Rick Warren - What Destroys Relationships and What Builds Them—Part Two

Hello everyone, and welcome to Pastor Rick's Daily Hope, the

Bible teaching ministry that's here to encourage and inspire you

every day. And today we're continuing our series called Awesome Relationships.

In it, Rick Warren shares practical ways to help you

take your relationships with family, friends, co workers, and even

God from ordinary to extraordinary. And this is a series

you don't want to miss. Now, let's hear what Rick

has to say in part two of a message called

What Destroys Relationships and What builds Them?

God has wired the universe that the more unselfish you are,

the more He blesses you. Why because He wants you

to become like him. God wants you to become like Him,

which is unselfish. Everything you have in life is a

gift from God because God was unselfish with you.

And so God says, in.

Order to help you become like me, I'm gonna give

a little reward to this. First, you get real life

on earth, and you get eternal life in heaven.

He says.

You know what you get a meeting and the way

God has wired it. As we give ourselves away, we

are most fulfilled. Jesus said only those who learn to

give their lives away, we'll ever know what it means.

To really live.

You see, if you don't get anything else I say,

or Tom says, today, get this. The greatest lesson in

life is learning to be unselfish.

That's it.

That's the number one lesson in life, learning to be unselfish.

It's also called love. Love your neighbor as yourself. Once

you know and love God. God says, now, I want

you to learn to love other people, and that means

being unselfish.

And unfortunately, a lot of people.

Go through life and never learn the greatest lesson, and

they waste their life. They waste the whole reason their

hair on earth to learn how to be unselfish. Now,

notice God also says in this verse its growth process.

He says, letting God's.

Spirit do the growth work in him, you'll harvest the

crop of real life and eternal life. You see, it's

not overnight. You don't learn to be unselfish by being zapped.

In fact, you're not gonna learn it in forty days.

It's going to take the rest of your life. But

it is a growth process, and there's only one way

you can do it, and that is with God's spirit

in you. God's spiritings you look at the next verse,

live freely, animated and motivated by God's spirit. Then you

won't feed the compulsions of selfishness.

Did you know that all of us are compulsive? Every

one of us.

We are compulsively selfish. We think about ourselves first. And

if you don't think that, you're really not in touch

with the reality. Because you do. You think about you

more than anybody else. And he says the only way

you can break that cycle is God's spirit inside you. Now,

anybody can be unselfish every once in a while. Anybody

can do that, okay, just by sheer willpower. Man, Look

what I did, And how do you know when it's

motivated by you.

Rather than God's spirit. Pride creeps in. It's that I felt.

Noble, It's that look at me, what a great person

I I did something good for somebody. See, when God's

Spirit's in you, then you don't do that. Anybody can

be unselfish every once in a while. But God says,

I want it to be a lifestyle. I want it

to be a lifestyle. And there's only one way, God's

spirit in your life. Doing the growth work inside of

you motivated. Now here's the second thing that destroys relationships, pride.

This is the second big thing that kills relationships. Pride

destroys relationships. In Proverbs thirteen ten, it says this pride

leads to arguments. Little history here. That was the first

verse that Kay and I memorized on our honeymoon, and

we needed it on the honeymoon. Pride leads to arguments. Now,

pride shows up in a lot of different ways. It

shows up first in criticism. If you are critical of

other people, If you tend to be judgmental of other people,

you tend to look down at other people, you tend

to be a picky, picky perfectionist.

You have a pride problem.

That's the reason you are critical is you have a

pride problem. If you tend to be competitive and you're

always comparing, Oh, look at her dress compared to my dress,

or look at his car compared to my car. Or

you're always comparing salaries, or you're comparing husbands, or you're

comparing children, or you're comparing titles or jobs or anything.

You know what, you have a pride problem. That comparing

spirit of always looking at everybody else and.

Comparing and judging. That is a pride problem.

If you have a stubbornness, if you haven't find it

difficult to say i'm sorry. If you find it difficult,

you choke on apologies. You cannot ever admit it when

you're wrong. You have a pride problem. Now you don't say, well, now,

if I may have offended you, that's not an apology.

That's what politicians say. If I may have offended you,

puts it back on you.

Said, well, really, it's your fault for being offended. That's

not an apology.

An apology is I was wrong, I'm sorry, Please forgive me.

That's an apology, Not if I may have offended you.

It is I was wrong, I'm sorry, Please forgive me.

If you can't do that, you have a pride problem.

You have a pride problem. If you have shallow relationships

and you keep everything superficial in your life, and you

never let anybody get close to you, and you keep

them at an arms distance, and you may use humor

to keep it all shallow and not let it get

too deep, and you keep faking it a lot, and

you wear a mask, ask you have a pride problem.

You see when you're too shallow to care about others.

That is pride. Now, what does pride look like in

a small group, since we're all in small groups. Well,

one of the ways it looks is when you always

have to tell a story that tops the last story.

Well you did that, yeah, but listen to this one, okay.

When you are always offering advice and you never ask

for it in your group, when you never admit when

you've had.

