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HONEST TO GOD: THE FIRST STEP TO HEALTH What do you think of when you hear the word recovery? Do you think of people with problems that you don’t have? Do you think that recovery is just for addictions? Do you think about the movie, What about Bob? Recovery sounds so intimating because to admit that you need recovery is to admit that you have a problem.

Listen very carefully: Every person in this room needs recovery. At the very least you need recovery from sin. We are born with a sinful nature, thanks to Adam and Eve, that causes everyone to need recovery. That is why Jesus Christ came to this earth.

Do you remember the Apollo Space program? Those long rockets would be hurled into space but when the mission was over just a little capsule would return to earth and it would drop into the sea with the help of a parachute. The Navy would be charged with the job of recovery. Recover the space ship and astronauts. It was an impressive thing to watch. Timing and team work were critical.

We’re going to begin a new series this week called Getting Healthy. We’re going to be in it for the next eight weeks. I'll begin with a little quiz. I have a list of eighteen areas where we commonly are unhealthy. Eighteen areas where we’re out of balance. Underline the areas in that list that apply to you.

What is Unhealthy in Your Life?

My pace of life
My thoughts
My overwork
My marriage
My addiction
My expectations		My diet
My worries
My habits
My family
My memories
My regrets		My financial situation
My relationship with
My holding on to the past
My perfectionism
My resentment or anger
My need to control

Which of these areas are unhealthy in your life? Is it my pace of life? My thoughts? My overwork? Is my marriage unhealthy? Addiction? Expectations? How about an unhealthy diet? Unhealthy worries or habits? Family? Unhealthy memories? Unhealthy regrets? An unhealthy financial situation? Unhealthy relationship with... and you can fill in the blank? If I haven’t named yours yet, you can write in your unhealthy area. Unhealthy perfectionism? Resentment or anger? An unhealthy need to control?

We all need this. We’re all going to need this series because we all have areas that are unhealthy in our lives. Sometimes things happen in our lives that we did not expect nor want. Take a look at the story of someone who lost so much and listen to her description of her life now.

Here’s the good news. Regardless of what areas you happened to underline, the answers are still the same. The solution to getting healthy is the same in any case. The principles for getting healthy are in the Bible, God's word. Specifically they’re in the first eight statements of Jesus Christ in His most famous sermon called “The Sermon on the Mount.” We call these eight statements “The Beatitudes”. These statements are not just principles for healthy living. They are actually steps. We’re going to take them in order for the next eight weeks on how to get healthy.

The first step to health is in the first Beatitude of Jesus in Matthew 5:3 “Blessed are those who recognize they are spiritually helpless.”

What does that mean? It means if I want to get healthy here’s what I have to do.

Step One: Realize I’m not God. I admit that I’m powerless to control my tendency to do what I know is unhealthy and my life is unmanageable. I admit that I’m powerless to control my tendency to do what is unhealthy. In other words, the things I know to do are right I don’t do, and the things that I know are not healthy I end up doing anyway.

Just to clarify this I have a second quiz.

Have you ever stayed up late when you knew you needed sleep?
Have you ever eaten or drunk extra calories you knew you shouldn’t have?
Have you ever made commitments that you couldn’t possibly keep?
Have you ever felt you ought to exercise but didn’t?
Have you ever tried to control something and discovered you couldn’t?


Welcome to the human race! The Bible has a word for this tendency. This tendency to not do what I know is healthy and the tendency to do what is unhealthy even though I know it’s bad for me. The Bible calls this my sin nature.

We all have this. What it means is I often do things that are self-destructive. Even though I know they’re bad for me, they’re bad for my health, they’re bad for my life, they’re bad for my relationships, I still do them. There are other things that I know that are good for me that I don’t do.

That happens not only personally, it also happens in relationships. I tend to respond to hurts in my life in a way that actually prolong the hurt rather than taking it away. I tend to treat people in ways that backfire and I expect a certain response. Instead I get the exact opposite of what I want from that person. I often try to fix a problem and in my fixing it I make the problem worse. You try to fix something but it ends up not working.

The Bible calls this my sin nature. In Proverbs 14:12 it says, “There is a way that seems right to man but it ends in death.”

Today we’re going to look at the cause behind most of your problems. Then we’re going to look at the consequences of that. Then we’re going to look at the cure or the first step of the eight steps of getting healthy again.

1. The Cause

The cause of most of your problems can be summarized in two words – playing God. Whenever I try to play God it causes all kinds of problems in my life and my relationships.

“In the pride of your heart you say, “I am god...” But you are just a man and not a god, though you think you are as wise as a god.” Ez. 28:2

I play God when I want to call my own shots, when I want to make my own rules, when I want to put myself at the center of the universe. I don’t want to just control my own life, I want to control yours. Because I think I know what’s better for you than you do.

