5, 23. He says, Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely. That means make you perfectly good.
The sanctification is the process by which he actively, practically redeems us from sin. Now that he sets us apart. Now may he sanctify you completely and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. So the same thing, that you'll be blameless, that you'll be complete on that day. He who calls you is faithful. He will surely do it.
Oh, that's so good. Because it'd be a little scary if Paul wrote to the Philippians. I am sure of this, that on the day of Christ, you will be complete because y'all are great. Because if there's one thing I know about the Philippians, is that y'all keep it together. If there's one thing I know about the Philippians, is that you make good choices. Galatians, not so sure.
Corinthians, I'm sure, but it's the other direction. But you Philippians, I'm proud of y'all. You got this. You ever have anybody encourage you that way? You're trying to work something out and they go, you got this. I know you.
I trust you. You don't mess stuff up. You always end up making the right decision. We should hang out more. I've been with me my entire life. That is incorrect.
There's part of you that takes that at first. You're like, yes, you're right. I am smart. I make the right decision. Then you leave and you go, wait, no, I don't.
And now all this waits on me and this feels overwhelming. Now I've just got all this extra pressure. It's like it builds us up just to have more come crashing down on us. And Paul does not say to them, y'all got this because you're great. He says, he's going to do it. So I'm certain.
He didn't say, I know you. He says, I know Jesus. Now that's good news. That when you stare right now in the face of your sin and your pain and your weakness, it is not, can I muscle up enough to bring myself to the finish line? It's will Jesus who is faithful be faithful? Yes, he will.
Is Jesus who is strong be strong? Yes, he will. Is Jesus who loved us so much that he would die for us? Will he keep loving us with that same type of love? Yes, he will. Will we stand complete?
Yes, we will because he will. That's the reality of this. That not only can we change, but we will change. But I want you to see something else. He says, I'm sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. See that in?
It's not just a work that he did for you, but it's a work that he's doing in you. That dramatically changes how this plays out. I heard a comedian say one time, I'm sick of following my dreams. I just want to find out where they're going and hook up with them later. And some of us in our growth in Christ want to be able to do the same thing. I just want to show back up when I'm all grown.
I just want to be there. Can I just get to the end growth part? I just want to like, can I just putter around and then just show up and the answer is no. He's going to do this in you, which means that you'll be here the whole time. This process, empowered by him and it's a promise carried out by him, will take place in you. So for you, what's it going to look like?
It's going to look like a lot of work. Let's go to verse 8. I want you to see this. For God is my witness how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus. And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more with all knowledge and discernment. I love that.
One is, if it abounds more and more, it means we grow in it. Paul says, I'm praying you grow. He says, I pray you abound in love. And as Americans, we're like, yes, love. All we need is love. Love.
We love that. We love love. Love's great. Love wins. Love. Love.
But he says, no, no, hold on. With knowledge and all discernment. I want you to grow in love, but not the stupid love that y'all have. Wise love. I want you to love the things you should love and not love the things you shouldn't love. And that's what we've been spending some time looking at.
That's what idolatry is, is that we don't love God enough and we love other things that are worse more than we should. He says, I want you to abound in love, but I want it to be wise love, discerning love, love that's pointing in the right direction. And he says this, so that you may approve what is excellent and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ. Okay. He says, I'm certain of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Christ. So I'm praying that you will make good decisions so that you'll be pure and blameless at the day of Christ.
Which is it? It's both. He's going to do this, but you're going to have to be there. And so his prayer is basically, I pray Jesus is going to do what Jesus said he's going to do. That's my prayer. That's a good prayer for you to have.
Lord, do in me quickly what you said you're going to do. I had it quickly, but I think it's okay. Sneak it in there. That I pray that you will change me and mold me into what you said you're going to change me and mold me into. It is in you through him. So what's that look like?
Well, he keeps going. In chapter 2, verse 12, he says this, Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence, but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. You see it again? Obey, work, because he works in you. But what's it look like to us?
It looks like obedience. I've said this before. I say it a lot because it's really helpful for me, but obedience and agreement are different. Agreement's nice. We can obey when we agree. It works out well, but obedience shows up where agreements differ, that we obey the Lord even when we disagree with him.
So he says, obey and work. So what's it look like? Well, it looks like waking up early so you can read your Bible or staying up later so you can read your Bible or both because you need a lot of your Bible. It looks like psyching yourself up to show up to your community group. I love so much that we host our community group. All we have to do is psych ourselves up to unlock the door.
I don't have to every week sit and go, okay, remember, remember it's good. You remember, you remember how you feel afterwards because there's always right before it's time to leave, there's just like, huh, do I actually want to have to get in my car and use the steering wheel and press the thing with my foot? There is, there's some kind of pressure that pushes on us to not be around each other and the reality is it's going to take some energy for you to go be around your group. It's going to take some energy for you to actually confess some sin. It's going to take some energy for you to pick up the phone and invite somebody to a thing or accept an invitation.
