Rick Warren - Employing Your Experiences—Part One

Hello everybody, this is Pastor Rick's Daily Hope. Thank you

so much for joining us today, and if you're brand new,

welcome to the Daily Hope family. We hope you'll enjoy

the teachings of Pastor Rick Warren right here. I'm so

excited for all of you to learn about your shape.

It might not be the shape you're thinking of right now.

Rick loves to use acrostics and this one is shape

your shape, your spiritual gifts, heart, abilities, personality and experiences.

And one of the reasons I love this series and

have shared it with so many friends is because Rick

talks about the way God wired you and why you

need not just know your shape, but how to use

it to do the things that God designed.

You to do.

And now Rick shares with us part one of a

message called employing your Experience.

We've looked at five different ways that God wired you

uniquely to fulfill your per life. We use the acrostic shape.

He has gifted you with spiritual gifts s. What are

you gifted to do? He has given you a heart,

things you love to do, passions, interests. He's given you

natural abilities that you have been good at since the

moment you were born. He's given you a personality that's

different than all the others. And you are unique, and

there's nobody like you. And today we conclude with the

experiences of life, and how God wants you to use

the experiences of your life, good, bad and ugly for

His glory and for your own good. Now, the most

famous verse in the Bible about the experiences of life

is Romans chapter eight, verse twenty eight. Is there at

the top of your outline, Let me read it to you.

We know that in all things God works for the

good of those who love Him, who have been called

according to His purpose. Now, this is one of the

most famous verses of the Bible. It's also one of

the misused, misabused, and misunderstood versus in the Bible. Let

me tell you what it doesn't say. It doesn't say

that all things work out the way I want them to.

We know that's not true. It doesn't say that everything

has a happy ending on Earth. It doesn't. We live

in a broken planet. So what does it say. Well,

let me take it apart phrase by phrase. First, we

know not, we guess, we hope, we wish, we pray for,

we want, we no, we know We know this for

a fact of life, as sure as the sun's going

to come up tomorrow morning. We know this for certain.

What do we know? We know that in all things? Now,

what's included in the word all? Huh Yeah. The original

meaning of the Greek word all is all. Does that

include your stupid mistakes? Yes? Does that include your dumb decisions? Yes?

Does that include your failures yes? Does that include your

sins yes? Does that include divorce and miscarriage and unemployment

and everything else that happens in life yes, bankruptcy yes, cancer, Yes,

everything is included in all. We know that in all

things God fits it all onto His Planet's certainly not

all good. There's a lot of bad in the world.

There is evil in this world, and God is not

the author of evil. And God grieves when he sees

evil happening. But He's given us a free choice, and

he will not force you or anybody else to do

right without taking away your free will. We know that

in all things God were works for the good of

those who love him. He works for the good. There

is a grand design behind everything in your life. There

is a designer. Your life is not an accident. It

is not fate. There is no luck in your life.

There is no karma, there is no random chance, there

is no happenstance. There is a design behind your life.

We know that in all things God is working for

what for the good, even in the bad. Yes, for

the good. He loves to bring good out of bad.

He loves to turn crucifixions into resurrections. He loves to

take the stupid mistakes of others and the ones we

make ourselves, and somehow put them all together and bring good.

We make mistakes, but God never makes a mistake. God

works for the good of those who love him. Now,

this is not a promise for everybody in the world.

God is not working everything for the good for those

who don't love him. If I'm thumbing my nose to God,

I'm turning my back on God. I'm pretending I'm my

own God. I don't need God. Everything's working for bad

in my life. It's not working for good. God owes

me nothing when I deny my creator his right to

lead and direct my life. Since he made me, and

I ignore his purpose and do my own thing. Everything

is not working for good. In fact, it's working for bad.

This is a promise for those who love God, who

are called according to His purpose. And one of the

reasons I worship God is because he is a God

who can take the mess of my life and bring

a message out of it. He can take the test

in my life and create a testimony out of it.

And he can take the crisis and he can show

Christ through it. And he can take the bad things

in my life and he can bring even good out

of that. It is a mystery and a miracle to me.

In a sense, it's not you know, I like chocolate

chip cookies. In fact, I like them a lot. I

like them so much I know how to make them.

In fact, I don't even need a recipe. I've made them.

