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Risen King Alliance Church
Risen King Alliance Church
Emotional Healing Week 1 (feat. Mike Plunket)
Week 1 of Emotional Healing series at Risen King Church!
Hey there. Thanks for joining us at risen King Church for our weekly podcast. We hope you experienced God today. Make sure you visit us at risenking.life to take all your next steps and follow us on Facebook, Instagram and youtube. Enjoy the message. I'm few announcements. Where are we looking at are teaching today? The first is, uh, our 1130 service is going to 1145. We want to spend a little bit more time after the 10 o'clock service to have prayer teams so that each a Sunday we'll have a time of prayer. You can have a time of ministry after the 10 o'clock service that will begin next week. So those of you who usually come at 1145, you can come at 12. Okay. Uh, 1230, some people come. So, but, uh, we're making that change starting next week. The other thing is this, this series that we're doing, it's really an integrative series. Um, we have teaching on Sunday mornings. We have the small groups and Danny and I have written a weekly devotion for you. It summarizes the teaching each week. It gives you an application to work out in your own private time. And it gives you a daily reflection from the scriptures to just remind you of the healing presence of God in every area of your life. So these, we, uh, we ask a donation of$5, if$5 is too much, I will buy it for you because I want everyone to have this. Uh, this is, this is how you really get transformation is not just that you get information, but then you begin to integrate it into your life. So we're going to begin this week on this whole subject of emotional healing. Now I have to tell you how it came to this, this curriculum or this teaching. Um, when I was 18, I started ministry. I preached my first sermon as an 18 year old. Never forget it. Some lady said it was the greatest sermon she ever heard. I've always remembered her. By 24, I was pastoring a church. By 27, I was planting churches in Mexico City. By 30, I plant four of churches in Atlanta, Georgia. And so I was falling apart emotionally while I was succeeding Ministerially. My life was more of a of a roller coaster. Every high would be followed by a disastrous low. I would have bouts of depression. I would have seasons of depression. I would go through months of depression. At one point, my wife, Lisa said to me, your pain is like a mistress. So I, I sought healing. I began to say, Lord, what is this? And the first step that I took was I went for a deliverance session. Now the denomination, I was a part of, the church that I had planted, we didn't do deliverance. in that church, the devil was real. He just didn't influence Christians. And so there was no deliverance that took place in that church. So I had to go outside and I found a friend and who became a friend, Doctor Neil Anderson. And I experienced an incredible freedom. As I went through deliverance and I, I had substantial healing that took place. I had been so sick and tired of being a spiritual schizophrenia. We're on one way. I loved God and I had, uh, all of his holiness, but I was, I was lost in lost and I was lost and in control and, and anger and anxiety and depression. And so that was amazing to feel this kind of freedom that came this kind of first time to feel, you know, to feel, to feel normal. But the problem was that as soon as I experienced deliverance, my church became incredibly enraged with me, that I was teaching on deliverance. And so the church asked me to leave. I found that the church, but the church asked me to leave. And within a short time, the denomination asked me to leave. They said, we don't want any teaching on deliverance. We don't want anything that has happened to you, but to be taught in any of our, our churches are in, in any of our stream whatsoever. And so I lost everything. I lost the church. I planted, I lost my job, I lost my ministry and my career. And one of the things that I saw in the midst of that one is that every step into freedom you take will be tested. But the second thing I've found was this, that even if you clean out the demons, even if you get rid of the lies that, that have held together to demonic strongholds in your life, what is left is damaged, that the soul has to be restored and that the major place of wounding is emotional wounding. And so the emotional world of the person who has lived their life in lies, who has lived their life with the influence of the demonic in their life, even having pain as normal to them, that person doesn't even know what healthy is. And so the, the restoration of the emotional world becomes an essential part of them then achieving or getting to a place of maturity in Christ. And so this morning I want to share with you and for the next