This is not a new problem. It’s man’s oldest problem, oldest temptation, trying to be God. When Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden and the devil comes through and tempts them and he says, “If you’ll eat this fruit...” He didn’t say, “If you’ll eat this you’ll be like me, the devil.’ He didn’t say, “If you eat this fruit you’ll be evil.” He said, “If you eat this fruit that God told you not to eat, you’ll be God.” And Adam and Eve went, “That sounds great!” And ever since then men and women have been playing God. These guys were trying to control paradise. Even today we still want to be God ourselves.

There’s an amazing direct mail ad piece. It’s about 30 pages, a little booklet. It starts off, “Dear friend. This may be the luckiest day of your life. You are one of only a very few selected people to receive this personal memo.” If it’s personal why didn’t he call me by name instead of “Dear friend”? Anyway, it says, “You’re going to have prosperity in every area of your life – emotionally, physically, romantically, financially, personally. You’ll learn how to control anyone and make any man or woman like you, admire you and love you.” I read through this thing. I get to the end and there’s a list of nine guarantees. “Thirty days after you receive this kit you will be doing this and much more. Guaranteed.

  1. Regardless of physical appearance you can have sexual relationships with beautiful women of your choice in one week or less.
  2. You will be such a superior lover that those women will fall in love with you and want to be yours forever.
  3. You will be making thousands of dollars each week at first and each day eventually. Guaranteed.
  4. You will get rid of all physical illnesses, all physical incompetence, pains, allergies and addiction.
  5. You will lose all your fat.
  6. You will become very smart quickly, and when you talk everyone will listen.
  7. Everyone will become interested in you.
  8. Beautiful women and powerful men will almost beg to be your friends.
  9. You will get an instant promotion.

So you see, it’s almost magical and mystical from this special power called Neo Tech, even an ordinary person, even a first rate nerd like I was, evolved into something with a super human life, the life of the god-man. I spent the past four years writing it all down, step by step, the secret power just as it lifted me from nerd to god-man. Now Neo-Tech will lift you too into a god-man who can take as much sex, power and money as you want from life. Receive my 458 turn-key manual called god-man: our final evolution.”

The tragedy is there are people who will buy this. Why? Because deep inside everybody wants to be God. We would like to control it all. You may be a little bit more sophisticated than that. You don’t go around calling yourself the god-woman or the god-man. You don’t run around calling yourself God. But let me tell you something we do. Every single day of your life you make choices and decisions that imply that you are smarter than God. You do it every day of your life. “I know God says to do ‘this’ but I’m going to do ‘this’ instead.” “I know that God says ‘this’ is the smart way to handle my money or my life or my relationships but in this case I really think I know what’s best.” “I know what God says to do but in this case I think this will make me more happy.”

Every day of your life you make choices that imply you’re smarter than God, that you’re wiser than God, and you willfully (and I do too) disobey God and say, “I’m going to do what I think is best.” That’s called playing God.

How do we do that? How do we play God? Two ways.

      1. By denying our humanity.

      2. By trying to control everything.

The more insecure you are in life the more you’re going to do these two things. The more insecure you are the more you deny your problems, deny your humanity, and deny your faults, failures and frailties. The more we cover up or put a mask on, we don’t want people to get close to us.

Three different ways we often waste so much time and energy trying to control everything.

1. We often try to deny or control our problems. We use phrases like, “I can handle this... It’s not really a problem... I don’t need any help... I don’t need any counseling... I can quit any time... I can work it out on my own...” We try to deny or we try to hide or we try to control our problems.

Asked a TV repairman, “What is the worse damage you’ve ever seen done to a television?” He said, “When people try to repair it themselves.” And how many times have you tried to repair something in your life and made a bigger mess of it?

2. The second area we try to play God is we try to control other people. We do this all the time. Parents try to control their kids. Kids try to control their parents. Wives try to control their husbands. And husbands try to control their wives. Men try to control women. And women try to control men. We’re all very familiar with the office politics and all the manipulating that goes on in the world when people try to control each other.

Every one of us has our own preferred mode or method of control. You learned this growing up. Some of you use guilt and shame to control. Some of you do the exact opposite. You try to use praise and affirmation to control but you’re still trying to get your own way in that person’s life by encouragement. Some of you use anger to control a situation and the threat of blowing up and your temper. Some of you use fear to control people. Some of you use that old time favorite the silent treatment to control. The truth is, everybody has their preferred method to try to control other situations and other people.

3. The other thing we try to deny and control is our pain. That only makes things worse. Have you ever stopped, slowed down long enough to realize how much of your time, how much of your energy, how much of your effort you spend in life trying to either avoid or postpone pain? So much of your life – and you don’t even do this consciously – so much of what you do in life, the way you act, the way you respond, the way you deal with other people, so much of that is either an unconscious attempt to either avoid or postpone pain. What that does is it usually just makes the problem worse.