It's going to take some energy for you to walk this out. It takes energy for you to show up in the morning. It's going to take some work. It's going to take some obedience. It's going to take you some times where you wrestle with the Lord and you say, I don't want to give this up, but I believe that you're good and I believe that you're doing something good in me, so I'm going to repent. So he says in chapter 3, verse 12, he says it again, not that I have already obtained this, talking about this resurrection, talk about being made new, or am already perfect.
Isn't that nice? Paul doesn't think he's perfect. He isn't saying get on my level. He's saying let Jesus do what Jesus is going to do. But I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own.
I press, I work, I labor, I obey to make this my own, to become what he says I'm going to be, to receive this resurrection life because Christ has already done it in me. He's already made me his own and he's promised he's going to bring me there so I fight to get there. That's encouraging. Messes with our head a little bit. Is he going to do it? Yes.
Are you going to do it? Yes. Is he going to do it in you? Yes. Do you have to be there the whole time? Yes.
Is it going to hurt at times? Yes. Is it going to be good? Always. In one of the Harry Potter books, they're time traveling, which if they had just done this earlier could have fixed a lot of problems, but whatever. They're time traveling and there's this time where Harry Potter is about to die, which also would have ended the books.
And he sees himself come save his life by doing some really like amazing stuff. And so you experience this the first time. He shows up and saves his own life. Then later, because of time travel, he shows up as this version of himself and does the really cool thing to save his own life. He's hanging out with his friend afterwards and she says, how did you do that? And he said, well, I knew I could do it because I already saw myself do it.
Does that make sense? And she says, no. That's right here. I'm pressing on to be made perfect because I already see that he's going to make me perfect. I'm repenting because I know that he's working repentance in me. I'm showing up.
I'm doing the stuff. I'm obeying because I know that he's working obedience in me. I'm empowered to do what I'm supposed to do because I know that I've already seen that he's going to do it in me and that one day I'll stand before him holy, blameless, above reproach that on the day of Christ I will be complete so I press on towards completion. And the reason I press on towards completion is that he's already promised to do this and he's going to get me there. I already know I'm going to win so I run the race to win. Does that make sense?
No. Does it work? Yes. That's how this plays out. That you take courage from the fact that Christ is going to complete what he says he's going to complete and then you walk with him in it. So he says I'm sure of this that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.
So at the day of Jesus Christ and we're going to look down at verse 10 and 11 because this idea comes back up. So this is where he says I pray that he works this in you so that you may approve what is excellent and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ. There it is again the day of Christ. I want you to know two things about the day of Christ. If you belong to Jesus if you've placed your faith in him if you are a partaker of grace which means Jesus has done the work and is doing the work not that you are a partaker of your own good works or your own good effort or your own righteousness that's not what it is it's a partaker of grace.
On the day of Jesus Christ there are two things that you need to know about yourself on that day. If you belong to Jesus this is a reality we're just peeking into the future. There are two things that are true about you on that day. One you are pure and blameless filled with the fruit of righteousness. Come on. Good Job y'all.
Pure and blameless filled with the fruit of righteousness. That's what we want. Don't you wish when your group was like hey we're going to get together we're going to spend some time just looking at ourselves kind of repenting of sin. Don't you wish that you could with all certainty just be like oh that's not a thing I have to do. I'm pure and blameless. I don't know if y'all have noticed I'm filled with the fruit of righteousness.
He's working that in us. Part of the process of that is repentance. Which repentance is a joy that is given to us that we could let go of things that are bad and take hold of things that are good. I heard somebody say birds fly fish swim Christians repent. This is something that we get to continually do as we work on towards being more like Christ. But on that day when he lays the world bare and you would be completely exposed in your sin if you belong to Christ you're covered by his blood you're filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ.
He's accomplished it but you're filled with it. So on that day if you belong to Jesus you are pure blameless and filled with the fruit of righteousness and it says to the glory and praise of God that we are praising God that he does this work in us so that he gets the glory. We get the results of it we get the joy of it but he gets the glory. We've said this before when we get to heaven we are not singing praises to our own names. I will not stand up and sing glory be to Chet or Chester I don't know what name you have to use when you're in heaven. I don't know if it's a nickname situation or like you know given name whatever.
I won't do it. I won't have earned myself the opportunity to be there. I will not be there by my own works I will not be there by my own goodness I will not be there by my own intentionality or my morality or anything. I will be there because of the work of Christ and so when we gather there all praise and all glory goes to Christ we sing his name because he is the one who has accomplished this for us and in us. All glory be to Christ. There's one name that's sung and shouted in heaven and let me tell you something that you need to know about praise.