few weeks, the journey that God led me on that allowed me to not only experience healing, but to continue to experience healing and then to share that healing with others. And the first thing is something he's asked me to declare over you today, to speak it over you and for you to take it in. I, I want you to hear this. This is, this is God's very hard for, listen to this. You have the capability to achieve everything God has destined for you and he has a glorious destiny for you. He has a desired future for you. You have the capability to achieve and he's given you the gifts that you need. He gives you the talents that you need. He gives you the experiences that you need. He makes training available and mentoring and other people who can help you along the way. You have the capability to achieve the destiny that he has for you, but you will only achieve it in proportion to the capacity that you have to receive all his resources. You will not achieve it without and enlarge capacity to receive all the love that he has for you. All the patients that he has, all the joy that he has, all of the faith that he has in you. If you don't have capacity, it doesn't matter what kind of capability you have. As a matter of fact, capability is the least important of the equation. God could make stone sing this morning. God's already made jackasses preach. Capability is not the issue. What most of us do is we work on our capabilities, never realizing that the essential thing is your capacity. How much can you receive, how much can you maintain? And one way it's both the opening because if you open up and say, I need to receive, you have to humble yourself. You have to let go of control. You have to get honest and say, I don't have the ability in and of myself to be what I know I'm destined to be. You have to humble yourself and so you have to let go of your pride and you have to let go of control for the opening to come and then you have to begin to register what you're receiving. The problem for many of us is that we're receiving into a capacity that has all kinds of holes in it. And so as God pours out his love and as people love you and as his power and his strength is coming, you just leak it out. It's a matter of fact. I'll give you an illustration of this every now and then. I just have to have McDonald's. I mean sometimes a French fries. The only thing that we'll do and when I have a French fry a half to have a coke, now I'm not doing sugar. So coke, whenever I'd get one of those cokes, cause now a dollar, you can get like a gallon or something and I get one of those codes. I drink two sift and I leave it in my car. Well in the heat you leave a Mcdonald's cup in your car. When you pick it up, the cup comes up. But the drink is in your cup. Sorry, it's budget Coke Cup holders I ever saw. You know, everything seeps out. That's your soul. God, pores and pores and pores. He gives you everything you need for life and godliness. All your needs are provided, not according to your riches, but his riches in Christ. Jesus in heavenly places, he pores and pores. But every time he picks your cup up, it just leaks out. This is why we have to have emotional healing. We have to have our capacity restore it. We have to have our capacity in large. We have to be able, if we're going to be all that we want to be, we have to be able to receive better than we've been doing now. The three things that he wants you to receive, the things that drove me to, to really say, Lord, Lord, I need healing. I don't just need deliverance. I need healing, and I just kept driving. I was as these verses, these verses were before me every day. The first one was this. You cannot escape that Jesus says to you, if you're a follower of him, he looks at you in the eye and he says, the things I do you will do and greater than these because I go to the father. Do you understand? If you are not doing the things Jesus did and even greater things than Jesus did, then it's a capacity issue is not a capability issue. It's a capacity issue. Your receptors are damaged so that you're not receiving all his power. You're not receiving all his love. You're not receiving all his strength and so what Jesus is saying in that is you were destined for greatness. He said, you didn't choose me, but I chose you to bear much fruit and fruit that remains. There is a greatness destiny on you that the enemy wants you to resist because you will not be healed in the places that will give you capacity for greatness. And if you're not in that place of doing what Jesus did and even greater than he did, then that means you need healing. But that wasn't the only one that drove me. The second one was this, Jesus said, I came that you may hit, might have life to the full, that you might have life abundantly. Well, when I was miserable and depressed, I couldn't call that life abundantly. I