Alive and Well I, Overcoming Hurts, Habits and Hang-Ups

When I meet with the folks that have taken the step of belonging, going to Class 101 here at North Way, which we received about 40 folks this last week, as new members in January, the number one comment that they make, there's two things that rise to the top. Number one is that they just feel the friendliness that you share with them as current members of the Church and those of you who have been here a while. That comes through loud and clear. And the number two thing that they say is just these moments of the presence of the Lord that a lot of folks are unaccustomed to. They've never experienced that before. And they're not sure what to do except that they know that it starts to melt their heart and sometimes they even begin to feel the emotion of that and they wonder, is that okay? And the answer is absolutely. See, a God that we serve is a God of the whole person, body, soul, and spirit. So He touches our emotions. And if you felt a few tears a moment ago, that was just absolutely natural. It's part of who God is. You never need to be embarrassed about that here. So if you're a guest today, we're glad you're here. You might want to take a moment right now. It would be a good time actually to open your notes and pull out this little card that we call our communicator. There's a side that says New to North Way. Be sure to fill that out. And when we take the offering at the close of the service, let that be your offering today. And stop at the Welcome Center on the way out today as well. And there's a cassette tape of this morning's message that you can have and some other great material that's available to you. Let's all take our outline out of the North Way Notes this morning. And we're going to get right into the message today. And again, we give you these outlines so that you can have more than just a vague memory about what you heard, but you can have something to talk about and something to study together and dialogue around. And just to show you, it's encouraging to me. I know some of our college students that came to luncheon last week are going to be meeting after the service today as a small group. We formed three or four small groups out of last week's meeting. And they're going to be using the questions that we've developed for each of these sermons as they come so that they'll have something to discuss and use the outline as well. So these are very helpful to keep for us to do that. Well, a father was trying to take an afternoon nap in his living room on a Sunday and his little boy, I guess it was a Sunday like this, you know, when you don't really want to do anything else, the little boy kept bugging him and said, Daddy, I'm bored. So his father, trying to make up a game, found a picture of a globe, a picture of the world in a newspaper, and he ripped it up into about 50 pieces, and he said, Son, this is a puzzle, and I want you to put it all back together. Well, he laid down to finish his nap, figuring I'll have, you know, 30 or 60 minutes to get a good nap while my son works on this because he didn't know what the world really looked like. Ten minutes later, the little boy woke up and said, Daddy, I'm finished. It's all put together. Dad rubbed his eyes and said, You're kidding me. How'd you do that? He said, Well, Dad, there was a picture of a person on the back page of the newspaper. And when I got my person put together, the world looked just fine. Now, you know, we're going to be talking here in the next seven weeks about real life, how you can get alive and well. We're going to talk about your person. It's amazing, isn't it, how much better the world looks when your person is right. If your person is wrong, the world looks really messed up. We're going to talk about that. We're going to be real honest with you. We're going to talk about habits, hang-ups. You're going to hear some things that you don't usually talk about in church, spoken of right here on the platform. We're going to talk about ways we get our lives messed up and what we can do to get them back on course. And we're going to hear some amazing stories as we go through these next weeks together. Now, the first thing I want to do is set a scripture verse as sort of a covering for the whole series. It's on your outline. Look at it. It's up here on the screen as well. Here's the prophet Isaiah. He says, I have seen how they acted, but I will heal them. I will lead them and help them, and I will comfort those who mourn. I offer peace to all near and far. There's five specific promises in this one verse alone. First, the Lord says, if you've been hurt, if you've been hurt, I will heal you. And I want you to circle that if that's you. He says, if you're confused, I want to lead you. If you feel helpless, he said, helpless to change, I want to help you. If no one understands you, he says, I want to comfort you. And if you feel anxious or worried or afraid, I want to offer you my peace. How many of you relate to at least one of those five? Many of us relate to all of them. Let's be honest. Life is tough. We live in the best country in the world with the most opportunity in the world, but it's still tough for us. We all make mistakes. We hurt other people. Other people hurt us. Sometimes we hurt ourselves. But we all make mistakes. We all feel. That's why I'm kind of encouraged now and then when people make big public