The first thing you need to know about praise is that all genuine praise true praise includes genuine delight. True praise includes genuine delight. Praise without delight is flattery. This is really good. Of all the meals I've eaten this is one of them tastes like someone cooked it. And we're trying to find a way to be nice but we don't have anything really good to say.
We get to heaven when you actually genuinely praise something when you actually genuinely enjoy something it just falls out. If you're eating something really good sometimes you just make a noise. It's a little weird for the people around you. You bite into it and you go mmm and it's like okay take it easy we get it you like it stop. Somebody starts dating somebody and that's all they want to talk about. And it just falls out this genuine delight so there's genuine praise.
So all true praise includes genuine delight which means that if we're there praising the Lord we are delighting in the Lord. second the best praise and the moments in life right now when you are the most free is when you are caught up in enjoyment of something else other than yourself. There's a true self forgetfulness to genuine praise that brings freedom. There are moments in life where you stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon and you just stare. when you hear a certain type of music and you're just swept away. You don't exist anymore. You're just getting to participate in the music. You're eating a meal and you're able to just enjoy the meal and not think about yourself.
Being praised we all like being praised and there's a place for it. But there's something about receiving praise that is never quite the same never quite as enjoyable as actually being swept up in genuine praise for something else. It never hits the same place. And so what you need to know about that day if you are in Christ is on that day you are whole. Nothing out of place. Nothing there that shouldn't be there.
You're complete. Nothing that you're dragging behind you. Nothing that's looming over your head. You are delighting in the Lord. Genuine delight. And you are free from yourself. that's a good day.
If you belong to Christ you're free you have joy and you're complete. And if you belong to Christ that stands as the finish line marker of your life. And it can't not stand that way because you can't escape Christ. You can't out sin him. You can't outrun him. If you belong to Christ you are in an unpluckable hand.
In an unpluckable hand. You will be there. You can be the worst person in your community group. On that day you're complete. You're whole. You're in Christ made wonderful delighting in him singing his praise. completely free from
Yourself. You can have day after day month after month year after year of struggle and pain and hurt where you're hurting others where you're
Wrestling with the Lord where you're fighting him over your sin and on that day you will be standing complete in Christ because he
Is the one who does the work that is the reality for you so we press on towards it that we might the truth
That's the reality for you if you belong to Jesus the band is going to come back up I want us as best we
Can to put this in our mind to see this this next week on Thursday I get to go to the beach with my
Family this week is going to be a good week all week not just when I get to the beach all week leading to
The beach because it's going to be hard to make me sad because on Thursday I get to the beach you know that school
Is about to be over you get to go on vacation you just keep stuff happens and you go well it's about to be
Over I'm about to be at the beach I'm about to be on vacation this class is about to be over this teacher is
The worst but guess what only for another week and the reality for us in Christ is that we get to look forward to
That day to give us courage and strength in this one that we can face this day because of that day and this day
Actually gets swept up in that day to make that day more glorious that this day actually stands in testimony to the goodness of
Christ to bring you along to bring me along that when we stand and praise Christ he's actually praiseworthy because he got us there
How powerful how good how loving how gracious did he have to be to do that infinitely he is good and that day is
A glorious day when we stand complete in him some of you are tired tired tired of your sin tired of your struggle tired
Of your pain tired of your weakness tired of your depression you're tired it's labor and work to get out of bed and to
Make it here on Sundays you don't even know how many songs our church sings because you've only ever made it to the one right before we start preaching because you're tired on that day there's nothing out of joint there's no exhaustion
Your lungs never tire of singing the praise of Christ you're complete some of us are sad just down on that day you are swept up in a joy that you cannot fathom that your best moments right now
Are just the taste just the hint just the scent of what's going to be tasted at that time some of us are anxious and we're worried well there's a day when you are a conqueror so that we're more than a
Conqueror now Jesus says that in this world you'll have trouble but take heart because he's overcome the world and that we get to stare at the end and go I don't know how it's all going to play
Out but I know what the scoreboard's going to be at the end of it I know where I'm going to be at the end of this when I was in high school my wife she wasn't my wife in high school but I was playing
My senior year of football and she was making a scrapbook so it turns out it was a great great scrapbook it was really kind thoughtful thing for her to do turns out she was a keeper she was making this
For me and we were in a game and in the first quarter the team that we were playing was up on us by three touchdowns it was 21-0 it was not going well and my younger brother took the camera from her
And took a picture of the scoreboard and sat back down and she said why did you do that and he said it's going to look really good in your scrapbook when they come back and win this game for us to have
Seen that it was 21-0 so the home game so the scoreboard says 0-21 and there's a picture in the scrapbook that says 7-21 and there's a picture in the scrapbook that says 14-21 and there's a picture
In that scrapbook that says 21-21 and there's a picture in that scrapbook that says 28-21 and he was right that 0-21 actually just looks really good because you get to see a 28-21 later and the reality is that for some of
You right now in your exhaustion and in your sadness and in your depression you need to just take a picture because if you belong to Christ this day is going to look really good when you stand complete
In him when you stand before the king made pure and blameless filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Christ to the praise and glory of God this day will just be a testimony it'll just be a moment in time that points and screams the name
Of Christ for all eternity that you can look back and go he got me from there to here because he's good so let's press on we know where it ends let's go and let's cling to Christ as we go knowing that he who is faithful
Will do it let's pray God we thank you that you're faithful and we pray that you would help us to press on to make it our own but we are not perfect it's not ours yet but we are yours so it will be ours later Lord you've made us yours
Through the work of Christ may we cling to you and praise you and may we work and obey as you empower us to do it and God for anyone in this room who on that day will not stand complete in Christ because they
Have not partaken in grace that they will stand in their own work in their own sin Lord we ask that by the power of your spirit and your spirit is in this room right now moving we pray that by the power
Of your spirit that you would convict and that you would help them to repent so that they might place their faith in you and not themselves so that they can stand with the chorus of the redeemed screaming Christ is glorious
At the top of their lungs free from their selves free from their sin and made complete in you oh Lord work through your spirit in Jesus name we pray amen
Process of Change
Use this guide to help your group discussion as you meet this week.