had to say what it was. This is life miserably and so this isn't what Jesus' promise. Now Jesus is pouring out his life. So the issue isn't with Jesus. It's with the receptor and me and I'm saying to you, you are called to fullness. If there's anything less than fullness in in your life. It is not because God isn't resourcing you. It's because you're not it or you don't have the capacity of maintain it. When the third one that drove me was this. The joy of the Lord is my strength. You know what that means? It means there's a joy that exist outside of your circumstances. There's a joy that you can appropriate even when you're sad. There's a joy that has nothing to do with whether the day is going your way or not. It's a joy that flows from heaven and if you are in Christ, you are rooted in heaven. You are in the water that flows from having that as the joy of the Lord, that when it comes in, it becomes your strength and the only way to have it is to receive it because you can't produce it. Well, if you're here today and you say, Oh gosh, I came on an emotional healing day. All I'm saying to you is the framework is this. You have the capability to achieve everything that God has destined you for and it is a great and glorious destiny because Jesus said, everything I do, you can do. You have, you have the capability of fullness. There is no one in this room that's not capable of forms. There's not a single one of you here that's not capable of joy, but the issue is your capacity for it. And because you're like us, a assessive of a cup in your soul, you have only achieved, you've only received, you've only experienced the level to which your woundedness will be healed. So here's are you tracking with me on this? So here's the opening prayer. Whenever I do these kinds of teachings, whenever I start, I want us to be on page together. And the first thing I wanted to do is I want us to pray together. And what I've found is, particularly in healing and warfare, is prayers need to be precise. And so this is a prayer that I learned with Dr. Anderson and I tweaked over the years and I've used it again and again because it's very powerful. It's simple but powerful. I'm going to ask you to pray it with me. We're going to read it. I'm gonna ask you to make the words your own. Would you read this prayer with me? Dear heavenly father, I thank you that you love me and that your son died and rose again so that I could have a close personal relationship with you. I have spent too much of my life trying to gain an acceptance from others that is already mine in Christ. Your word says it was for freedom that Christ set us free, and that is what I really want. Freedom. There are many ways in which I have allowed a yoke of slavery to weigh me down and wear me out. Please deliver all bondage in my life and bring my mind the areas where my progress toward maturity has been slowed or stop by the traps of the enemy of my soul. I am believing that your truth will set me free to love, worship, know, and obey you in the acceptance and unconditional, uh, that you have graciously extended to me in Christ. In Jesus name I pray. Amen. All right, so that's the prayer. When we pray like this, we also need to declare war. And when we declare war, we don't close our eyes and we don't meekly say, please Satan, listen to me. We began to get a swagger about us. We began to get a little attitude about us. So I want you to get your fist balled up, or you can point or you can do whatever. Don't sit there like passive little flubs because if you do, you're doing exactly what the demons want you to do. They believe that you will not resist. They believe that you will stay exactly the same as you are. Some of you can even hear their voice say, you will never change. It will never get better. Will you tell them it will change? It will get better because Jesus has already won the victory. Now what you're gonna do is you're going to speak that victory and you're going to speak it out loud. Listen, demons are not subject to your thoughts. They're subject to your words. All right, so come on, let's get a little, get a little little attitudes going. Punch him in the nose. Whatever everybody gotta to do. Okay? Say this with me and the name and authority of the risen Lord Jesus Christ. I take my stand against all demonic opposition, my quest for freedom and emotional maturity. I refuse all fear, anxiety, doubt, confusion, Deception, distraction, or any other form of harassment that comes from the enemy of the Lord Jesus. I choose to take my place in Christ and I declare that all his photos have been disarmed and that Jesus himself came to destroy the devil's work in my life. I declare that the chains having been broken by the finished work of Jesus Christ are broken and my life and that I am in him. Therefore his victory is my victory.
Speaker 2:[inaudible].