mistakes, just to reassure me that I'm not the only one that's doing it. Like this implosion thing in Three River Stadium. That was a big mistake missing that thing by a week. They've kind of downplayed that, but lots of money had been already committed to watch this happen. I did a couple of phone calls made. The Hilton at the point lost 250 room reservations like that. Christopher's up on top in the mountain. They had 570 reservations for breakfast today at $75 a pop for breakfast. What kind of eggs would those be, huh? All those were canceled. All that food was lost. Somebody messed up. I felt real good about that. And who would go see that anyhow? Right? I mean, who's into... I figure anyone that's going to see that, see a big mess of rubble just doesn't have teenagers. I mean, all you got to do is open the door and if you get in the room, that's sort of a modified implosion from what I can remember. Don't take it personally, teenagers. I've been there. I know. So we all make mistakes, don't we? But the pathway on your outline, the pathway to becoming alive and well is also called the familiar term recovery. And everyone in this room needs recovery unless you've lived a perfect life. Anyone lived a perfect life? Then you need recovery. If you've had hang-ups that have just held you, if you've had habits that you can't break, if you've had hurt that you can't deal with, you need recovery. And I've listed some of them up here. Just look on your outline. I've just listed maybe 18 or so of them, but there's probably 50 or more I could have put on here. I'm not just talking about the common ones that we think about, the substance abuse, the alcohol and drugs, although I am including that. I'm talking about a lot of different behaviors and they manifest themselves in many different ways. And all of us struggle with some of them. Some of us have our baggage, if you will, kind of neatly organized. And we picture ourselves as being sort of really very limited in our baggage. I mean, we kind of look like Kelly here. We have it all nicely put together. Others of us, however, we're more like Bob. And so when we wake up in the morning, this is how we feel. Our life is a nightmare of trying to get everything together and just sort of put our baggage in one place and then try to deal with getting into work and having other people tolerate us. Last night when we had him do that, he said, are you kidding about this? No, that's real stuff in there, isn't it? All right, we can just leave it up there. Thank you very much. Now, some of you may think your life is this way, but it's really this way. Others of you know your life is this way. And some of you might have a smaller amount of baggage. But we all have it. Now, the amazing thing is is that the principles for recovery are found in the Word of God. This isn't something that just was dreamed up. Sixty-five years ago, and I can give you a lot of history. In fact, I'm going to tell you about a ministry in a little bit that's going to give you a lot of history if you'd like it. Sixty-five years ago, two men saw the ravaging devastation of these kind of problems in people's lives. And they developed what was called the 12 Steps of Recovery, now used by millions. Even here in America, this week, some 15 million people will be meeting regularly in groups to recover from the damage that's been caused in their lives. And we're going to take these principles, first find them in God's Word, and we're going to make sense of them for us here today and in the coming weeks. We're going to experience a transformation. Now, the first step to freedom is to realize, on your outline, that I'm not God. To admit that you're powerless to control your tendency to do some wrong things. And that your life, in some ways, is unmanageable. It might be a real obvious thing to some other people, and not to you. It might be real obvious to you. It might be that you just simply stay up late every night, even though you know you need sleep, just because you just find it hard to go to sleep. Maybe it's that you eat too much. You can't control your eating habits. Maybe it's that you don't eat enough. Maybe it's that you do selfish things when you know you should be giving. Maybe it's that you say things you don't want to say because you need to be sure that someone gets the message from you. Maybe it's that you do the right thing too infrequently and the wrong thing too often. I don't know. All of us know, however, there's some place that we're going to need to realize that we just don't have it all together. What's the source of this problem, number one? Well, the source is simply this. It's called sin nature. Now, what I'm going to tell you in the next few minutes is born out of 27 years of pastoral experience, and you can take that for what it's worth, but here's what I've discovered. Every person, every single one that I've met is born with a deep, heartfelt inner desire to know God. It rarely shows itself the first time we meet, but almost invariably over a span of time, I've discovered that every person I've ever met has a deep desire to know God. It's part of our creative nature. That's why when people say, God is love, we resonate with that. When they say, Jesus loves me, this I know, that makes sense to them because something inside them says, yeah, I want to believe that. And I'm further convinced that the degree to which we discover and experience