Transcript
Good morning. My name is Spencer. I am one of the pastors here. We are in week three of our four-week series on soul care. This is an introduction to the idea of soul care that we would, as Christians, grow in understanding the brokenness and the sin that's beneath the surface that's in our soul and that we would treat, we would help grow in the gospel and grow as Christians as we care for ourselves and ultimately care for one another. So the first two weeks of this series, in the first week we introduced this idea of soul care that at the core of our souls is our heart and at the core of our heart is our view of God, how we worship Him, our lack of worship of Him, and our view of self in light of who God is.
That's at the core of who we are and we took a step back from that and looked at us as complex people with complex stories, that our history, that the way we're built, that our behavioral patterns, that there are things that affect our hearts. So we walked through that in week one. Last week Chet walked us through what is the core problem of our hearts, that we worship things in the place of God, that we have functional saviors that we run after. And even beneath that we've got deep idolatry, deep idols that's at the core of our heart, that creates this dysfunction in us, in our souls. So the first two weeks was really getting to know what's going on underneath the surface.
And it stirred up quite a bit, I'm sure. Sometimes my wife and my kids will go out to my parents' house, they live on the lake, and they've got this entryway into the water. And at the lake, before you walk in, you can kind of see the water, you can kind of see underneath the surface. After about a minute of being in the lake and standing there, the whole, like, the water's cloudy and muddy. We've been, our feet has been all in the mud beneath and all this stuff's been stirred and clouded the water and clouded to the surface. And that's kind of what it's felt like the last couple of weeks as we've walked through this.
We've just been stirring up stuff, we've been poking at things underneath the surface, and some of you are like, okay, thank you for telling me everything that's wrong with me. Appreciate it. And others of you, there's probably a range of responses. Others of you are excited, and you're like, yes, you've told me what's happening beneath the surface. Let's go.
I want to tackle this sin. It's like, okay, we're getting there. The first two weeks is really getting beneath the surface. This week, what we want to do is walk through Colossians 3 and walk through the process of change. Now that we know what's been going on underneath the surface in our souls, what do we do with that?
How do we actually change? That's what we're going to do today. And as we walk through Colossians 3, we're going to see three stages of change, three kind of steps of change for us. So I hope this morning can be incredibly practical for us as we seek to change and grow to know more of Christ. So let me pray, and then we'll jump into the text.
Lord, we love you. I'm thankful for the last couple of weeks that we've been able to walk through the Scripture's teaching on our soul and what's going on beneath the surface. God, I pray this morning that you would, as that has been brought to the surface, as that's been brought to the light, as that's continually going to be brought to the light, that you would give us a vision for change. That we would not be hopeless as we face sin and brokenness in our life, but you would give us hope from the Scriptures. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.
All right, so we're going to walk through Colossians 3, but I want to give some context because we're jumping into a book. Typically, we walk through books of the Bible. But when we are kind of going through topical series like this and we're sitting in a chapter, I want to give you a little bit of context for where we are in Colossians 3. In Colossians 2, in the middle of it, Paul is proclaiming the gospel to this church. This is a letter to the church at Colossaea. He's proclaiming the gospel to the Colossians.
In the middle of it, he says, and you who were dead in your sins. Those of you who were once dead, that's the idea that before we knew Christ, we were dead in sin. We were spiritually dead. We did not know him. He says, and you who were dead in your sins and the sinful nature of your flesh. God made alive together with Christ.