Speaker 1:Now, what I have found over these last years, this started for me in 1993 what I've found is that whether a person is in a way, just the person who says, I just come to church or whether someone is the leader of the ministry, everyone is broken, everyone is bankrupt. What happens a lot of times though is people get into ministry to get filled, but instead are ministering out of their emptiness. I've read a very good book recently that I wanted to share this ministry leaders experience and the reason I want to share this because he experienced it with one of my heroes who is Brennan Manning, and so this guy's name is Phil Anderson. He's wrote a book. He's written a book on burnout and it's in the introduction. I want to read this to you just so you'll see. Everybody has these issues. Now this is his words. The words of Jesus that were two or three are gathered in my name. I am there among you held no special significance for me. Now this guy is a leader of a major ministry and the manifest presence of Christ had no meaning for him. That should tip you off right away, okay? Yet on that afternoon, I experienced the reality of his divine presence through Brennan Manning, who's words exposed the truth of the condition of my soul. We are not alone. He assured me out of love. Jesus had chosen to be there with us. Don't be distracted by my presence. Brennan said, but know that we are with the one who loves you as you are not as you should be, since you will never be the person you should be. His strange words were somehow comforting and they set me up for what would happen next. He began asking questions about a part of me I had not considered for quite some time. Tell me about the condition of your soul. Brennan ass in waited for a response. I was clueless. How could I tell this stranger about a part of me with which I was so unfamiliar to Squirm free from the silence, I began babbling about the most maddening aspect of my life, the frantic out of control frenzy pace. I couldn't seem to escape. I told him about my fatigue and emptiness. I described how overwhelming my life was even on the very best of days after listening for a while, he made the statement that changed my life. Phil, you seem dreadfully close to losing touch with the Jesus you so desperately want others to know. This is powerful. You know, a lot of leaders don't really revealed that they're operating from empty because they keep trying to show I'm capable, I'm able, I can, I can preach, I can teach. But this guy said he wasn't even in touch with the condition of his own soul. Do you understand? Wounded people, wound people that what comes out of your soul is either living water or it's poisoned water, but it's water. And that the interesting thing for many of us is we don't realize that all the trials of our life, all of the things that come to bump us, they do not produce those negative emotions. They revealed them. Amy Carmichael said, if you knock over a glass of sweet water, it's not going to spew out poison. So whatever's in the cup is what is coming out of the cup when the cup is tipped over. Whatever's in the soul is what's coming out of the soul. Whether we're the highest leader of great ministry or we're feel like we're just, you know, we're just another person. God wants to heal and then to feel with living water every soul. Now. In order for that to happen, you have to begin to understand that you and I come into our life with Christ with all kinds of assumptions. We come in with all kinds of expectations. One of my favorite verses in all the Bible is Romans eight 28 I love it and we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purposes. Now, the truth is here that there's such richness in this. We could spend our whole day on this first, but I want to, I want to spend on one line a few minutes. It says in all things. Do you know what Paul is saying here? He's saying anything that could happen to anybody else can happen to you. There are a lot of people who say to me, if I pray enough, nothing bad's going to happen today. There are people say, if I go to church every week, nothing bad's going to have. If I listen to a preacher who goes on and on and on and on to 11 o'clock 1130 1145 then nothing bad will happen to me because I sacrificed enough for that week. But here's the thing. You could be all prayed up. You could be all confessed up. You could have gotten rid of every curse in the Bible cell says in all things. So your expectations sometimes are what? Trip you up into disappointment, despair, anger, anxiety. Because you want to control outcomes that you neither have a right or an ability to control. See that spiritual immaturity and it's emotional woundedness, fear of pain pizzas. Zero says it this way. It's impossible to be spiritually mature and let while remaining emotionally immature, even in the secular world. One of the big books many years ago was a book called ECW emotional quotient. Dan Daniel Goldman said it this way, says, your emotional quotient is far more important than your God given intelligence. Your Iq said that even in business, people go farther with her EEQ than they ever go with their Iq. Well, one Christian Journal, let's put it this way. God's greatest gift to me was the guest of emotional healing. He brought me to a place where my emotional wounds could be safely exposed, understood, healed. My emotional healing did not detract from my faith, my emotional healing increased my faith. This is what I'm calling you to in terms of what kind of expectations did you have as a healthy Christian are as a Christian who's moving towards health? Well, the first thing that you have to understand is that if your expectations are not healthy, you will become incredibly discouraged. You will even begin to doubt