Dare to Care: Stepping up to a Complete Recovery Today we’re going to conclude the series we’ve been in for the last eight weeks – looking at the Beatitudes of Jesus – eight steps to getting health or eight steps to recovery.
The eighth step is about helping other people. Once you’re on the road to recovery, God wants to use you to help other people. In fact that’s one of the characteristics of recovery is that you begin to help others.
Step eight: Yield myself to God be used to bring this Good News to others, by both my example and my words.
This last step is based on the Bible verse of 2 Corinthians 1. “God comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others." [Circle “so that”.] When others are troubled we will be able to give them the same comfort that God has given us. So when we are weighed down with troubles it’s for your benefit so we can be an encouragement to you.”
God may allow you to go through a problem and then give you a ministry, an ability, to help other people through the very things that you’ve been going through.
You know you’ve recovered, you know you’re emotionally, physically, spiritually healthy when you start focusing on other people. You want to help others. In fact, if all you can think about is your problem, if all you can think about is your stress, your difficulty, you’re not thinking about helping other people you’re only thinking about helping yourself and how can I get rid of this pain and how can I get rid of my problems and my stress you’re not there yet. You’re still on the road to recovery.
Let me give you some facts about pain.
1. There is no such thing about a pain free life. As long as you are on this planet you will have emotional pain, physical pain, relational pain in many different areas. This is not heaven. Heaven is pain free. This is earth. So you will always have pain the rest of your life.
2. There is a purpose behind your pain. God always uses pain for a purpose. God wants to do a number of things in your life through it and God never wastes a hurt. He wants to use it in your life.
3. Your greatest contribution in this world – your greatest ministry, your greatest service – will be not through your strengths but through your pain, sharing your weakness, your pain. Why? Because people don’t get helped by your strengths. People who seem to have it all together are nice people and I’m glad I know some, but when I meet somebody who says, “I went through this pain and God helped me and God saw me through it,” and it’s the pain I'm going through right now that is encouraging. And I think, “Maybe I can make it. Who can better help someone who’s going through the pain of a divorce than somebody who’s already went through the pain of a divorce? Who can better help somebody who’s lost all their finances and going bankrupt than somebody who’s lost all their finances and has gone bankrupt? Who can better help the parents of a problem or special needs child than some parents who had a special needs child? Who can better help somebody who’s going through a cancer situation than somebody who went through a cancer situation? Who can better help someone who’s been abused and raped, than someone who was abused or raped?
The very thing that you like least to talk about in your life, the very thing you’re most embarrassed about, the very thing you want to hide in the closet, the very thing that you don’t even want to think about is the very thing that God wants to use in your life to help and encourage other people.
The eighth step is God wants to use you to bring healing to other people. How does He do it? God will use you if you will be willing to honesty share four things:
1. Share how pain got your attention.
Has pain ever gotten your attention? I imagine so! It’s great attention getter. Proverbs 20 says, “Sometimes it takes a painful situation to make us change our ways.” Next: “I'm glad not because it hurt you but because the pain turned you to God.”
God uses pain in your life for many different purposes. God uses pain to direct us, to help us know which way to go. God uses pain to correct us, it shows us what’s wrong in our life. God uses pain to perfect us. It helps us to become more like Jesus and build Christlike character. God uses pain to inspect us to show us what we’re like on the inside.
But God uses pain to get our attention more than anything else. If you never had physical pain you’d never know anything was wrong with your body. So you need pain to know something is wrong. If you never had emotional or relational pain you’d never know something was wrong in a relationship. And it would just get worse and worse and worse. Most of all God uses pain to get our attention. C. S. Lewis said, “God whispers to us in our pleasure but He shouts to us in our pain.” Pain is God’s megaphone. It’s God’s wake up call. Something is wrong in a relationship, in your finances, in your physical health – whatever. God is saying, “I want to wake you up!” It’s alarm bells. It’s a warning light.
This is very important because we rarely change until we see or feel the pain. We’re so afraid of changing we never change until our fear of change is exceeded by the pain. And all of a sudden when we have more pain than we have fear we start changing.
We rarely change until we get desperate. We postpone very difficult decisions. We just keep putting them off. Even though it’s important, it’s difficult to make so we just keep putting them off.