that love, we enter life's most precious moments. We enter into the contentment and the fulfillment and the purpose that God designed for us. But there is a problem. By my own casual observation, and I should say really studied observation, lots of people never discover that love. They never find it. They never experience it. They fail to know what Paul said. He said that you would know the height and the depth and the breadth and the width of the love of God. Ephesians 3.20. Many, after failed attempts in searching for God, just sort of give it up. And they say things like this to me. They'll say, I've tried church and it didn't work. Have you ever heard someone say that? Or, well, you know, I believed for a while, but it didn't really help me any. They'll say something like that. Or, it worked for you, but I'm glad, but it just doesn't work for me. And I'll hear things like that. And, loved ones, I have to say, sadly, the church overall has failed in so many ways to declare the majesty and the glory and the beauty of God's love and greatness and grace. We've hidden our light under a bush so haven't. We've kept it to ourselves. I understand why people say that. But let me just say this. The church may have failed you, but Jesus never will. You need to know that. When you come to Him, it's not about the church. It's about you and God. And what really saddens me is when people give up the pursuit to find that knowledge of God and to experience that love. They repress that desire or, even worse, they transition from trying to know God, listen, to trying to be God. They transition from looking to experience His love to trying to play His role out in life. And then a powerful thing starts to happen. That sin nature. That's what Eve did. Remember? The serpent tempted her and said if you eat this apple, you will look at it and you will be like God. It's not a conscious, okay, I'm going to be God. But it is starting to control things. And so people control their image. You don't know when it controls their image. They want to present themselves as a certain way, unruffled, certain way they dress, certain group of people they hang out with, certain ways that they conduct themselves. They just want you to believe that they've got it all under control in their life. Father John Pollack, a Catholic priest, wrote the book Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am? That title's always intrigued me. And if you read the book, the reason is this. If I tell you who I am and you don't like me, you don't accept me, what options do I have? That's why I'm afraid. So some people work on controlling their image and playing God themselves. Some work, you know, they look at their life and say I'm pretty together, I'm going to control you. I'm going to fix your problem. And they go, they're just bent on controlling someone else. And so husbands control wives or wives control husbands. Parents control kids or in some cases kids control parents. How many of you have offices where people are fighting for control? How many of you students are in schools where cliques are keeping you under control by letting you in or keeping you out? We're real good at it. We can use all kinds of manipulation and guilt and fear and praise and silent treatment and rage and criticism but we're going to be under control and we're going to control others. And sometimes we play God by trying to control all of our problems. We take great pride in this, don't we? I mean, we really want people to believe that we have all of our problems under control. So if I ask the congregation, how are you all doing? You'd say, fine. How fine really are we doing? Well, if you know the truth, I had this and I had that. We don't want anyone to know. I don't really need your input. It's not really a problem with me that I'm, you know, I can certainly manage and I don't need counseling, so get off that. Or I can quit any time. Just, you know, don't push me. I'll work it out on my own. And the more you try to fix your problem yourself, the more time you waste thinking about it and managing it and trying to keep it under wraps and more of your life it gobbles up. And the fourth thing we try to control, the fourth way we play God is to try to control our pain. We'll do about anything, won't we, to avoid pain? I mean, we'll run from it, we'll hide it, we'll medicate it, we'll postpone it, we'll eat more than we should, we'll eat nothing at all, we'll get drunk when we can, we'll take medications or other drugs just to somehow soothe the pain for a while. We'll run in and out of relationships. Oh, the next person in my life, they'll help me to really feel my significance and my worth and then we suddenly discover that they don't and so we just tank that relationship and try another one. See, the pain comes the loudest when we lay our head on the pillow at night and realize that we haven't found the answer, that we really aren't God. I want you to turn to someone right now and just look at them and say, I'm not God. Now, as silly as that may sound, it's a confession that we need to make now and then. The first step to being alive and well is to recognize that you won't get well on your own, that you need to face what it is about you that isn't right. Not to face it, not to call it what it is has a term, that term is denial. Say it with me, denial. As a teenager said to me, denial is not a river in Egypt, okay? It's