A tough week. Everybody else's saying, yeah, I've had a

tough week.

And you never admit any problem in your life. The

problem with pride is it's self deceiving. Everybody else can

see it, but we can't. When I'm full of pride,

I can't see it. I can't see them out. Everybody

else can see it, but I can't. When you have

a problem with pride, you don't see it in your

own life.

It's self deceiving.

Everybody else can see your being prideful, but you can't

see it yourself. And so the Bible says this in

Proverbs sixteen eighteen, pride will destroy person. A proud attitude

leads to ruin. And I love this verse in the

message paraphrase first pride. Then the crash. The bigger the ego,

the harder the fall. You had a hard fall, Well,

that just shows how big your ego was. Now, pride

keeps us from apologizing, and that destroys relationships.

Tom's going to talk about the next thing.

Pride destroys relationships. Humility. That's the antecdote to pride. Humility.

Humility builds relationships. Listen to these five things that build relationships.

Over in First Peter, chapter three, verse eight, the Bible

says there, live in harmony, be sympathetic, love each other,

have compassion, and be humble. Those five really are built

on the fifth one, the ability to be humble. This

is really a pretty good model for small groups. If

you take a look at these five things, it's what

we all want to be doing in our families and

our groups and our relationships. We want to live in

harmony and pathetic love each other. We want to have

compassion and be humble. I want you to notice that

first one, particularly, live in harmony. That's what God wants

in relationships. He doesn't want this unison where we're all

the same. He wants the harmony of us all being different.

Why be in a relationship, if you weren't different from

the other people. That's what we draw from. But this

is important. Harmony and humility go together. You have to

have them together in a symphony. The beauty is in

all the different instruments. But if you have one flute

player who wants to stand on their chair play louder

than everybody else, it ruins the whole thing. If you

have one person who's saying notice me, and I can't

let other people be noticed, it ruins all the joy

of the harmony of life, the deepness, the richness that

God wants to give into our lives because of that. Now,

let me encourage you to do something in your group

this week. You to do something that will promote humility

and harmony in your group this week. Pair up with

a spiritual partner, someone that you can learn from. They

can learn from you. You can be encouraged by they

can be encouraged by you. You can be friend, they

can be friends with you. You can support vice versa as

it works together. Guys, pair up with another guy. Women

with another women. If you're just starting to learn the

Bible or you don't know much about Jesus, pair up

with somebody who doesn't. Who knows more about the Bible,

knows more about Jesus. That can encourage you. Now, the

point about a spiritual partner is this, everybody needs a

spiritual partner except me. That's how we tend to think, Oh,

this is a good idea, this is a great idea.

But about a month ago, one of the guys in

my small group called me up and said, hey, can

we get together regularly and maybe read threw a book together,

talk about the impact that it's making on our lives.

It took me a month to get back to him.

And you know why I didn't really want to meet

because I feel like I'm too busy. Can you relate

to that this week? Don't be too busy to connect

with somebody else and say can we be a spiritual partner?

Your life will be the richer for it. And do

not be too busy. If somebody connects with you and says, hey,

could we pair up, don't be too busy to say, well,

I'll get back to you on that, and then never

get back to them on that. If you and I

will make this toy, it can change our lives. How

are you and I going to grow in humility, because

that's the tall order. How does that happen in our lives?

It happens by letting Jesus Christ begin to control our

thoughts and hearts and attitudes and reactions. He's got to

be a part of this. The Bible says over in

Ephesians four twenty three and twenty four. This verse on

your screen. Let the spirit change your way of thinking

and make you into a new person. How do I

become a new person? How do I start to think

in a different way? Basic law of relationships is this,

I tend to become like the people I spend time with.

Spend time with grumpy people, you get more grumpy. Spend

time with happy people, you get more happy. You want

to have more humility. Spend time with Jesus Christ because

he is humble. He wants a relationship with you. He

wants you and I to spend time with him in

prayer and reading his word and talking to him. He

is humble. Look at this next verse in the outline

Philippians two three and then five and six. Be humble

and give more honor to others than to yourselves. Your

attitude should be the same as that that Christ Jesus had.

Though he was God, he did not demand and cling

to his rights as God. No one's ever done anything

more humble than Jesus coming from heaven to earth to

become a man to live for us, Give his life

for us, be a resurrected for us, and I spend

time around him. That enables me to begin to become

more humble, and that builds relationships. Now on the back

of your outline, there's a third struggle we all face,

and that is the struggle of insecurity. Insecurity destroys relationships.

The Bible talks about this over in Proverbs twenty nine

twenty five when it says, the fear of human opinion

disables when I'm so insecure that all I have got

to think about is your opinion, what you think of me?

That disables my life. What's the problem with that fear?

What does that problem cause us to disable in relationships? Well,

when I'm afraid, it tends to cause us to try

to control each other, and that destroys relationships.