Again, each of us has our own favorite coping devices to deal with pain. It may be eating. It may be not eating. It may be watching lots of television. It may be reading fantasy novels. It may be pornography. It may be smoking or drinking or taking drugs or prescription meds. It may be sports. It may be traveling. It may be jumping from relationship to relationship to relationship to avoid the pain. It may be withdrawing yourself into a hole and building a protective wall of depression around you. The truth is everybody in this room has their own preferred method of medicating their pain. Every one of us does. You have a method that you use to try to deny and control the pain in your life. That’s your medication.

2. The Consequences

If the cause of most of your problems boils down to you trying to control everything and denial and playing God, then what are the consequences of playing God? There are three.

      1. The first consequence of playing God is frustration.

It is frustrating trying to play a role that you weren’t meant to play. Paul talks about this in Romans 7. “It seems to be a fact of life that when I want to do what is right I inevitably do what is wrong. There is something else deep within me, my lower nature, that is at war with my mind and wins the fight.” He says there’s a war going on inside of me. There’s a conflict, a struggle, a frustration going on inside of me and the things that I know I want to do that are right and good and healthy I end up not doing. And the things that I know are wrong and unhealthy and mess up relationships I end of doing. But I can’t change. I can’t stop. And I can’t control all my problems. It’s frustrating.

Have you ever been to an arcade? There’s a great game called Wacka Wacka. It has this big mallet and these little moles pop up and you beat them down. When you whack one down, three more pop up. You whack those down and three more pop up. You whack those down and five more pop up.

That machine is a parable of life! I don’t know a better description of life. You’ve got a problem in your life and you whack it down and just about the time you whack it down, three more pop up. Then you whack down those three problems and five more pop up. It is so frustrating because you can’t keep up.

If you’re so “in control” how come you can’t even unplug the machine? You are not in control. Face it. You don’t control a single problem in your life. Most of those come at you from the outside and you just don’t know they’re coming. You don’t know what problems you’re going to have tomorrow much less next week or next year. You are not God and you are not in control. The more you try to pretend you are the more frustrated you’re going to get. The problems just keep coming at you and you can’t handle them all at once. You weren’t made to handle them all by yourself. Frustration.

      2. The second indicator that you’re playing God is fatigue.

When you get tired that is a warning sign that you’re trying to play God again. It’s tiring playing God. It’s tiring trying to control everything. It’s trying to be the manager of the universe. It’s tiring trying to pretend that you’ve got it all together. Denial requires enormous amounts of emotional energy.

Energy that could be used in problem solving is actually diverted and used in problem-denying and problem-hiding and problem-avoiding. It’s a waste of your energy because it doesn’t work. When you try to hide it increases fatigue in your life.

David says in Psalm 32: ”My strength evaporated like water on a sunny day until I finally admitted all my sins to You and stopped trying to hide them.” Circle “stopped trying to hide them.”

That is the whole point of Step One in Getting Healthy. That’s the whole point of the first beatitude. “Blessed are you when you admit that you are spiritually helpless.” Stop trying to hide them.

Denial is just as old as Adam and Eve. They blew it. They made a mistake. They sinned. So they run off and hide behind a bush. God had made them, God had made the fruit, God had made the bush and they think they’re hiding?? In fact, you say to someone “Have you ever talked to God about your hang up?” They answer, “I wouldn’t want Him to know.” Who are you kidding? He knows. Stop denying.

We hide a lot of things. We hide our fears. We hide our faults. We hide our frustration and most of all we hide our feelings. One of the ways we try to run and hide from the problems in our lives is by staying busy. If I stay busy then I don’t have to think about that pain, that hurt, that background. We stay busy.

Now you can stay busy with a lot of good or bad things. You can stay busy with work and be a workaholic. You can stay busy at home with your family. You can stay busy with hobbies, with sports. You can stay busy with church. You can stay busy with ministry and helping other people. You can stay busy with travel. There are a thousand ways to keep yourself busy so when you go home at night you don’t have to think about the pain. You don’t have to face it. You keep running and running.

If you’re always tired, if you’re always fatigued, if you’re always out of energy you might just stop and ask yourself one question: What pain, what problem am I really running from? What pain or problem is driving me to be so busy like this that I’m tired all the time? Fatigue is a really good indicator that you’re playing God. That you’re either a) denying your humanity or b) trying to control everything.
Frustration. Fatigue. There’s a third indicator when you’re playing God.

      3. Failure.

There is one job in life you are guaranteed to fail at. Playing God. Because you’re not big enough. Solomon says in Proverbs 28 “You will never succeed in life if you try to hide your sins. Confess them and give them up then God will show mercy to you.”