not. Denial is that which we resist believing about ourselves. It's really true. And so what are the symptoms of playing God? What are the symptoms that begin to evidence themselves? And I just want to say this, this became a revelation to me a little under two years ago in my study break time. I'd never understood this before. I never understood why the power of addiction was so great. But here's what happens. You see, this deep inner desire that I talk about, this longing to know God when not met is still, it's a good thing. I mean, God's put this desire, it's a drawing thing unto Him. But when it's not met, here's what happens, that desire is like this magnet that reaches out and there are things in this life that attach themselves to that desire. There are things outside of us that attach themselves to that desire. And it's a strong bond. And those desires, you see, what's driving that compulsive behavior, what's driving that addictive behavior, what's driving that habitual acting out of things is that inner longing. And you see, these attachments come out. And they feed off the fuel of that desire. And it's the most, it's the core thing about you. And that's why when a person is truly in an addictive state or truly a compulsive state, it's a very hard thing to get your hands on. It's a very hard thing to get free from because it's the inner core of you that's been attached. The word attachment that we get comes from the French word which means passion. It's passionately affixed itself to you. And this is a serious thing. Let me give an analogy. I mean, it's a good thing that's been attached to you. It's kind of like a puppy. How many of you have had puppies? How many of you have had large puppies? Like, you know, retrievers and collies and bullmastiffs and on and on. I had a friend, and you probably recognize his name if I mentioned to you, here in the Pittsburgh area, who got a yellow Labrador retriever. A little puppy. And it was a great puppy. He would tell me how much fun it was. But both my friend and his wife worked and they didn't have kids in the home. And so when they'd leave for work, they just kind of let the puppy kind of have the room in the house. And so on. They potty trained him and did that. That was fine. But this puppy had all this energy. And he had all this... I mean, he wanted to go for it. Well, at the end of the day, you know, he would start knocking things over. They tried to train him not to do this, not to do that. One day, about eight months into puppy life, they came home to find that three of the legs of the dining room table had been chewed almost all the way through. Not a good thing. Then some weeks later, they found that several pairs of shoes that they kind of thought were the better quality shoes had been chewed all the way through. At that point, Mom was saying, you know, dump the puppy. No, this is a good puppy. This is a good... We've got to train this dog. So we'll try him in the garage when we go out. So they put him in the garage. They came home that night. He chewed the corners of the bumpers on the car, you know, the little rubber bumpers. He chewed through those things. Bye, puppy. Relocate time. Now, was that a bad puppy? No. That was a natural puppy. A puppy just needed someplace to express that energy. You see, and that's the thing that gets attached to in us. It's that inner desire. And it's a powerful thing. It can be a person. It can be a career. It can be a hobby. It can be alcohol or drugs. It can be lying, you know, just kind of covering, just sort of subtly distorting the truth. It can be stealing. It can be eating or not eating. But once we succumb to these attachments, we enter a process of self-destruction that I call the spiral down effect. The spiral down effect. Look at your outline. The first thing that happens is we enter into a few moments of false freedom. When we go ahead, like Eve did, you see, and we take a bite of that apple that we were tempted with. And for just a while, it just tastes so good. It tastes so good to have that affair for a while. It tastes so good just to get indulged in whatever it is. It feels just like, oh, wow, at last, I know freedom. I'm not bound by commitment. I'm not stifled by rules. I'm free. An amazing thing happens. It usually doesn't take very long. Just a few weeks or a few months. And that passing freedom becomes a fear. Fear that really the satisfaction that we want is now slipping away. And suddenly that drug or whatever it was isn't working. It's not having the same effect. Or that affair is starting just to lose its attraction. Or this behavior is starting to be more and more difficult to manage. And we become afraid. Afraid that we're going to go back again to that place that we were where that attachment has its hold on us. And then frustration comes on because we're trying harder and harder to keep this compulsion focused. And so we eat or drink more or less or whatever we do. And some people even change them. They go from maybe just indulging in this particular behavior and trying that one for a while and say, well, I'll go over here and do this now. So I'll throw myself into my job. I mean, if I can't have this then I'll go do that. And then after a while you see that frustration mounts. And that leads to fatigue. My strength evaporated like water on a sunny day. David writes, until I finally admitted all my sins to you. You see, some