He made us alive. When you place faith in Jesus, he brings you to life. And he says, having canceled the record of debt that stood against you with its legal demand, the sin debt that we've accumulated, it says, this he set aside, nailing it to the cross, that your sin was bought and paid for as you were raised to life in him. He proclaims this truth to this church. This is what's true about you because you've trusted in Jesus. And then he shifts into addressing kind of some problems that's been happening in the church, the Colossian church.
Some self-made, self-religious efforts that have been added on to the gospel. So he addresses some of these things that they're doing, they're adding on to the gospel. And he closes out chapter two with saying in verse 23, these have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion, an appearance of wisdom in promoting asceticism and severity to the body. But they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh. This self-made, self-religious effort, it has no value in actually stopping the indulgence of the flesh. There's no value in bringing about the change that you want to see.
You're doing it wrong. You've got a bad model that you've been surrounded by for change. My daughter, my oldest, she's in first grade this year, which is crazy to me that she's now in first grade. And last year, she was in kindergarten, and she was learning to read. And the teacher said, hey, I want to do a parent-teacher conference. I couldn't be there.
My wife did it. It was a Zoom conference. But later that night, right before we went to bed, she said, hey, let me tell you how the parent-teacher conference went. And I said, okay. She's like, is she doing well here? She's doing well here?
But when it comes to reading, the teacher is taking extra time. She's sitting down with her and reading. And Ellie won't look at the pictures. She's like, look at the pictures and the words and try to make the connections here. And Ellie just looks at the words. She won't look at the pictures, and the teacher can't figure out why.
So I was like, hmm, I think I know why that is. I said it to myself. And then I said it out loud. All right, well, good night. The next day, I was like, no, I can't hide this. I need to fess up.
So I said, honey, I think I know why our daughter doesn't look at the pictures. It's because every time that we're reading together, I say, don't look at the pictures. You're cheating. Don't look at the pictures. Look at the words. Don't look at the pictures.
Don't look at the pictures. To which I find out by talking to teachers about this is harmful to learning process. It damages your child. And I didn't know. Listen, I pay my taxes. I send my kids to public school so they can learn.
I can't. We don't teach. I just I didn't know. I'm just kind of rocking with what I got. It seemed like pretty logical. She's cheating.
Looking at the pictures. Focus on the words. And since then, we've had to implement the correct process. It was a bad model for change. And the problem is for us is that we sometimes have a bad model for change. We want to grow in our faith, but we were doing it wrong.
So I want to let the scriptures address some of our self-made, muscling through, trying to own change by our own strength. I want the scriptures to address us with this process that it lays out in Colossians 3. So pick up in verse 1. This is the first step in change. If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.
For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory. Step 1 is to set your mind on Christ. It is to focus on Him. You look to Him first. If you have, Christian, if you've been raised with Christ through believing in Him, if you've laid down your life and trusted Him, it says continue to look to Him.
Set your mind on things that are above. Set your mind on Christ. Because here's the problem. If you jump straight into addressing sin, if that is your first focus, your effort to affect change will be by your own effort, not Christ working in you. It is of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh. It is a self-made effort of your own.
He says, Behold Him. Behold Christ. Set your mind on Him. The one who died for your sin. The one who conquered death of the resurrection. The one who ascended to the right hand and is seated at the right hand of the Father in power.
The one whom you can hide in, in the face of fire. He says, Look to Him. And I love the physical nature of that command. He's literally saying, Look up. Look above. I love that, because often when we are in sin, we don't do this.
We look down. When we feel the effects of depression and the effects of sin through deep sadness and depression. The Bible has a category of language for this. In the Psalms, you're downcast. You're literally, your body language is down. That when you're ashamed in sin, your body language, you're looking down.
I remember a few years back, I was confessing some sin and some brokenness to a friend, to a brother of mine. And as I was confessing this, I didn't realize this. The whole time I was talking with him, my head was down. I could not look at him in the eyes. And he finally just said, Hey, look at me. Look at me.
You're proclaiming the gospel over me. You can look at me. I love this command to look up. Jesus, in the midst of our sins, says, Hey, look up. Look at me. Focus on me.
Set your mind on me. You're no longer a slave to sin. You're no longer identified by your sin and your brokenness and the worst aspects of your sinful nature. Look to me. Set your mind on things are above. Set your mind on Christ.
And this is not a formality. This is not a checkbox. We say, Okay, okay, step one. All right. Set your mind on Christ. All right, I pray.
All right, Jesus, now help me with my sin. This cannot be a formality. This has to be a desperate need in looking to Him. This is you in the ocean as the waves are crashing over you. And you see a life buoy. And you're like, That is my only hope.
You fix your eyes and your grasp and your hope on that to save you. That's the type of desperate need that it takes to set your mind on Christ as your only hope for change. It starts with this. Now, how do you practically do this? Well, you practically do this through a desperate pursuit of Him through word and prayer. A desperate pursuit of Him through word and prayer.