We’re going to fail if we try to play God but since none of us wants to be considered a failure we invest enormous amounts of time and energy in what I call Image Management. We don’t want people to really know what we’re like. So we wear masks and we play games and we assume roles and we kiss up and we cover our blemishes. I read a quote from super model Cindy Crawford. She said, “Even Cindy Crawford doesn’t look like Cindy Crawford without three hours of make up and hair.” Nobody really looks that good. They have to cover it up and airbrush everything. We don’t just cover up our physical blemishes. More important we cover up our emotional blemishes because those things scare us far more than the way we look.

3. The Cure

What’s the solution? What is the first step to getting healthy? We’re going to look at all eight steps and I hope you’ll stay with me all eight weeks.

The first step to help is to admit I need God's help. Stop the denial and admit I need God's help.

Admitting that I’m not God means recognizing three facts of life that are true whether I want to admit them or not.

1. I admit that I am powerless to change my past. No matter how much I regret it and no matter how much I resent it, I cannot change my past.

2. I admit that I am powerless to control other people. I can’t control myself much less other people. I’m not responsible for other people’s actions or decisions in life. I am responsible for me.

3. I am powerless to change my unhealthy habits, because willpower is not enough.

Some of you think, “I can do this. I can solve all my problems.” No, you can’t. If you could have you would have but since you can’t you won’t. You say, “This next time is going to be different!” It’s not going to be any different because willpower is not enough. You need God and you need the steps to getting healthy again. It takes God and His steps to getting healthy.

Paul admitted that he was powerless to change. He admitted his weaknesses. In 2 Corinthians 1 he says this “We saw how powerless we were to help ourselves but that was good for then we put everything into the hands of God who alone could save us for He can even raise the dead.” God can do what you can’t do.

You may be thinking, “My problem isn’t that bad.” Let me ask you a question. How bad does it have to get before you ask for help? How bad does it have to get before you realize it’s not in control by you?

So my question is: How’s your pain level? Not too bad? Congratulations. Why don’t you listen to the little pain you’ve got before it turns into some massive pain years from now?

Some of you are feeling enormous pain. I have no doubt about that. You feel like you’re at the end of your rope. May I say to you congratulations you’re at Step One. “Blessed are those who realize they are spiritually helpless.” Or as The Message paraphrase says of the first beatitude “You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and His rule.” This is why Jesus Christ came to earth.

“When we were unable to help ourselves at the moment of our need Christ died for us.” Jesus Christ came to earth to give you grace and grace is the power to change. It’s the power that you don’t have. It’s the power to change the things that you don’t have control of in your life. He offers it to you. So what happens if I come to God and say, “I admit I’m not God. You’re God and I’m not. I’ve been trying to act like God by denying my humanity, by trying to pretend like everything’s under control. But it’s not. And I need to ask Your help. I admit I’m helpless.” What will happen if I admit that?

Remember for a moment the mother from the video. She knew that there had to be more. Something else to give her meaning in her life. This morning it is very simple, just be honest to God.

“God gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless.” What a deal!

Prayer:

I’m going to pray for you but before we close let me ask you, What is unhealthy or out of balance in your life? What needs changing?

I want to invite you to join the rest of us for the next eight weeks as together we take these eight steps of getting healthy again. But I want to ask you will you take the first step today? For many this will be the hardest step – admitting it. Why? Why is it so hard? It means being honest and facing up to issues that you have not wanted to face and have scared you to death. It’s going to take courage. So that’s what I’m going to pray for you right now. I’m going to pray for courage for you. Then you can follow me in a prayer.

Father, because none of us is perfect we all have areas in our lives that are unhealthy and are out of balance. Some of these areas are so painful we can hardly even stand to think about them. I know that there are people here today who have struggled with shame and low self-esteem. And there are others who are here in a marriage that’s stuck or cold or dying or maybe even separated. There are many others here who are struggling with habits or hurts or memories or the fear of being out of control. Give them the courage to take the first step to health right now.

Now you pray. Say this. Follow me in this prayer in your mind. “Dear God, I want to take the first step to getting healthy again today. I realize I’m not God. I’ve often tried to control things like I was God and I’m sorry. I’ve tried to deny my problems by staying busy or doing other things. But I’m not running any more. Today I’m asking You for help. Please help me get healthy again. I admit that I am helpless to control this tendency to do things that I know are unhealthy for me. I humbly ask You to take all the pieces of my unmanageable life and begin the process of healing. Help me to stick with this process for the next eight weeks. In Your name, I pray. Amen.”

This sermon was adapted from the Saddleback Sermon Series: Getting Healthy Again.

2004/10/03