people are just plain worn out trying to manage their attachments. We run from the issues. We never slow down enough to confront it. We lose ourselves in a sport or a hobby or maybe we just sit for hours in front of the television hoping that things will get better but they don't. Hoping that when we go to sleep we won't be wrestling with this but we do. We hear the voices of our pain and that leads finally to failure. Failure. When you try to play God, listen, when your job description is, I am God, you're going to fail. When your job description is, I have it all under control, you've failed. And loved ones, I want to say this with a lot of compassion today because I see it every single week. There are many, many, many people right here in the North Hills whose homes and families and personal lives are in a state of destruction because they failed to play God. And it's a very painful thing. Here at North Way, we've always tried to be a safe place where people could come. But I have a sense in the weeks just ahead, we're going to become more like an ER where people are going to be bringing folks who are in different stages of meltdown, different stages of struggle, where they can come as real people with real problems and hurts and habits and hangups and know that they can walk through the doors and not be judged. No one's going to be looking down at them or making some kind of judgment about their condition. But rather, we can come openheartedly and accept one another. Because you see, we all need each other. We all have some weaknesses. We all have a blind spot. We all need someone to be a mirror to help us see ourselves as we really are. Once that begins to happen, it opens the door to amazing transformation. And so each week in this series, we want you to hear the story of a real-life person or two. People just like you who discovered that they didn't have it all together who became honest with God and themselves and others. And they're going to tell you their story in the hopes that you too will do the same. And it's not easy for these people to be transparent to stand up here and admit, hey, my life was a mess. But each time they come, I want you to welcome and let them know that you appreciate them helping light the way to finding God's grace. I want you to hear a testimony this morning of a couple who thought that life was really all together and began to fall apart. And just 11 months ago, an amazing thing began to happen. Welcome Mike and Denise Stevens as they come to share. Give them a hand. Good morning. I want to thank you so much for staying. I'll just preface this by saying Mike worked all night and I gave his testimony last night and this morning. So you guys, this awesome sacrifice to be here and I appreciate it. And if you want to go to lunch, I'll be happy to provide that for you if you can stay up that long. Okay? Bless you. Good afternoon. My name is Mike and this is my wife, Denise. We'd first like to thank Pastor Jay and all of you for giving us this time to share our story with you. Our hope is that someone will hear our testimony and it will help them come closer to the Lord. We were both born and raised in Catholic families. We both believed in the Lord but never really gave our lives to the Lord. We had our moments of conflict here and there but I thought life in general was all together We started a family and have three children. We thought we had it all. The perfect American family. As you can imagine and we now know, we were missing the most important and crucial element in our lives. Neither one of us had a true personal relationship with the Lord. We've come to discover through different small groups here at North Way that the Lord will let you live your life any way you choose. He will point the way and it is up to us as individuals to either follow his way or pay the consequences. The Lord wanted our priorities changed and we were in denial. We thought we could control all aspects of our lives. God made the light come on in a bright way. The facts and elements of our life crisis are too recent and painful to discuss at this time. I can assure you though that we got the message. Our life went from one of peace and content to constant conflict and strife. We went from a couple who almost never fought to a couple on the verge of divorce. My wife took the first and I feel the most important step for us as a couple and also as individuals. She asked me to pray with her. This was very much out of the ordinary. We always shared a routine goodnight prayer but this was real praying. I forgot the exact words. I know we asked the Lord for direction and guidance. He answered our prayers in ways and actions and circumstances that we can only label as miracles. In the early days of our conflict I was lying in bed thinking about cashing it all in, giving up. I was thinking and justifying divorce. I was planning my future such as where I would live, etc., etc. Then out of the clear blue I heard a voice in my head plain as day tell me she is your soul mate that I have sent you. Those words were probably the most profound and important words that I have ever heard. I then decided to try and work things out. The next Sunday we decided to leave our old church which we unfaithfully attended and try service here at North Way. We both felt we needed a spiritual change and Denise had made connections to this church through the MOPS organization. We