Fresh Start1
The Road to Recovery
(Fresh Starts Pt 1)
Isaiah 57:18 God speaking, “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.” This is a great promise of God. Notice there are five parts to recovery that God wants to do in your life.
Recently a father was trying to take an afternoon nap on a Sunday afternoon in his living room and his little boy kept bugging him saying, “Daddy, I’m bored.” So his father, trying to make up a game, found a picture of a globe in the newspaper, a picture of the world. He ripped it up in about fifty pieces and he said, “Son this is a puzzle. I want you to put it all back together.” He laid down to finish his nap, thinking he would get at least another hour and a half to two hours of sleep. In about 15 minutes the little boy woke him up saying, “Daddy, I’ve got it finished. It’s all put together.” “You’re kidding.” He knew his son didn’t know all the positions of the nations and things like that. He said, “How did you do that?” He said, “Dad, there was a picture of a person on the back page of that newspaper and when I got my person put together the world looked just fine.”
We’re beginning a new series today called Fresh Starts.
· We are going to work on your person. It’s amazing how much better the world looks when your person is put together in the right way. We’re going to talk in this series about how to handle and how to overcome the hurts in your life, the habits that are messing up your life and the hang-ups that have cause pain in your life. Hurts, habits, and hang-ups.
The verse I’ve chosen for our theme verse in our series “Fresh Starts” is Isaiah 57:18, God speaking, “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.”
1) There are five parts to recovery that God wants to do in your life.
a) If you have been hurt, God says “I want to heal you.”
b) If you’re confused, “I want to lead you.”
c) If you’ve ever felt you were helpless to change anything, “I want to help you change that.”
d) If you’ve ever felt no one understands your problem, “I want to comfort you.”
e) If you feel anxious and worried and afraid, “I want to offer peace to you.”
The fact is life is tough. We live in a imperfect world. We’re hurt by other people and we hurt ourselves and we hurt other people. The Bible says, “All have sinned.” That means none of us are perfect, we’ve all blown it, we’ve all made mistakes. We hurt and we hurt others.
This series is for everybody. Everyone in this room needs recovery, unless you’ve lived a perfect life. But if you haven’t lived a perfect life, if you’ve ever been hurt, if you’ve ever had a hang-up or a habit that you’d like to get rid of, you need recovery
.
2) WHAT DO YOU NEED RECOVERY FROM?
The good news is this: regardless of the problem you need recovery from, whether it’s emotional, financial, relational, spiritual, sexual or whatever, regardless of what you need recovery from, the steps to recovery are always the same.
The principles for recovery are found in the Bible. It’s the original recovery manual. In 1935 a couple of guys formulated, based on the Scriptures, what are now known as the classic 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and used by hundreds of other recovery groups. Twenty million Americans are in a recovery group every week and there are 500,000 different recovery groups. The basis is God’s Word.
I have summarized these principles of recovery around the word “Recovery.” We’ll take a letter each week and look at eight summarized steps on the road to recovery.
3) THE FIRST STEP. THE “R” IN RECOVERY STANDS FOR REALIZE.
Realize I’m not God. I admit I am powerless to control my tendency to do wrong things and my life is unmanageable.
Do you ever stay up late when you know you need sleep?
Do you ever eat or drink more calories than your body needs?
Do you ever feel you ought to exercise but you don’t?
Do you ever know the right thing to do, but you don’t do it?
Do you ever know something is wrong, but you do it anyway?
Have you ever known you should be unselfish, but you’re selfish instead?
Have you ever tried to control somebody or something and found it was uncontrollable?
If your answer is yes to any of those questions, welcome to the human race. We’re all in need of recovery.
I. THE CAUSE OF MY PROBLEM: MY SIN NATURE
· The Bible has a word for this. The Bible calls that tendency, my sin nature. My sin nature gets me in all kinds of problems, and you in all kinds of problems. I do things that aren’t good for me. I do them even when they are self-destructive and I don’t do things that are good for me. I respond the wrong way when I’m hurt and it just increases the hurt, rather than lessening it. I react the wrong way to people. I treat them in wrong ways and then it backfires, when I know it’s not going to work. I try to fix problems and often when I fix them they are worse than they were when I started.
Proverbs 14 says “There is a way that seems right to man but it ends in death.”