I know how to make chocolate chips. And the amazing

thing is I get in a little hurries sometimes and

I want to eat the individual ingredients, and they taste

like turdle spit. You ever eat a little you know, shortening,

don't try raw eggs, bad salt and sugar by itself,

bad baking, sowd up, bad chocolate chips good one out

of six not bad? Okay? Somehow, though, when you mix

five bad things with one good thing, and you stir

them up together. It is so good you eat half

the dough before you make the cookie. How is that

five bad things in one good equal a really good mixture.

And that's what God wants to do with your life.

He wants to take bad, bad, bad, bad, bad bad

good and turn you into missus Fields. And he's a

pro at it. And today we're gonna look at how

he does it. God does not want you to waste

your experiences. So how do I keep from rate wasting

the experiences that I've had in my life up to

this point? Three things? Number one First, you must embrace

your experiences. You must embrace them. You must embrace the

experiences of your life, the good ones, the bad ones,

the shameful ones, the right ones, the wrong ones, the

happy and the sad ones, all of them. You've got

to stop running from your past if God's going to

use it for good in your life. Galatians Chapter three,

Verse fources this, you have experienced many things where all

those experiences wasted. I hope not. And as your pastor,

I say to you, I hope not too. Don't run

away from your past. The problem is because of pain,

many people deny their past, ignore their past, discount their past,

regret their past, resent the past, shoot, they revise their

past and rewrite their past, and they make up little

stories that aren't really the way it was because they're

happier with their story than the pain of the past.

God says, if you're in denial, you can't You can't

use it for good, and I can't use it for

good in your life. Would you write this on your outline?

God can use every experience in my life for good.

Every experience, the relational, the educational, the spiritual, the vocational,

the painful, all of them, the ones you like and

the ones you didn't like. He can use them all.

But you've got to stop running from him. You have

to embrace your experiences. And maybe your parents weren't that great,

or maybe you weren't that hot in school, or maybe

you weren't the football captain or the prom queen wealth.

So what they're your experiences. Own them and God will

use them for good in your life. In order to

use them, you got to remember them, stop pushing them

out of your mind. You got to remember them. And

Jesus tells us this, and in fact, in the old

Estima tells it too. In Deuteronomy eleven, verse two. It says,

remember what you have learned about the Lord through your

experiences with him. Now it says, remember what you have learned.

It's saying the important thing is to remember the lessons.

Remember the lessons. Now, how do you do that? Well,

the best way to remember the lessons of your life,

the experiences is to keep a journal. Now, I'm not

talking about a diary. A diary is a list of

what you did today. I went to the store and

bought milk whipped. You do a journal, but you don't

necessarily write in every day. It's just every time you

have an important lesson, you write that one down because

you don't want to forget it. And you go, oh, boy,

that was painful. I had to learn that one the

hard way. I don't want to forget that, and you

write down the lesson. He says, remember what you've learned

about me, and you want to keep a journal. This

is one of my journals. I've been keeping a journal

off and on now for well since I was in college.

And I don't write in it every day or even

every week. It's just when I get a lesson and go, oh,

I don't want to forget that one. And I hear something,

I learned something, I write it down, and then I

go back and reread it. Now, why do you want

to keep a journal on your experiences and the lessons

you learn from them in life? Because hindsight is always

twenty twenty. You understand your life looking back, not looking forward.

Isn't that true? It makes a whole lot more sense

looking backwards. In fact, Jesus said it. Notice this next verse,

Jesus replied, you do not realize now what I am doing,

but later you will understand. You almost never understand what

God is doing in your life in the present. It

is only looking back you go, oh, now, I see

it now, I see what God was doing. He was

doing this. I didn't see it at the time, but

I see it now. Joseph was a man who in

the Bible, everything in his life went wrong. For forty years.

It was downhill. Nothing went right, including being thrown in

jail for a rape that he did not even do.

He had run from the woman and she falsely accused him.

Everything went wrong in this poor guy's life for the

first forty years, and yet later, looking back, when God

had done a series of amazing things and raised him

to second in command in Egypt, And during a famine

he saved Israel and Egypt from starving to death. And

when he was confronted with the brothers who had traded

him into slavery years earlier, and told their dad, you

know he just died. Sorry, he said this the next verse.

You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good. Now,

there are things in your life where people intended to

hurt you and they meant it. They meant to hurt you,

and I'm sorry, and they intended it for bad. But

God is greater than your problem and your pain, and

his purpose is far bigger than either of those, and

he means it for good. So first you have to

embrace your experiences and stop running from them. Okay, number two.