it, maybe even go unbelief. What happens to many of us is we are surprised when life is the way that it is. We think that we've done enough to avoid or our miss all of these, these big issues of life. And the last five years of my life I have been more intimate with God than I've ever been in my life. And yet I've gone through open heart surgery, had three years of incredible plant pain from blockages, which the doctors kept calling acid reflux and, and then find out, you know, on one morning the woman who I think is like the most holy woman in all the world, and I still can't believe she lives with me, uh, had cancer. You see in all things. But the other aspect of this is that there is also a real enemy. One of the issues that many of us have is we don't realize that when you're not a Christian, the enemy that you have is God. Bible says, we are at enmity naturally at enmity with God. He's our enemy. Now, God is an enemy who's holy, just loving, gracious and merciful. But when you come to Christ, God's ceases to be your enemy. You have peace with God. God is now your friend. But that means that all the enemies of God are now you are enemies. Now these enemies are not nice guys. As a matter of fact, Jesus said, all they want to do to you is to steal, to kill, and to destroy. And so what's happened is you have transferred one opponent who was wholly Justin righteous for an opponent who is wholly unrighteous, holy, unjust, and who doesn't want to play by the rules whatsoever. And so if you're going to survive, as a matter of fact, if you're going to overcome, you're going to have to have a capacity to receive things that have no connection whatsoever to your circumstances so that even when you are sad, you have a joy because the Bible says that there is a joy that is outside of yourself, is yours to have. It's a spiritual buoyancy. Even though you're pressed down, you are not kept down. You are unsinkable. Even when you go down, you said, but I'm coming back up. That joy is not about being pressed down. It's about a source that nobody can touch, but you have to have the receptor for that joy. You didn't have to have the capacity for it. Now here's the, here's the beauty of it. A Christian should be the most familiar with joy of any person in the whole earth because that joy cannot be taken away by anybody else in this earth. And so what happens is you can enjoy the pleasures of this world because they're not your source. Now, you can enjoy the fact of intimacy and they even sexuality, you can enjoy marriage, you can enjoy family, but you look at it and say, this is a pleasure that God has given to me, but it's not the source of my joy. Because see, if anything on this earth becomes the source, it becomes ultimate. And when it's taken away, it destroys you. I love my wife. She gives me a credible joy. I love our relationship, but she's not the source of my joy. I bring the joy of the Lord into our marriage and it's the strength of our marriage. But when I looked at her and said, make me happy, particularly when I said, do what I want you to do, she blocked me at every turn. Even as understand what your anger usually is. It's about outcomes, results. Somebody blocking you. Something's in your way. That you think would make you happy. You know what anxiety t is in many ways it's an outcome that you're trying to make happen. Manipulate, control happening, and somebody is not responding the way you want them to or something is outside of your control. And when we get depressed, we've concluded that whatever it is that would make us happy will never happen. That will never have enough control. I'll never have enough power. Do you understand those three emotions? Anger, anxiety, and depression are gonna keep you from having a capacity for joy. You do not have infinite capacity. You have finite capacity. You get to choose what takes up space in your capacity for joy. Are you hearing me? I mean, listen, let's think about this for a mat. When you taste a good meal, you don't have to go, Oh God, I feel so guilty eating this good meal. I'm not worthy of it. No, you go, no. Oh that's just me. I'm sorry. Lisa says, I'm very embarrassing to be with cause when it tastes good, I just, I am so excited about it because you know what? Will, you know what I know that pleasure is a spark of what God put into the Cosmos to tell us there is a heaven, but it's uh, it's a, it's a damn hint. Can you imagine what it'll be like to drink from the source? Have you ever had a night with your friends or your family in the night? Just flew by and you just talked all night and it just was so perfect. And at the end you go, where did the time go? You don't go, oh, we wasted our time. Now you go bad was a spark of what heaven will be like where we will be together in those kind of moments of fellowship forever. You see, we have little hints here. And if the source of your joy is not your circumstances, you can taste the hints. You can feel the hints you of all. People shouldn't be most aware of the pleasures that God has placed us blessings in our life because you have a source that this world can't take away.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 1:So how do I diagnose this whole thing of emotional health and healing? And I am I healthy first. Let me just say you're not. If you'll, if you'll start there, see if you'll start there. If my thing that really triggered you, you're really not healthy because that's your pride. How can he say that to me? I'm very healthy. Anybody goes to say I'm very healthy, is not very healthy. Protestation pins to show guilt show brokenness. We're not healthy. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the unhealthy people. He came for the unhealthy, not the healthy. If you're healthy, you don't need Jesus. Go play golf next weekend. But if you're unhealthy, you need Jesus and you need to know what it is to be healthy. When I began to get delivered and when I began to get healed, I realized I had no idea what healthy was. I grew up in a religiously on healthy family, lots of guilt, lots of shame. I might, what my mother called normal was unhealthy. It wasn't manipulative. Their love was always conditional. There was never a sense of safety or security in any sense whatsoever. And so I had to say to ward ward, I want to be healthy, but I don't know what that is. So he gave me these four tests. The first one was this, a person who's healthy, who's in touch with reality and yet is relatively free from anxiety. What you see with a lot of people who are free of anxiety, they're free because they're so immature and irresponsible that they do not deal with reality. They bills, pay bills. What are those? You know, work be, you know, be on time, any of those kinds of things. There is so much emotional immaturity that is called faith when it's really just irresponsibility. You see what always has to happen if somebody irresponsible and not in touch with reality. They either have to marry or they have to be friends with somebody who will actually take care of them. But then that problem usually is that that person is so in touch with reality that they're utterly consumed by anxiety. Now I want you to understand why this test is so important. The Bible gives a place for anger, be angry and sin, not the Bible gives places for fear. There is a healthy place for fear, but the Bible says be anxious for nothing, so that's your worries, your cares and the deal is this, that people who are unhealthy in terms of anxiety always believed their anxiety is necessary because they're responsible because they're the ones who care the most. That is a lie. It comes from the pit of hell and it will destroy you. Anxiety is a master who can never be satisfied. Anxiety is the language of hell. Now listen to me. Anxiety is prophetic in nature. Anxiety is a prediction about the future. It is imagining, envisioning worst case scenarios, and the lie is if you know them all, you'll be prepared that it's things going out on all right. I'm okay. The problem with that is that by envisioning them, you actually experience them so that the pain of an uncertain future becomes the reality of your present. So instead of preparing you for the future, it we can do in your present. It is prophetic dread. Let me give you an example of this. I know I'm talking kind of fast. Can you go with me on this? Okay. So there was a young woman in our church, Lisa, and I loved her. We, we, she was just really special to us, but she was filled with anxiety and I had done deliverance on all her family. So I knew it was generational anxiety back many generations. And so we were trying to help her through it, but she would not let it go. And she married this guy who was not an easy guy to live with anyway, but one of the issues was he drove like a maniac. So everywhere they went, she would go, you're going to kill me. You're driving like a maniac. Some of you are looking at each other right now. And so one day though, she was sitting in the seat weeping as he drove. Usually she yelled at him, she's crying her eyes out. He's like, what did I do now? She said, well, I just experience you killing our children by your bad driving. And I am grieving the loss of our children now. They had no children,
Speaker 2:okay?
Speaker 1:She is experiencing him murdering their children and blaming him for it while they have no children. They divorced and they never had any children. Thank God, but she is
Speaker 2:well, we've been at that. You see,
Speaker 1:anxiety makes you experience a future that is dreaded, that never happens, that's demonic friends, but it tricks you into believing it's a power source to getting your work done. It's a power source in order to be responsible and loving and caring. Anxiety is actually a tornado that's around you as a person and nobody else can get close to you because nobody will care like you think you care. Nobody will do like you think you can do and so if you have anxiety, friends, you are unhealthy and you need emotional. Healing is the opposite of peace and the Bible says that a healthy person, a biblical idea of how is we operate from the position of peace from Shalom. Shalom is this, it is every benefit that your heart needs to flourish. Sholom is every joy that your life needs to flourish. The Shalom of God is for every believer you have. The capability to live in Shalom, but you have not exercised the capacity. You've thought, I have to work harder. I have to prove myself. I have to perform. I have to get approval. I have to do all these things. Dad is not Shalom. That is restless ness. There is no wholeness and restlessness. When you are operating out of restlessness, you're destroying not building your wounding, not healing. You cannot do the work of God except from a position of Shalom if you are not whole, what you're giving out is not whole. Ooh, are you hearing me in Hebrew? This whole term that that God wants for you as his wholeness, completeness. It's safety, it's sound. It's fulfill its fullness. You see, you really are a very much a multidimensional being, your complex, your physical, your spiritual, your emotional, all of those things are are where God wants to fill. Once wholeness in the place. In First Thessalonians five the the prayer that Paul Prays, he says that God would sanctify you. Holy Body, soul, and spirit. In Hebrews it says there now as for us, a rest to enter into. You cannot do ministry. You cannot do the things that Jesus did without being able to rest in Jesus. You're not performing well. You're performing from approval.