sat in the rear of the church and heard Pastor Jay talk about choices in life and how Christ has died for our sins. Personally, the rest of the service was a blur but the words that Pastor Jay spoke impacted our hearts. Hearts that were broken were given hope. More importantly, we now had a place to lay our burdens down. At the end of the service we prayed with Pastor Jay. We prayed that the Lord would enter into our lives and forgive us for our sins. Afterwards, Denise and I went to the front of the church and prayed with Mack McCabe and Carl Adler, two of the church elders. They prayed with us and shared a scripture that said the Lord would be with us always. Carl read Psalm 3418, The Lord is close to the broken hearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. These words became my personal inspiration. We started attending church faithfully, no excuses. About two weeks after attending North Way, Carl Adler actually took the time out of his busy schedule to phone me on a particularly depressing day just to see how I was doing. We prayed together and what was turning into a hopeless and painful day turned into a day of spiritual growth. We started attending marriage menders and learned about how to live a Christian life as a couple. In marriage menders, we completed a questionnaire regarding emotional needs. Denise and I realized that we were in denial when it came to meeting each other's emotional needs. We had grown and are still growing as a couple, but what we've learned in marriage menders, marriage menders is one of the reasons we're still together today. I made connections with a men's Bible study. I went to my first Bible study and truly enjoyed it. I now know why Pastor Jay advises to get connected with a small group. In the men's group, I learned about accountability. It gave me a non-judgmental way to express my feelings and attitudes. Did they stand up to the way God wants me to live? Denise continues growing and worshiping with the Mops and we have both attended Discovery 101. We plan on attending Discovery 201. In closing, we pray that our testimony will help someone who is facing denial about their personal relationship with Jesus. If someone is sitting here today who feels alone and abandoned by the Lord, we can tell you from our experience that if you give your life to the Lord, all things are possible. Thank you. God bless you guys. A lot of fruit from this. How do you respond when you hear a testimony like that? One way is to say, well, my problem is really not that bad. I mean, I'm not thinking about divorce or cashing it all in. What's that called? Denial. How bad does it have to get before you do find help for what it is that's choking the life out of you? How much pain do you need to inflict on someone else before you reach out and find some help and stick with it? Because I want to say this. A lot of people know that they've got to do something. They get involved and then after a few weeks or a few months, they give it up. And the process of healing is just that. It's a process. We all wish we had that miracle prayer or that miracle pill. And sometimes God will supply a miracle in a moment. But my experience is generally His miracles are a process. Mike and Denise are in a process and they've humbly admitted they're still in it. So stick with that. Once you get in that, don't just start saying, well, you know, I took a step and tried it for a while but it didn't really matter. It will work as you apply faith and stay in it. So that you don't have to get to the end where it really, really, really costs you. Unfortunately, most of us don't change when we see the light. We change when we feel the heat. When our marriage blows up and when our kids melt down or when our job evaporates because of our irresponsibility. Save yourself the pain and make a move now. One man said to me this, he said, it happened to me when the acid of my pain finally ate through the wall of my denial. C.S. Lewis writes, God whispers to us in our pleasures but He shouts to us in our pain. God's pain is a megaphone to rouse a deaf world. God's antidote to denial is our pain. So let it motivate you to deal with it. To face an issue maybe you've been denying for 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 years. Face it now. Use this series as a launch pad for transformation. The second way you could have responded to that testimony is to think, well, you know, I'm glad they found help. I'm sure they needed it but I really don't. I'll work it out on my own. What's that called? Denial. See the fact is if you could have changed your problem after all this time you would have. But you can't and you need to admit that. Instead we hide it. That's as old as Adam and Eve. When they were found out by God, it's interesting, they went and hid in the bush. Who created Adam and Eve? Who created the bush? Who knew where both were at the same time? Brilliant strategy. But we do the same thing. I asked a man a while back, he said, have you talked to God about this habit? He said, oh no, I don't want God to know about it. He's probably in on it. He already knows. So how do we change? What is finally the secret of our freedom? Well, number one, it's to admit, and this is so important, admit that in some way in this area you are powerless to change. And everything in you is going to fight that statement. Everything about you is going to say, well, you kn