· You will always have this sin nature with you, this desire to do the wrong thing. You’re going to always have it with you till you get to heaven. And even after you become a Christian, you still have desires that pull you the wrong way. Paul understood this. In Romans 7:15 he said, “I don’t understand myself at all. For I really want to do what’s right, but I can’t. I do what I don’t want to do but what I hate. I know perfectly well that what I’m doing is wrong, but I can’t help myself. It’s sin inside me that’s stronger than I am, that makes me do those evil things.”
a) The first step to recovery is you must understand the cause of this problem. Why does this happen in my life? You need to understand the cause of it, then the consequences of the problem, then the cure.
b) What’s the cause of my problem? The cause of all your problems is this—I want to be God. Would you like to decide what’s right and what’s wrong? You say, “I don’t want anybody telling me what’s right and what’s wrong, I want to decide what’s right and what’s wrong. That’s called playing God. What it says is, “I want to control.” And the more insecure you are, the more you’re driven to control. The more insecure you are, you want to control yourself, control other people, control your environment. You are driven to do this. And that’s called playing God.
c) This is man’s oldest problem. Even Adam and Eve had it. God put them in Paradise and they tried to control Paradise. God said “You can do anything you want to in this entire Paradise except one thing: Don’t eat from this certain tree.” What did they do? They made a beeline for that tree. The only thing in Paradise God said was off limits. Satan said, “Eat this apple (or whatever it was) and be gods.” That’s been the problem from the very start. I want to be God. I want to call the shots. I want to run my own life.
d) We want to be in control. How do we play God? By denying our humanity and by trying to control everything for selfish reasons. I want to be at the center of my universe. Control is the real issue. I want to be in control and we try to control ourselves, other people, everything around us.
4) HOW DO WE PLAY GOD?
1. We try to control our image.
· You want to control what other people think of you.
· You don’t want other people to really know what you’re like.
· We play games, we wear masks, we pretend, we fake it, we want people to see certain sides of us and we hide other parts, and we deny our weaknesses and we deny our feelings (“I’m not angry, I’m not upset, I’m not worried, I’m not afraid.”)
· We don’t want people to see the real us. Why am I afraid to tell you who I am? That’s the title of a book. The answer is: If I tell you who I really am and you don’t like it, tough for me ‘cause I’m all I got. So we try to hide and we try to control our image.
2. We try to control other people. Parents try to control kids; kids try to control parents. Wives try to control husbands; husbands try to control wives. People try to control other people. There are office politics in your office. Countries try to control other countries. We use a lot of tools to manipulate each other. We use guilt to control, we use fear, we use praise, some of you use the silent treatment to control, anger, rage. We try to control people.
3. We try to control problems, our problems. We’re good at this. We use phrases like: “I can handle it, it’s not really a problem.” That’s somebody trying to play God. “I can handle it, I’m O.K. Really, I’m fine
4. We try to control our pain. Have you ever thought how much time you spend running from pain? Trying to avoid it, deny it, escape it, reduce it, postpone it. People try to postpone it many different ways. Sometimes we try to postpone our pain by eating or not eating. We try to postpone our pain by getting drunk or by smoking or by taking drugs or by getting in and out of relationships.
· Pain comes when we realize in our quiet moments we’re not God and we can’t control everything and that’s scary. (I remember on Saturday Night Live Chevy Chase used to come on and say “Hi, I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not.” And I just imagine God saying, “Hi, I’m God and you’re not.”)
You’re not going to get well on your own, face it. Don’t deny it.
5.) THE CURE
· The first step on the road to recovery is to admit my powerlessness. The Bible says that in admitting my weakness I find strength. This is not a popular idea in self-sufficient American culture which says, Raise yourself up by your own bootstraps; don’t depend on anybody else; do the Lone Ranger thing. But this is the essential first step to getting your act together. Admit you’re powerless to do it on your own. You need other people and you need God.
Admitting I’m not God means I recognize three important facts of life. Maturity comes when you recognize these three facts of life:
1. I admit that I am powerless to change my past. It hurt, I still remember it, but all the resentment in the world isn’t going to change it. I’m powerless to change my past.
2. I admit that I am powerless to control other people. I try, I like to manipulate them, I use all kinds of little gimmicks, but it doesn’t work. I am responsible for my actions, not theirs. I can’t control other people.
3. I admit that I am powerless to cope with my harmful habits, behaviors, actions. Good intentions are not enough. How many times have you tried and failed. Will power is not enough. You need something more than will power. You need a source of power beyond yourself. You need God, because He made you to need Him.
James 4:6: “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”
· Grace is the power to change. Grace is the power God gives me to make the changes in my life that I want to make and He wants me to make—the power to change. And for you to recover from hurts, hang-ups, and hassles in your life, you need God’s grace. How do you get it? Only one way: He gives it to the humble.
· Let me ask you, what needs changing in your life? What hurt or hang-up or habit have you been trying to ignore? For many of you this step will be the hardest step. I’m glad it’s number one, because when you get over this, over the hump, and that is just to admit it, “I have a problem, I have a need, I have a hurt.” It’s hard for many of us to admit that because it’s humbling. It says, “I’m not God and I don’t have it all together as much as I’d like everybody to think that I do. I don’t have it all together.” If you tell that to somebody, they’re not going to be surprised, because they know it, God knows it, you know it, you just need to admit it. It means being honest and facing a problem that you’ve wanted to ignore for a long time. Join me these ------------weeks