In the Old Testament part of the Bible there’s the story of a guy named Elijah. God took him to this brook and he was having this great little vacation. He had all the food he wanted, all the water he wanted. He’s relaxed and having a good old time. One day, the Bible says, the brook dried up. And Elijah got mad at God. “God! What are You doing? Don’t You love me anymore? Don’t You like me? Don’t You care about me? I'm out here. I’ve got to have water to live. You let the brook dry up! Don’t You love me any more?” And God said, “Of course I love you. I just don’t want you at the brook any more. I want you to be somewhere else. I want you to move!”
Has the brook ever dried up in your life? An emotional brook that was refreshing and wonderful and satisfying and all of a sudden, it’s over. You don’t get any more joy out of it any more. A relational brook? Has that ever dried up? And people that you were depending on and counting on to help you all of a sudden, they’re not there any more. The brook dried up.
God is trying to get your attention. God is saying, “I want to use pain to get your attention.”
If you want to be used by God and you want to not waste those things that you’ve gone through but help other people there’s one qualification. You’ve got to be real. You’ve got to be honest. You’ve got to be authentic about your pain. You can’t airbrush your problems and make it feel like you’ve been on a victory lap your entire life.
The five things you need to share if you’re going to make an impact in people’s lives are the five things that Paul shared. If you want to use your experiences to help others…
1. I must be open with my feelings.
Paul says, “We have spoken frankly to you. We have opened our hearts wide.” Paul says we’ve shared our feelings. We’ve spilled our guts. We’re not hiding anything back. You cannot be emotionally distant and impact people. You’ve got to share your feelings, share what you really feel.
2. Be humble with my faults.
Paul says in Galatians “Each of us must bear the faults and burdens of his own for none of us is perfect.” We all know that but we all pretend like we’re the only one in the universe who is perfect. We want to hide our feelings. We want to hide our faults. Paul says if you want to make an impact you’ve got to be humble about your faults.
3. Be frank about my failures.
Paul says, “Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the worst.” That’s pretty frank.
4. I need to be honest about my frustrations.
A lot of life is frustrating. You’re asked, “How’re you doing?” I'm doing great! No, you’re not. You’re frustrated. Why don’t you just admit it? You’re frustrated right now. Paul says, “I have the desire to do what is right but I cannot carry it out. I keep on doing the evil I don’t want to do. All the things I want to do and I know that are right I end up not doing. All the things I know that are healthy for me I end up not doing. And all the things that are unhealthy for me I end up doing.” That is frustrating. If you’ve never had that frustration there’s a word for you – liar. Because every one of us has had that frustration doing things we knew were unhealthy for us – we did them anyway. And not doing things we knew were right and good and healthy for us – we just do them. Be honest about my frustrations.
5. I need to be candid about my fears.
Paul was even honest about this. He says in Corinthians “I do admit that I have fears, that when I come to you you’ll disappoint me and I’ll disappoint you and in frustration with each other everything will fall to pieces.” He’s just gut level honest.
Don’t waste your pain. How do you do it? Explain and share how pain got your attention.
He wants to use you to encourage and help other people. First you have to share how pain got your attention.
2. Share the lessons you’ve learned.
What did you learn from your pain? What did you learn from your mistakes? What did you learn from the hurt that you’ve gone through? You look for the lessons that you could pass on to other people.
We’ve all heard it said, “It’s wise to learn from experience.” And that is true. You ought to learn from experiences of life. It’s wise to learn from experience – it is wiser to learn from the experiences of others. Life is too short to make all the mistakes myself. I don't have time to mess up in every area to know that that one’s a dead end. So while it is good to learn from experience, it’s even wiser to learn from the experience of others.
We all go through different kinds of pain, we all go through different kinds of trouble but regardless of that there are three things that God wants you to learn from your pain. There are things that God has taught me from the pain that I’ve gone through.
1. I’ve learned to depend on God when I'm in pain.
Learning to depend on God is one of the very first things that God wants to teach you through troubled times. You don’t know that God is all you need until God’s all you’ve got. There are some times when life kind of kicks the stilts out from under you and all of your support system’s gone. The people, the things, the events, habits, patterns that you’ve depended on they’re just not there. All of a sudden all you’ve got in your life is God. And that’s where you learn God’s all you need. If I’ve got God – one plus God equals a majority.
