Let Go Of Our Painful Past—Part 14

These readings will provide additional insight into the topic covered by this most recent set of blog posts:

READINGS – Part 2

Through fifteen years, as tapes have gone out all over the world, letters and testimonies have confirmed my belief that there is another realm of problems which requires a special kind of prayer and a deeper level of healing by the Spirit. Somewhere between our sins, on the one hand, and our sicknesses, on the other, lies an area the Scripture calls “infirmities.”

We can explain this by an illustration from nature. If you visit the far West, you will see those beautiful giant sequoia and redwood trees. In most of the parks the naturalists can show you a cross section of a great tree they have cut, and point out that the rings of the tree reveal the developmental history, year by year. Here’s a ring that represents a year when there was a terrible drought. Here are a couple of rings from years when there was too much rain. Here’s where the tree was struck by lightning. Here are some normal years of growth. This ring shows a forest fire that almost destroyed the tree. Here’s another of savage blight and disease. All of this lies embedded in the heart of the tree, representing the autobiography of its growth.

And that’s the way it is with us. Just a few minutes beneath the protective bark, the concealing, protective mask, are the recorded rings of our lives.

There are scars of ancient, painful hurts … as when a little boy rushed downstairs one Christmas dawn and discovered in his Christmas stocking a dirty old rock, put there to punish him for some trivial boyhood naughtiness. This scar has eaten away in him, causing all kinds of interpersonal difficulties.

Here is the discoloration of a tragic stain that muddied all of life … as years ago behind the barn, or in the haystack, or out in the woods, a big brother took a little sister and introduced her into the mysteries—no, the miseries of sex.

And here we see the pressure of a painful, repressed memory … of running after an alcoholic father who was about to kill the mother, and then of rushing for the butcher knife. Such scars have been buried in pain for so long that they are causing hurt and rage that are inexplicable. And these scars are not touched by conversion and sanctifying grace, or by the ordinary benefits of prayer.

In the rings of our thoughts and emotions, the record is there; the memories are recorded, and all are alive. And they directly and deeply affect our concepts, our feelings, our relationships. They affect the way we look at life and God, at others and ourselves.

We preachers have often given people the mistaken idea that the new birth and being “filled with the Spirit” are going to automatically take care of these emotional hangups. But this just isn’t true. A great crisis experience of Jesus Christ, as important and eternally valuable as this is, is not a shortcut to emotional health. It is not a quickie cure for personality problems.

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Healing for Damaged Emotions, David Seamands, Victor Books, pages 11-12.

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Sunday’s coming. Do you have your sermon ready? Is it relevant? Will it effectively motivate your congregation to walk more in step with the Master? What about that Sermon Series you’ve been thinking about?

Or, if you’re someone who plans well ahead, have you asked yourself what you will preach for your Easter Sermon, your Advent Sermon, your Christmas Sermon?

David Mains and Mainstay Ministries can help. We offer a wide variety of Sermon Starters and Full Sermons that will give you Sermon Ideas to help you prepare for regular Saturday or Sunday sermons, Mid-week Bible Sermons, and Sermons for special occasions.

We also offer assistance as you create Topical Sermons, Sermons Series, and sermons for special times of the year. We have resources available to help you with Advent Celebrations, Advent Sermons, Christmas Sermons, Easter Sunday Sermons, Patriotic Sermons, and more.

For more information on how to create better Bible Sermons and how to turn Sermon Ideas into Sermon Outlines, and then into effective, meaningful Sunday Sermons, please click here to visit David Mains’ website.

You will also find a variety of resources for pastors and congregations at the Mainstay Ministries website. Just click here.

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Let Go Of Our Painful Past—Part 13

These readings will provide additional insight into the topic covered by this most recent set of blog posts:

READINGS – Part 1

I doubt we can ever put our pasts behind us when we’ve never put them before us. Yet many of us stall on the starting line of change because we fear that we’ll lose family members’ approval and affection.

I once counseled with a charming thirty-something Christian who grew up in a subtly, but profoundly, unhealthy home. She said her birth family’s motto was “family first.” I think that meant, “Ignore and don’t talk about who and what’s hurtful in this family.” An alternative translation might be: “Don’t rock the boat (with truth) even if it’s the Titanic!”