And I know that when I say that, that the response from some is, Oh, huge shock, preacher man. Read your Bible and pray more. It's not like I haven't heard that before. And others will say, That's over simplistic. To look at someone and their sin and their brokenness and their disorders, and to say, Read your Bible more. That's overly simplistic.
You don't understand the complexity of the problem. My hope is that the last couple of weeks have highlighted that we absolutely believe that the problem is complex. That the sin and the brokenness, that our stories, that our idolatry is absolutely complex. But I, hear this, I wholeheartedly reject any idea that does not place word and prayer as a sin. central aspect of soul care. I reject any idea that doesn't, that downplays the need for word and prayer in the process of change. I mean, honestly, that, I mean this, that, that can really only come from someone who hasn't desperately sought Christ as their only hope through word and prayer.
Not just for a moment, not just for a couple of days, not just for a couple of weeks, but has for seasons, for years, clung to Christ in word and prayer as their only hope for change. That critique can honestly only come from someone who has not done that. And I have seen, over the last three years, some of the people I've watched grow in our church immensely have grown in this. They have, there's a common thread. They have sought the Lord and word. They're growing in prayer.
It is a long-term approach. It is a long-term pursuit. One of my former pastors, he used to say, I'm sure he's not the source of this quote. He used to say, soul work is slow work. That soul work is slow work. It takes time.
It takes more than just a couple of months pursuing God. You need to look at him as your only hope and continue to look and fix your gaze upon him. And that happens practically through word and prayer. Over and over and over again to see the change you want to see happen. Now, the reason this is so important is that when you focus on him, when you continue to look at him in his word, he starts to change your perspective on all of it, on yourself, on life. There's a book that I'm almost done reading called Gentle and Lowly.
It is the book you see on both sides. Crossway was, the publisher was generous enough to give us 200 free copies. So today I want you all to take a copy when you leave. But this book just does that. It looks at the heart of Christ. As a diamond, you're turning all the facets and seeing different aspects of it.
And as you sit in it, as you look at the heart of Christ, it begins to change your perspective on everything. It changes your perspective on your sin, on your brokenness. That's what he's calling us to do. To continue to look at him, continue to gaze upon him, continue to fixate on him, to pursue him in prayer, to go after him. We need to tether ourselves to Christ, to fixate on him. And when you do this, it sets you up for the second part of this, in step two, which picks up in verse five.
He says, put to death, therefore, what is earthly in you, sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these, the wrath of God is coming. And these, you too, once walked, when you were living in them. But now, you must put them all away, anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self and its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in the knowledge after the image of its creator. Here, there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free, but Christ is all and in all.
Now, we could spend a few weeks just walking through that right there because there's a whole lot packed in. But I want us to see, take a step back and see that the big second step in the process of change is this. It is an aggressive approach to sin. It is an aggressive approach to sin that when you put and focus your mind on Christ, it will inevitably result in this, an aggressive approach to sin. There's an illustration in that book, Gentleman Lowley, that I found incredibly helpful. He says that the father's view of sin in us is similar to a father's view of cancer in their child.
That when their child is diagnosed with cancer, they hate it. They hate the cancer in them. They hate seeing it hurt them. They hate seeing it harm them. That you hate that in your child. You want it destroyed.
That you will aggressively treat it with chemo, which hurts. But you will aggressively treat, you will treat this disease. And he says that's the father's approach to sin in us. That he hates sin in us. He hates the disease of sin. He knows what, he can see what it does to us.
He sees how it destroys us, how it kills our fellowship with him, how we run to lesser things. He sees what it does to our friendships, to our marriages. He sees what it does to our community groups, what it does to our churches, what it does to our society. He hates the disease of sin in us. And he wants us to aggressively approach it. And he gives two basic metaphors in this.
The first metaphor that he gives is put to death what is earthly in you. That's the first aggressive approach to sin that we're given. It's to put to death what is earthly in you. He says, therefore, linking back to everything he just said, therefore, put this to death in you. Week one, we talked about knowing our hearts and knowing our greater story and how that's all connected and how that knowledge helps us in the change process. Last week, we looked at deep idols and functional saviors.
And all this is knowledge to help us understand the brokenness that's within us, the brokenness that's underneath the surface. And the scriptures say, now that you know this, you can see this, put it to death. Murder it. Bludgeon it to death. Strangle it. Snuff the life out of it.
It is, I mean, it's an aggressive approach. I mean, this isn't unique to Colossians. You can go to Galatians 5, 24, where it says, crucify the flesh with a similar list of sins. Crucify. We walk through the crucifixion regularly in our church and teaching to understand how awful that death was. The ripping apart of the flesh that Jesus went through.