Speaker 3:Okay?
Speaker 1:Are you hearing these things? All right, well, if I'm resting in Jesus, if I have all this benefits of heaven in my life, then what happens is I really began to spirits. The true happiness and a healthy person is not someone who's unfamiliar with happiness. As a matter of fact, with John says the Apostle John, he says, beloved, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health just as your soul prospers. You say you will have the capability to prosper. When you have the capacity to receive what will make you prosper, the soul must be able to contain it. One of the things that happens is you have to examine what makes me satisfied, what makes me fulfilled, and and so if, if in your statements you're saying, I would be happy if my husband would just, you have given away your happiness. That's not true happiness. Now what you've done is you've said, my happiness depends on someone I need. There have the right to control or the power to control. And so what will happen is in order to be happy, you will manipulate, Nag, irritate, go silent, withdrawal, punish, do whatever it is you will step out of being a person into being a god and you are never happy when you are a god and you will find that God will not be your personal assistant in your godness because he won't resource your idolatry and he won't give success to your idol. Happiness. Friends.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:This maybe this, I'm asking you to trust me in this, we have a drive for happiness. It's why we get so restless. It's why we say something. I'm so bored.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Now if you are restless and bored, you will not be happy because you're looking for a source to satisfy you that cannot do. So. If you're restless and bored, you need emotional healing because what you've done is you've said, somebody in the world needs to entertain me. Something in the world needs to distract me. Something needs to me so that I don't have to think so much. I'll tell you another thing. If you're restless and you're bored, you are susceptible to the greatest temptations. Restlessness draws you to the counterfeit. Boredom draws you to the elicit. This is why God wants you to understand and come to a place where that verse is so important to you where it says, be still and know that I am God. The other thing is this. I mean, just on a practical level, you can't have a prayer life if you're restless because your mind will not be able to focus. If you are bored, prayer will not make you on board. It is only when you're healed and you began to love your healer. That prayer becomes mighty in your life. Well, the fourth one, are you too tired? I mean, I'm doing all the work
Speaker 2:here.
Speaker 1:I'm doing all the work. Come on. Here's what, here's what I realized was was a key in my life and then I began to see it in others lives. Most people believe that their emotions are caused by other people and by circumstances. You hear this all the time as a parent, two kids, you drive me crazy. You made me angry. Now, one little kid heard my teaching and the Ma, this kid's mothers said to her, you're driving me crazy. And the little kid looked at it and say, well, Pastor Mike said that I don't drive you crazy. I just revealed that you already are crazy.
Speaker 2:See
Speaker 1:that lady slapped her and me?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:See, what do you need to look at is, am I reacting to the realities of my life in a healthy and mature way? Are? Am I still reacting like a child? If you are, what you've done is you've given your choices of emotions away to circumstances and people, and if you are unconscious about what you're choosing as an emotion, guess who's in control, not you. So here's what I, I started doing to help myself. I said, well, number one is that what I feel is a choice. So if I'm angry, I'm choosing to be angry. So let me ask the question, why am I angry? Here's another thing, that idea, I mean, just to give you the how practical this is when I would wrestle with lust because I love my wife and I love purity United. Say, okay, well I'm wrestling with lust. I don't think, I don't, I don't think this is my true self. What's going on here? And I would ask, because I would ask the question, why am I read? And then the Lord would say, because you're angry.