Paul says in 2 Corinthians 1 “We were crushed and overwhelmed and saw how powerless we were to help ourselves. [Some of you are in that situation right now.] But that was good. For then we put everything into the hands of God who alone could save us and He did help us.” God wants to teach you about Himself. That He is loving, He is caring, that He’s honest, He’s just, He’s dependable, He’s loyal, He can be counted on, He is wise, He is fair.
2. I’ve learned to obey God’s word.
It taken me a long time but I’ve learned when I do it the way God says to do it, it always works out. When I do it my way it messes up. When I try to fix a relationship the way I think it ought to be fixed it always makes the relationship worse. On the other hand when I let God fix the relationship and I do it the way God says to do it, it always works out better. That’s just good sense.
David says in Psalm 119 “It was the best thing that could have happened to me [talking about a problem he went through] for it taught me to pay attention to Your laws.”
Life is a school and problems are the curriculum. I don't know why it is but in human behavior and human nature some lessons we only learn through failure. If you obey God’s word you will save yourself a lot of heartache.
3. I need other people.
Have you learned that one yet? That you need other people in your life? That you were not meant to go through life as a Lone Ranger? Even the Lone Ranger had Tonto. You’re not an independent island totally self-sustained. You need other people in your life. Corinthians 11 “Remember that in God’s plan men and women need each other.” The woman who thinks she needs no men in her life is sadly mistaken. The man who thinks he needs no women in his life is sadly mistaken. I'm not talking about marriage. I'm talking about the fact that God made human beings in His image male and female. He put part of His image in female and part of His image in male and we need each other’s perspective. If I'm going to be healthy and grow I need lots of good godly Christian men in my life and lots of good godly Christian women in my life so I can see life from the total perspective.
You need other people who will love you and care for you and hold you accountable – help you out, reveal weaknesses and blind spots.
Most of the time we’re not willing to face the truth about ourselves until we’re forced to. “Two people are better than one. If one falls down the other can help him up. But it’s bad for the person who is alone and falls because there’s no one there to help him.”
There is no situation in life you can’t learn from if you’ll just ask the right questions. What are the right questions? Here’s what you ask. Whenever you’re going through pain or problems or difficulty or hurt whether it’s your fault or somebody else you ask not Why? But What? Not “Why is this happening to me?” but “What do You want to teach me, God? What do You want me to learn? What do you want me to change? What difference do You want to make in my life?” When you share what you’ve learned you’ll help others.
3. How God is bringing good out of bad.
If you’ll look and see how God is bringing good out of the bad that has happened in your life. This is one of the great promises from God’s word. God specializes in bringing good out of bad. One of the classic promises on that is Romans 8:28 “We know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God.” This is a phenomenal verse so let’s look at it word by word.
First notice what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say, “God causes everything to work out the way I want it to.” Because that’s not reality. Everything does not work out the way you want it to in life. And God does not promise that. This is not heaven. This is earth.
It doesn’t say, “God causes everything to work out to have a happy ending on earth.” That is not true either. There are a lot of unhappy endings on earth. This is a fallen broken world.
What does it say?
First, “We know…” We don’t hope. We don’t wish. We don't imagine. We don’t desire. We don’t psych ourselves up psychologically and pull ourselves up by bootstraps. “We know…” We are confident. We are assured. We are certain of what we are to learn in this verse. We know for a fact. What do we know?
“We know that God causes…” There’s a grand design behind it all. And there is a grand Designer behind it all. Your life is not a result of random chance. Your life is not a result of fate. Your life is not a result of either good luck or bad luck. There is no such thing. There is a grand design. History is His story. God is pulling the strings. And it is not by chance and it is not by accident and it is not by good or bad luck. God has a design and He is the designer.
“We know that God causes.” What does that mean? It means that we make mistakes but God doesn’t. We do make mistakes, sure. But God never makes mistakes.
“We know that God causes all things.” What’s included in the word “all”? Everything! Does that include your mistakes? Yes. Does that include your sins? Yes. Your stupid decisions? Yes. Does that include things that are painful like cancer and miscarriages? Yes. Hurts from other people in our lives? Yes. Divorce? Death of a friend? Parents? Yes. Everything fits into God’s plan. Even the bad things God uses them for good.