The suffocating on the cross. The scriptures say, crucify. With that aggression, crucify the flesh. It's violent language. And the reason it's violent is because we are called to take sins seriously. The disease is serious.
We need to look to God and as we look to Him and He stirs in us a holy hatred of sin. We look back at our sin and say, oh no, it's got to die. And I've got to murder it and if I'm going to bring people in in my group to help me murder it, I will crucify this. I will kill this. I will end this. And then it gives a second metaphor.
The second action it says is put them all away. Put off. Now the language of that in the Greek has to do with clothing. that you would put off, put away bad clothing. He's saying, you have bad clothing. Anger, wrath, malice, slander, obscene, talk from your mouth. He says, put it away.
Take it off. Get rid of that clothing. It's not good for you. There was a brief time when I was a kid that I pulled for Tennessee. And if you know me, I'm a huge Gamecock fan. But in the 90s, I saw Peyton Manning play and I went, oh man, that's a quarterback.
That's not a Tannehill. That is something different. And I fell in love with him. I was like, to this day, he was my childhood hero. I followed him to Colts. I'm a huge Colts fan.
I love Peyton Manning. And for a brief period of time, I also pulled for Tennessee. And then after he went to the NFL, I went to a Gamecock game where Tennessee was playing and I had a Gamecock shirt underneath and a Tennessee sweatshirt on. And about halftime, I looked around and I looked at myself and I was like, I look ridiculous. Why? Peyton's gone.
He's never coming back. I don't like this team. I look ridiculous. So I repented of my ways and I never wore anything Tennessee ever again. It was a bad look. And he's saying, it's a bad look.
These patterns that you were once enslaved to. Don't go back to them. Put it away. Pornography. Sexual sin. Masturbation.
This pursuit and gratification that comes from the flesh. He says, put it away. Get rid of it. You don't need to wear this anymore. He says, self-hatred. You can add cutting, disordered eating.
Did it ever bring you, did it ever fix anything in you? Did going after that ever actually bring you an ounce of joy? He says, put it away. Put it away. Greed. Materialism.
The worship of money. Did it ever satisfy? Did it ever bring you the true joy that Christ offers? He says, no, put it away. Don't wear it anymore. It's a bad wardrobe.
These two metaphors for approaching sin are helpful. We need to absorb this. Now, how do we take that, take a step back and apply that to what we've been learning about the last few weeks? How do we apply that to the complexities of our story, to our deep ideology, to our functional saviors? I think part of this is knowing what is earthly in you so that you can respond accordingly, aggressively. I think it's part of knowing your anxiety and some of the, not just some of the feeling of anxiety, but some of the unbelief that's attached to and within anxiety that you get to know yourself.
You get to understand yourself. And maybe as you study yourself and you study the anxiety in you, you start to understand that maybe for you, what's underneath the surface is some control idolatry, which we walked through last week. That you want to be like God and control everything and if you can't control everything, then what happens is you start to get anxious and as you know yourself and you know this deep idolatry and as you take a step back like we looked at in week one and start to know yourself and know your story, that maybe part of it is is that there are things that you do that add to, that fuel unhelpfully the anxiety in you. We talked about one of those things is if you're prone to anxiety, drinking coffee and caffeine can stir you up in a way that's unhealthy, that maybe some of these behavioral patterns, some of these physical aspects of yourself and some of the deep idolatry, when you know this and you can piece it all together, you say, okay, I know what I'm up against and I'm going to put it away.
I'm going to put it away. I'm going to take it off. I'm going to put it to death. You can do this with depression, that as you see some of the hurt that comes from depression, maybe you've identified some deep idolatry that's underneath the surface, that maybe there's some approval idolatry that's underneath this deep sadness in your life and that part of it is is that you are seeking the approval of others always and it's not working and you're never satisfied and it makes you very sad and then you look at some of your behavioral patterns we walked through in week one and you realize that you spend a lot of time on social media, on Instagram, on Facebook, over others of you, on the news and it makes you cynical and it makes you sad and comparing yourself to others makes you even more, I mean, you understand all of this.
You piece together your story, your idolatry, these functional saviors and you understand it and you say, okay, no, no, I'm going to put this away. I'm not going to wear this anymore. Maybe this is, for some of you, this might be unrighteous anger and you have these fits of unrighteous anger or you just stay angry all the time and maybe you identify that for you there's some power idolatry underneath the surface that there's this need for power and that when people at work make jokes at your expense that you see then you get angry and then you can also take a step back and look at your story and realize that, oh, when I was 12, I had brothers who used to flex their power over me. I had friends that used to flex their power over me and I made a decision a long time ago that nobody was ever going to outman, outgun me, that I was going to be the one in power and when you piece all of this together you understand it and you're like, no, this will be put away.