Speaker 4:So my anger was fueling my less. So I what I, what I was doing is realizing the last was a symptom. The anger was the issue. And the remedy was to forgive the person I was angry with. And immediately the power of the loss would go away. The anger would go away and love for the person would come. What I choose to feel is my choice and how I respond to others is also a choice that I'm making. And so when I've made the wrong choice, then I can go back to them and say, I'm sorry I overreacted to that. I reacted wrongly because I can take responsibility now, which helps make intimacy in relationships or more easily. Or that third one is, this lease always lasts at this one. But I, I, I really believe this. You have to have emotions about your emotions. And what I mean by that is you have to decide which emotions you value. Now, in my family, pity is a motion that my family values. My family always felt sorry for itself. Oh, nothing ever works for us. They actually like things going badly, so they could be self pity, be filled with self pity. Well, when I recognize that, I said, you know, when I go into my pity party, nobody joined with me in it and I don't advance in my pity. So I began to say, what value is pity then nine to May. So I began to say, I want to stay in pity as short a time as possible. The other emotion that I looked at was regret to regret is to feel very bad about something you can't change. And I realized, wait a minute, if I can't change it, feeling bad isn't going to make a difference there. So I began to really value forgiveness and repentance and confession. And I valued taking responsibility. I have valued examining my own emotions. And once I started doing that, I started advancing very quickly and began to be in control of my emotions instead of my emotions being in control of me. Listen to me, there are people in the evangelical faith. I grew up in this. It said, never trust your emotions, hears that that's a wrong and simplistic way of looking at it. You can trust that your emotions help you diagnose the lies you're believing or the truth you're believing. If you're, if you're believing a lie, your emotions will not be right. If you're believing a lie, your emotions will not be real. And so if you look and say, I am so angry, then you need to trace it back and say, what lie am I believing? And once you expose the lie, then you apply the truth and the truth will set you free because God has a healing pattern us. So one of the issues that I had is when I first started, because I felt so guilty being a pastor and being so depressed, I felt so everybody said, you are held to a higher standard. So I faked it till I made it kind of a thing until I realized I have to have the pattern that God has for healing instead of just trying to get more willpower. You see, I'm not a machine that he fixes and if it's just pressure, then I'm changing out of the pressure. I'm not really changed. I'm not transformed. I'm not doing it because it's really me. I'm doing it because I'm afraid of me. And so what does God do? He reveals his heart to you. He reveals his face. Do you know what in Christ there is therefore now, no condemnation. When you look at God, he doesn't say tits, tits, tits. Shame on you. I'm disappointed. He looks and says, I delight in you. I delight in you. Jesus delights in you. The Holy Spirit delights in you. And he comes and he says, I love you. I accept you exactly as you are. And only he can say, I except you and I have a vision for who you will be. Anybody else? It's a manipulation. You see? Anybody else? You Go, Oh, you're saying I'm not enough? No. When he comes, he says, I knew exactly what I was getting into when I got into a relationship with you. I love you just as you are a delight in you, but I have this vision for your future that is who you always wanted. His healing pattern isn't to fix you. It's not to pressure you, is to reveal himself to you and his heart for you. I know the plans that I have for you declares the Lord. Plans for your welfare, not for calamity, to give you a future and a hope stands for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:What'd you do this? Would you close your eyes and just kind of open up your, your hands a little bit, however you might be comfortable doing it. What I'm asking today is when you like the capacity to be enlarged, to be increased, the opening from which you can register all the blessings, all the pleasure, all the love, the light of God to be more and your capacity to maintain and hold greater and greater fullness of his love fullness. Well, it has to be emptied for it to be filled, it has to be restored. It has the wounds have to be here and I just put pressure on you. You'll break. If I just try to fix you, it'll temporary. He wants to heal the wounded places, but I did find I had to be willing to empty those places. And so I'm going to ask you to empty anxiety today. All of us have a little bit of it. Some of us have a whole lot, but we need to get rid of it. It's not our friend. Be Anxious for nothing. So would you do this with me? Would you? Would you reject anxiety with me? Would you knowing this is your capacity to receive. You're not gonna receive anxiety anymore. It's a master. It's a prophetic dread. We want nothing to do with it. Would you say these words? I renounce anxiety as a power source of my life as a protector in my life. You do not protect me. You do not empower me. You weaken me. You make me afraid. You make me controlling. I don't want any more of this. Go now to the feet of the Lord Jesus Christ. Never come back.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Now emptying you get to fill. Would you say these words? I receive the fullness of Christ, the greatness he has destined me for the fruitfulness. He is destined. I receive the joy the guy received. The joy of the Lord is my strength. The joy of the Lord is my strength. I received the spirit of joy again. Remember, you don't produce it. He gives it to you. Faith Receives Trust, receives it. Patients receives love receiving, or we see all what you're doing in Jesus.
Speaker 2:Amen.
Speaker 4:God bless you. See you next week.