I hate you when people say that in a relationship,

it is often a sign that somebody's trying to control

somebody else. And what's beneath that control. What Tom talked about,

fear insecurity causes us to try to control others, and

insecurity causes us to resist the control of others, and

that destroys relationships. You know, it's amazing dilemma as human

beings we have. We long to be close, but we

also fear being close. We want it, but we don't

want it. We long to have intimacy with others, but

we are also scared to death of having intimacy with others.

Would you write this down? Insecurity prevents intimacy. Insecurity prevents intimacy.

You can't get close to somebody if there's fear in

the relationship, which is why living together it doesn't work

in the long run, because you never know when somebody's

gonna walk out. There's no lifetime commitment. So I'm gonna

hold back because what if it doesn't work. It's only

a situation where I say I'm committed regardless of weather

we get along or not, We're gonna make this thing work.

Then the fear vanishes, and then the intimacy, real intimacy rises.

Now what do we fear in relationships? Well, we fear

a couple things. First, we fear exposure, We fear that

somebody is gonna find out what we're really like. And

we fear that, so we hide ourselves, and we don't

want people to know what we're really like. And this

is man's oldest fear, all the way back with Adam

the first Man in Genesis three, verse ten, he says,

I was afraid because I was naked, and so I hid.

I was afraid because I was naked.

So I hit.

When we're afraid, we hide ourselves, we cover up, we

wear masks, we pretend to be people that were not.

Now it's interesting today we don't have this problem anymore

with a lot of people. Many people are not afraid

at all of their physical nakedness. They walk around half naked, Okay,

they walk around showing off barty parts I don't want

to see, and so they're not ashamed of their physical nakedness,

but they're scared the death of their emotional nakedness. That's

what really scared them. I know a lot of people

who flomp their bodies, who are extremely insecure, extremely insecure,

and they're afraid of emotional nakedness. What if somebody understands

finds out my fears, finds out my faults, finds out

my dark side, find out the parts that I don't

want anybody to know. And you see, fear makes us dishonest,

and it causes us to build up walls, and the

result nobody ever gets to know you, and you don't

understand one of the things that God puts you on

earth to.

Do, and that is to be fully known.

Everybody deserves to be fully known and to fully know

somebody else, whether you ever get married or not. This

is haws to do with soul to soul intimacy, and

God designed the family, the church to do this, where

we get to know each other on a gut level basis.

And we fear exposure.

But there's a fear even deeper than that, and it

is the fear of rejection. And this may be the

greatest fear in human beings, the fear of being rejected.

We've all been rejected.

At some point and we know how much that hurts,

and so we feared and we close ourselves off as

I'll never let anybody hurt me.

Again, and we build up walls.

Now, maybe you have been hurt by rejection by somebody,

a boyfriend, an ex, or somebody a parent who said

you're never gonna mount anything, or you're not good enough.

And you felt the sting of rejection by a teacher

or a coach or somebody.

Maybe you even.

Felt it by a so called quote Christian, somebody who

claimed to be a believer, or maybe you felt it

in a church, or maybe you felt then in a

small group. And if so, I would say to you,

I am sorry. I mean I am really sorry, and.

God grieved at your rejection.

In fact, if anybody understands rejection, it's Jesus Christ. Remember

they nailed him to a cross. That is the ultimate rejection,

so he understands how you felt. But as your pastor,

I would beg you, please, please.

Don't let that pardon your heart.

Don't build up a wall, a crust, put yourself in

an eggshell. That's a self imposed prison you don't want

to be in. And when you won't let anybody get

close to you, because I'll never let anybody hurt me again.

You're making a terrible mistake. You're not living, You're just existing.

And it is my job as your pastor, to help

you and to encourage you and to say take the risk,

have the courage to risk love again, Have the courage

because if you will do and you will open up

your life, and you will lower the berries, and you

will let somebody have the potential to hurt you, you.

Will come alive again in a way you have never

ever experienced.

Ask God for the courage to take that risk again,

to be open, to be vulnerable. Now, let me talk

to the guys for a minute, because men, we're the

worst about this.

As guys.

We wear are We hold our cards close to us

and we don't let our feelings be known. We don't

let people know what we're really thinking or feeling. And

I want to dare you to do a very courageous

thing to be openly honest about what you're feeling. Now,

you don't have to do it with everybody, but you

need to do it with one person. You get in

a group and share it with a group, or if

that's too hard, get one Person's Tom talked about. I

firmly believe in having a spiritual partner in life, one

person that you can level with, you can encourage, you

can grow, you can support, you can share, and somebody

that you tell what you're really like to and they

tell back.

And that's a spiritual partner.

What a great message from Pastor Rick today. There's something

I always take away from his message. Here's Rick to

tell you how you can help support this ministry.

Jesus told his disciples that they should live their lives

according to five specific purposes. He said, you've got to

love God with all your heart. That's worship, and love

your neighbors yourself. That's ministry. That's called the Great Commandment.

And then Jesus said, go make disciples. That's evangelism. Baptize

them into the Family of God. That's fellowship, a sign

of fellowship. And then he said, teach them obey everything

I've taught you. That's discipleship. And we call that the

Great Commission. We believe it daily hope that a great

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