I will aggressively address this. Part of aggressively addressing your sin is knowing what you're up against. It's knowing the bad wardrobe that you have and once you know the bad wardrobe that you're wearing it's got to go. It's got to go like a Abercrombie polo flipped up, flipped up collar or Matt Freeman's goatee that he rocked in college which you can go back on Facebook. It's a bad look. It just is.
It's got to go. It didn't fit anymore. You've got something new that is better. We aggressively approach our sin and then we move into what he gives us in the third step that we get to put on something that is better. Here's the third step. Verse 12.
Put on then. Alright, that same language in the Greek for clothing. Alright, you put off, you put away and now you're putting on, you're replacing the wardrobe. Put on then as God's chosen ones holy and beloved. As God's redeemed people that he chose that he redeemed that he scooped up out of our sin and our brokenness and set us apart and that we get the righteousness of Christ applied to us. He says, put on then as chosen ones holy and beloved.
Here are the things you put on. Compassionate hearts. Kindness. humility. Humility. Meekness. Impatience.
Put these on. The spiritual fruit that comes from pursuing Christ. Put these on. Bearing with one another. And if one has a complaint against one another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you, so you must, you also must forgive. As you're putting on this fruit that comes from Christ, it's not ultimately just good for you, it's for the good of one another.
It's for the good of your church family, for your brothers and sisters that you might bear with one another better, that you might forgive one another better. It says, put this on and above all, verse 14, put on love which binds everything together in perfect harmony. Love. The love of Christ. It binds, it's the glue that holds us together. It binds us together.
So people ask sometimes when we talk about our elders, the four of us and how we work together, they're just like, man, how do y'all do this? How do y'all work together so well? And I'm like, man, it's a lot of heavy drinking. No. I'm like, no, honestly, it's love. We love one another.
We love one another deeply. We work through stuff. We fight through stuff. We fight for what is good and we argue, but we absolutely love one another. That binds us together. And I see our groups and I fight for this, that love binds them together in their healthy place.
They love one another. We're replacing what is earthly in us with this deep, abiding love of Christ. Verse 15, it says, and let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts. As that, we should aim, we should, we should absolutely pursue that wholeheartedly. For those who feel turmoil in our souls, he says, let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts. You should pray for this.
You should seek this. One of your regular prayers, if you feel like there's turmoil in your soul because of sin, it should be, Lord, the peace of Christ rule and reign in me. Let your peace just flood over me and be in me and ruling in me. He says, rule in your hearts to which indeed you were called in one body and be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly that we would continue as we look up and behold him in his word and prayers. We're looking at our sin and dealing aggressively as we're putting on the righteousness of Christ.
We are letting the word of God dwell in us richly. And then he keeps going. He says, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And y'all, that's what we do here every Sunday. Teaching and admonishing one another. Singing Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.
Listen, part of your sanctification, part of you growing to be more like Christ, part of you changing is this, is being here on a Sunday morning. It's worshiping together. It's sitting on the authority of his word. It's reading scripture together. This matters. I'm thankful that we have really good group attendance week in, week out.
I want us to grow in this. To not just come once every couple weeks. To be here. To be present. To worship. And to sing praises.
And to be molded and shaped by his word. It is important in the process for change. And in 17, he says, And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. That it's all in the name of the Lord Jesus. The power comes from him. Clothing ourselves in righteousness, that comes as a gift from our God.
That he grants us this righteousness. That we get to grow in this as we have the righteous standing of Christ eternally. The fruit of that gets to well up in our lives. We get to display this fruit as we actively replace sinful patterns in our life with something better. Repentance is not just putting off, it is putting on. It's not just turning from things, it's turning to Christ.
That's what we're called to do over and over and over again. The direct application of this is what he said. Meekness, kindness, it's Galatians 5, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. It is this fruit that we put on. Kind of a next application from that is something that I do in counseling. It's called gospel replacement.
Gospel replacement is the idea that attached to sinful behavior, idolatry, attached to some of the sin and functional saviors that's beneath the surface is this these bad confessions, these bad narratives, these bad refrains, this bad liturgy, this negative talk that we cycle through over and over and over again. And we reinforce some of the brokenness within us by saying the same things to ourselves over and over again. And what this does in gospel replacement is it addresses that by replacing it with the gospel. it's similar to there's a therapy called cognitive behavioral therapy. It's one of the more popular therapies out there.
And cognitive behavioral therapy is the idea that if you have a bad behavior or something you want to change you introduce something that is different and good to address it and through every time you have a bad thought you replace that with a good thought that it ultimately changes your behavior that it can rewire synapses in your brain to be able to change behavior. And it's like that I understand that psychologically I understand that through observation but behavior modification doesn't bring about the change that we want. But when you take the gospel and you apply that to some of the deep idols to some of the functional saviors to the sin and broken and you replace some of the bad confessions with good ones then we're doing the work that God has called us to.
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.