“We know that God causes all things to work together for good.” Circle “together”. Not separately. It does not say that everything in life is good. That’s obviously not true. Rape is not good. War is not good. Leukemia is not good. Children getting strung out on drugs and running away from home. That’s not good. There’s a lot of bad in this world.
It says “All things work together for good.” For everybody? No. This is not a promise for everybody in the whole world. “For those who love God.” This is a promise only for people who have taken their lives and put them in the hand of God and said, “God, You take all the pieces, good, bad and ugly and You work it out for good.” God works for good in the lives of those people.
I’ll be honest with you if you have not done that… if you have not placed your life in the hands of God and trusted Christ for your life, all things are not working together for good in your life. In fact, all things are working together for bad in your life because you are living in opposition to God.
There are a lot of things in your life that are distasteful. There are a lot of things in your life that are flat out bitter. They don’t taste good. But God works them all together for good, if you give Him the pieces of your life – the good, the bad, the ugly. If you put your life in His hands and you love God.
This is how you can be both optimistic and realistic about your life. Realistic about the pain and problems you’ve gone through, many you’ve brought on your own self. And optimistic because you know God’s going to bring good out of it.
There may be people in your life who meant to hurt you. Some of you have been hurt sexually. Some of you have been hurt physically, emotionally, verbally. There are people in your life who intended to hurt you. They meant it for bad but God meant it for good. And He can bring good even out of evil. He can turn it around if you will give Him the pieces.
The fourth way you can help other people from your pain…
4. Share how Jesus gave you hope to change.
How Jesus gave you the hope and the power to change. Everybody needs hope. The two most common comments I’ve heard over and over and over from people during my ministry, “My life is out of control” (you could put in family, finance or whatever) and two, “I just can’t seem to change (me, my spouse, my kids, my situation, whatever).”
Both of those are statements of hopelessness. Everybody needs hope to cope. You can’t cope without hope.
One of the best places to get genuine, solid hope is from somebody who’s been where you are now. Somebody who’s already been through it and God has helped them through it. You say, “Then maybe God could help me. Maybe God could help me make it through this situation.” That’s why God wants to us you to give hope to other people.
1 Peter 3:15 “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.”
“When you call Me I will answer you. I will be with you when you are in trouble. I will save you and honor you.” That’s an amazing promise. When you call Me I’ll pick up the phone. He says, “I will be with you when you are in trouble. [Circle “I will be with you.”] I will save you and I will honor you.”
Do you know the one thing that all of us have in common today? This ladder! This ladder represents not just us helping others but the biggest help of all came to us through Jesus Christ. He brought us the ultimate ladder of forgiveness and salvation. Today we are going to celebrate and commemorate the fact that He dared to share. The Bible says that He humbled Himself and became flesh so that we might be delivered. He came that we might be healthy, whole, forgiven, people.
When you came in you received a little cup with a piece of bread attached to the top. We are going to use these items to remember the broken body and the blood that Jesus shed for our salvation. Give Caution.
Prayer:
Dear Father, I have no doubt that there are people here right now who are in a lot of pain. Tears come easily because it’s so close to the surface. Thank You for bringing them here this weekend. Help them to realize that you are with them.
With our heads bowed, I’d like to ask you a couple of personal questions. Has God been trying to get your attention? Will you trust God to bring good out of bad in your life? Will you trust His power to make changes that you have been unable to make? Will you allow God to use your mistakes to help other people? Will you face your fear and begin the steps to getting healthy again? To learn to depend on God, to obey His word, to realize you need other people and you’re not going to get better on your own. There’s a word for that. It’s called arrogance. Why don’t you pray this, say this in your mind, “Dear God, thank You for loving me enough to get my attention. Thank You for bringing me here. I ask You to bring good out of the bad in my life. Help me to learn the lessons I need to learn. I want to learn to totally depend on You. I want to follow Your word, Your instructions, I want to become all that You made me to become. And I want You to use me to help other people. Please, give me hope when I feel hopeless and the power I need to change. I'm willing to follow Your steps of recovery from here on. Help me to be honest about my faults and my fears and my frustrations and my failures. Use me to encourage other people. Most of all I thank You that You will always be with me. I want to follow You. In Your name I pray. Amen.”
This sermon was adapted from the Saddleback Sermon Series on Recovery.
2004/12/05