You first, you embrace the experience. The second you extract

the lessons. You pull the lessons out of the experience

you've had. An unexamined experience is worthless. There are people

who are fifty years old. They haven't lived fifty years,

they've lived one year fifty times, and they're still making

the same mistakes because they never stop and extract the

lessons from what happened in this last year, and how

can I do it differently based on what I did

this last year? And then never pull it out. Second

Corinthians thirteen, verse five says this, I let this in

the amplified examine and test and evaluate your own selves

to see whether you're holding to your faith. In other words,

you've got to extract the lessons. Do you not realize

by an ever increasing experience that Jesus Christ is in you?

Haven't you figured out by now that you're never alone?

That God is with you all the time, that no

matter when you thought you were your most lonely, he

was right there with you. Have you not figured out

from your experiences yet that Jesus is with you and

in you if you've invited him into your life. If

you haven't, you're not keeping a record of where your

life's headed. And you need to go back and examine

and test and evaluate. What does that mean? You take

some time to review the experiences of your life and

what do you look for? You look for benefits, patterns

and lessons. You look for benefits, What did I really

enjoy in my life? And you go back and you

don't just say, well, I really enjoyed that job. You go,

what was it about that job that I really loved?

That'll help you understand your shape. And you don't say

I really like that class, You go, what exactly about

that class did I like? That was so fulfilling to me?

And you'll get little clues about where you should be

headed with your life and the shape of where you

should be. Don't examine your experiences, they have no value

to you. You look for patterns, and particularly you want

to look for patterns in your failure because when you failed,

you do it the same way every time, and so

you look at them. Now, where if I failed in

the past, and you don't look at it to beat

yourself up? Oh poor me? You do it so you

can go, I want to be different. What are the

patterns that I keep doing over and over and over?

And as the old cliche goes, those who ignore history

are doomed to repeat it. This is the problem with

the Israelites. They were freed from four hundred years of slavery.

They're coming to the Promised Land. They're crossing the Sinai Peninsula,

and it takes them forty years. Why this trip should

only taken four weeks? It took them forty years. Why

because they've refused to learn the experiences the lessons that

they needed to learn. And so God would give them

a test and they'd blow it and they'd forget, so go, okay,

one more lap around the desert, and then they'd have

another test. Okay, one more lap around the desert. And

they did it seven times, and it took them forty

years to take something that should have never taken that long.

You want to look for the lessons. Notice this next verse.

The Bible says in Job thirty two seven, the longer

you live read it with me, the wiser you become. Now, friends,

that verse is a possibility, not a promise. I know

a lot of people who are old who are dumb.

So is wisdom does not automatically come with age. That's

a possibility, not a promise. You see, maturity is when

you extract meaning from the everyday experiences of life. That's

what it means to be mature. You're able to look

at the things in your life, the normal everyday things,

and go, oh, I got that. Other people just go

through life. Never ever, you're examining a Socrates says, the

unexamined life and worth living. So treat every experience as

in education. You go, what can I learn from this?

And the amazing thing about the school of experience is

two things. One, if you fail the test, it's okay.

You get to take it over and over and over

and over until you pass it. And the second thing

about the school of experience is just about the time

you think you've graduated, they add another course and you

will be in that school the rest of your life.

You embrace your experiences, you extract the lessons, and then

number three, you employ them to help others. You employ

them to help others. Now, when you finally realize that

the purpose of your life is far greater than your

own happiness, problems become a whole lot easier to handle.

You just look at everything from a different perspective, and

you're able to use the experiences of your life, good

and bad, to help other people. Fall says Saint Paul

and Philippians chapter one. He's writing to the people in

the Greek city of Philippi, and he says this, I

want you to know, my friends, that the things that

have happened to me have actually really helped the progress

of the gospel. He says, I want you guys to

know that the things that have happened to me are

actually they're beneficial for the ultimate goal sharing the good news.

Now where is he when he's writing this, and what

are the things that have happened to him? He has

been captured, taken on ship to Rome, been in a shipwreck,

been bitten by a snake, now thrown in prison in

a dungeon, cuff to a twenty four hour Roman guard,

and he's gone, Oh, the things that have happened to

me have actually caused the good news to be spread further.

It's spreading now all over Rome. That's a different perspective.

He's not whining and crying and complaining that things aren't

people won't make him happy. Oh, if it weren't for

this poor centurion, I'd be happy. If I weren't in

this prison, i'd be happy. No, he's saying, you know,

I've got a bigger perspective. Now. The Bible teaches that

God wants you to use your experiences in four ways.