We will never begin the move from hurting to healing until we answer the question: “Whose rules rule?” The person whose rules we are living by is god to us! If, in an attempt to gain the parental seal of approval, we continue to live by the rules of hurting, hurtful parents, we will continue our hurting, hurtful ways. But if we choose to know God and put him on the throne of our lives, we will begin to live by His rules. And, as we’ve already seen, God takes truth very seriously.

I read somewhere that calling a thing by its correct name is the beginning of change. Some of us will need to begin calling our family loyalty lying, if that is its correct name. Yet, just contemplating such a genuinely truth-based approach to our entire lives, we may feel as alien in our families as salmon would be in the Sahara! Yet God and commitment to change call us to begin dealing honestly with our pasts as well as our present lives. We must face the pain inherent in becoming truth-tellers in truth-fearing families. We are foolish to expect reality-phobic family members to jump up, click their heels together, and exclaim, “Oh, goody goody. We’ve all been wondering when someone would get healthy enough to start changing so that we’d be confronted with our personal and family dysfunction and be dragged kicking and screaming into greater wholeness!” It just doesn’t work that way.

In unhealthy systems, whether they’re families or companies, the person who sees and speaks the problem becomes the problem. Instead of working to resolve the problem, such systems focus on removing the problem-perceiver.

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Hurt People Hurt People, Sandra D. Wilson, Thomas Nelson, pages 94-95.

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Sunday’s coming. Do you have your sermon ready? Is it relevant? Will it effectively motivate your congregation to walk more in step with the Master? What about that Sermon Series you’ve been thinking about?

Or, if you’re someone who plans well ahead, have you asked yourself what you will preach for your Easter Sermon, your Advent Sermon, your Christmas Sermon?

David Mains and Mainstay Ministries can help. We offer a wide variety of Sermon Starters and Full Sermons that will give you Sermon Ideas to help you prepare for regular Saturday or Sunday sermons, Mid-week Bible Sermons, and Sermons for special occasions.

We also offer assistance as you create Topical Sermons, Sermons Series, and sermons for special times of the year. We have resources available to help you with Advent Celebrations, Advent Sermons, Christmas Sermons, Easter Sunday Sermons, Patriotic Sermons, and more.

For more information on how to create better Bible Sermons and how to turn Sermon Ideas into Sermon Outlines, and then into effective, meaningful Sunday Sermons, please click here to visit David Mains’ website.

You will also find a variety of resources for pastors and congregations at the Mainstay Ministries website. Just click here.

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Let Go Of Our Painful Past—Part 12

These questions will help you affirm what you’ve read in the previous blog posts:

FOR DISCUSSION AND REFLECTION

1. Have you recently heard someone in a conversation give evidence of holding on to a painful past experience? How common a problem do you think this is?
2. Why do painful past experiences often inhibit people from dreaming God’s dreams for themselves or for the church?
3. Almost everyone has had a negative church experience of one kind or another. What is a memory like this which you might do well to put behind you?
4. Do you, like Moses, have any memories of trying to serve the Lord and being hurt in the process?
5. If a person said, “I don’t know how to put memories like this behind me,” what advice would you offer?
6. How good does “daring to dream again” sound to you?

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Sunday’s coming. Do you have your sermon ready? Is it relevant? Will it effectively motivate your congregation to walk more in step with the Master? What about that Sermon Series you’ve been thinking about?

Or, if you’re someone who plans well ahead, have you asked yourself what you will preach for your Easter Sermon, your Advent Sermon, your Christmas Sermon?

David Mains and Mainstay Ministries can help. We offer a wide variety of Sermon Starters and Full Sermons that will give you Sermon Ideas to help you prepare for regular Saturday or Sunday sermons, Mid-week Bible Sermons, and Sermons for special occasions.

We also offer assistance as you create Topical Sermons, Sermons Series, and sermons for special times of the year. We have resources available to help you with Advent Celebrations, Advent Sermons, Christmas Sermons, Easter Sunday Sermons, Patriotic Sermons, and more.

For more information on how to create better Bible Sermons and how to turn Sermon Ideas into Sermon Outlines, and then into effective, meaningful Sunday Sermons, please click here to visit David Mains’ website.

You will also find a variety of resources for pastors and congregations at the Mainstay Ministries website. Just click here.

Share and Enjoy