Number one, use them to minister to others. God says,

I want you to use your experiences to minister to others.

Now I don't have to spend a lot of time

on this point because we've talked about it so often

here and the key verses Second Corinthians, chapter one that

says this in our trouble, God has comforted us, and

this too is to help you, to show you from

our personal experience, how God will tenderly comfort you when

you undergo these same sufferings. He will give you the

strength to endure. The point here is that God takes

us through problems, comforts us, helps us, strengthens us in

our problems, so then we can comfort, help and strengthen

others when they go through the same thing. God blesses

us to be a blessing to others. God helps us

so we can help others. And every experience that you've

gone through He wants to use in your life to

help somebody else. He says, use your experiences, don't waste them.

Use them how by helping somebody else who's about to

go through or is going through what you've already been through.

Who can better help someone going through cancer than somebody

who's been through cancer. Who can help somebody dealing with

an addiction to pornography or medicines or drugs, or a

million other things than somebody who's been addicted to pornography

or drugs or a million other things. Who can better

help someone deal with the pain of a divorce than

someone who's been there know what it's like. Who can

help someone deal with the problem of rejection and adultery

than somebody who experienced the problem of rejection and adultery.

Who can better help the parents of a special need

child than parents who had a special need child, And

who could better help parents who had a kid who

went off the deep end than somebody whose son or

daughter went off the deep end. Who can better help

someone in the loss of a loved one than someone

who says I just lost my loved one last year.

And who could better help somebody with aids than someone

who's got aids. God never waste the hurt. I've said

that a thousand times in this church. He never wastes

the hurt. And he doesn't want you to waste your hurts.

He wants to use them to benefit and bless other people.

And the thing that you're most embarrassed about, that you

most regret, that injustice, that prejudice, that hurt, that wound,

that sin, that mistake, The thing you'd like to keep

in the closet and would say, you know, that's over.

I'm not going to think about it. That's not my

life anymore. That very thing can become your greatest ministry.

You always help people more through your weaknesses than your strengths.

When you come and you try to help somebody with

your strengths, they're going, well, whooped you do? You're just

good at it, big deal, you're talented. There so what,

I'll never be like you. But when you come and

you say, you know what, been there done that? I

remember how embarrassed, how shocked, how afraid I felt with

that bankruptcy or that situation, and then you begin to

help other people with it. Who could better help someone

who's been raped than somebody who went through a rape.

Nobody else could even understand what that's like, an abuse,

a rape, an incest, or anything else. You know what,

if you don't use your experience, it's wasted. All you

get out of it is pain. That's not what God

wants you to get out of it. Where was God

when that happened? He was grieving too, and he could

have taken away the free will of every one of us,

But that would have made us not human, we would

have been puppets. And there's a lot of things that

happen on this planet that God hates. He hates it,

he hates evil, and he weeps. But if you just

refuse to deal with it and let God use it

and bring good out of it, all you get out

of it is pain and God, oh no, don't waste

your hurt. Don't waste your hurt. Embrace your experiences, extract

the lessons and use them help others. Employ them to

help others by ministering, first of all, out of the

very things that you think you'd like to forget now.

The second way God wants you to use your experiences

is use them to motivate others. You minister to people

in their pain. You motivate others when they're discouraged, when

they're down. And your experiences can be inspirational to many

people because you have been things, through things, and been

through places that they have not yet gone through, and

you can motivate them.

Thank you so much for joining us on Pastor Rick's

Daily Hope today. Hey, I'm wondering have you ever asked

the question, what does God want me to do with

my life? If you're like me, of course you have

and you're not alone. God intentionally created you to fulfill

a unique purpose. It's so important that you discover how

you can live the full and abundant life that God

designed just for you. In the Shape to Make a

Difference Bible study. It was created by Pastor Rick and

taught by Pastor Eric Reeese. Now, in this study, you're

going to see how the Acrostic shape which stands for

spiritual gifts, heart abilities, personality and experiences. And it will

reveal how God wired you and how you can use

your shape to do the things that God made you

to do. This is a sixth session video and workbook

study and it's going to help clarify to you your

future goals and it shows you how you can have

the most fulfilling life possible, a life lived for God's

purposes by God's design. Now, no matter what your age is,

it's never too soon or too late to discover what

God has shaped you to do. And this life changing

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