Rick Warren - Winning the Battle Inside Me — Part Three

Today on Daily Hope with Pastor Rick Warren, we continue

in our riveting journey through the series The Invisible War.

In it will explore the.

Unseen world of good and evil and see how it

impacts our day to day existence. Join us for eye

opening biblical insights into the spiritual dimensions that influence our

lives in ways we never imagined. Right now, here's Pastor

Rick Warren with the final part of a message called

winning the Battle inside Me.

Second preliminary step to ending the battle going on inside

of you and winning the battle, I must detect and

disarm the lie I'm believing. I must detect and disarm.

The lie that I'm believing.

You need to understand that the number one way Satan

messes up your life is by suggesting lies to you

or to get you to lie to yourself. And that's

the number one way you mess up your own life

is lying to yourself. Every time you expose and challenge

a lie that you've listened to in your mind, you're

going to be further set free every time you sin.

You might write this down. In fact, look at this verse.

The Bible says, if we claim to be without sin,

we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

Now.

He's saying there that sin causes us to deceive ourselves,

and deception causes us to sin. Now, we all tell

ourselves lies all the time, all the time. In fact,

one of the big lies that you tell yourself is

this one. It's not really a problem. Oh really, yeah,

it's not really a problem. My finances, they're not really

a problem. Our sex life, it's not really a problem.

My kids.

It's not really a problem. My work, not really my temper,

my foul mouth, my thought life, my little secret habit

over here in the corner.

It's not really a problem. Who are you kidding?

The Bible says, if we claim to be without sin,

we deceive ourselves, and.

The truth is not in us.

So let me just ask you this real blunt question,

is somebody who loves you, what are you pretending isn't

a problem in your life? What are you pretending not

to know? What are you pretending isn't a problem in

your marriage? Isn't a problem in your personality? And you

don't want to admit it. The Bible tells us that

if I'm going to win this battle, I have to

stop lying to myself, and I've got to stop listening

to Satan's lives. And I want you to write down

a couple important things. We'll go into these in deeper

detail in following weeks. Behind every self defeating act is

a lie I have believed. Behind every self defeating act

is a lie that I have believed. Either I lie

to myself or or I let Satan lie to me.

You see, we have an amazing.

Ability to lie to ourselves and to convince ourselves of

things that aren't true. Look at this verse up here

on the screen Jeremiah seventeen to nine. The heart is

deceitful above all things and beyond cure.

Who can understand it? What does it mean?

The heart is deceitful? We have an amazing ability to

lie to ourselves. The biggest liar you know is you,

And the person you lie to the most is yourself.

The person I lie to the most is myself. I

tell myself things are right when they're not right. I

tell myself things are okay when they're not okay. I

often tell myself things are not okay when they are okay.

And you do this all the time, and we rationalize

and we minimize and we make excuses and we tolerate

things in ourys going.

It's no big deal. It's no big deal.

And if you're going to get free and if you're

going to have victory in this number two, write this down.

To stop defeating myself, I must stop deceiving myself. To

stop defeating myself, all those self defeating things in my

life that.

I don't like about me that I'd like to change.

To stop defeating myself, I have to stop deceiving myself.

I must become a person of the truth. I stop denying,

I stop rationalizing, stop minimize. Is going to stop excusing

and stop tolerating.

Again. Let me ask you a very blunt question.

What self destructive behavior in your life are you putting

up with? And you know it's bad for you, and

you know it's gonna cut years off your life, and

you know it's going to hurt you in the long run,

and you know it may red destroy a relationship.

But you justify it. What is the truth?

You need to admit? This is the second step to

winning the battle. Jesus said this next verse. When you

know the truth, the truth.

Will what But first it will make you miserable.

The truth makes you miserable as long as you deny it.

The truth does not free you until you admit it.

As long as you deny the.

Truth, it doesn't help you. In fact, it just makes

you mad. The truth makes you mad, and the truth

makes you miserable. It is only when you are humble

enough to admit it.

Yeah, this is really what I am.

And yeah, this is really what I do, and yeah

this is really a compulsion, an addiction, a habit, a

problem in my marriage, in my life, or whatever. When

you admit the truth, then it sets you free. It

doesn't set you free until you admit it. We'll come

back to this in future weeks. I delete or detect

and disarm the lie that I'm believing. The Bible says

Satan is the father of lies. All he can do

is lie to you. It's the only way can influence

is you can suggest lies that Jesus said, I am

the truth. You got to decide whether you're going to

listen to God's truth or the world's lies, or Satan's

lives or your own lives. Number Three, The third thing

I need to do to get started in overcoming this

battle is I must declare my struggle to another. Declare

my struggle what I'm struggling with to another. I'm struggling

with my mouth. I'm struggling with my mind. I'm struggling

with my memory. I'm struggling with my behavior. I'm struggling

with my secret addiction.

I'm struggling with and and you.

The Bible says we just share it. Sharing, revealing your

feeling is the beginning of healing. Now, if all you

want to do is be forgiven, you just admit it

to God. But if you want to change and you

want to be healed and you want to be different,

God says you're gonna have to admit it to one

other person. You don't have to admit it to everybody.

Just all you need to do is have one person

who's gonna love you unconditionally, accept it, pray for you.

They're going to be an accountability partner. They're gonna be

a uh you know, nobody goes into battle fight in

a war by themselves. You go with the team, You

go with a platoon. You need a battle buddy. You

need one person in your life that your gut level

honestly frank with, and you can share that with and

if it's not your husband or your wife, then if

you're a woman, you need to get another woman to

share it with. If you're a guy, you need to

get another guy to share it with.

You.

Go look, I just need to tell you I'm struggling

with this. And by doing that, the relief valve is

opened and the pressure is off, and.

The boogeyman isn't as big as you thought he was.

Now the Bible claims this James five point sixteen. Confess

your sins to each other and pray for each other

so that God can heal you. When a believing person prays,

great things happen. Now he says, confess it, not to God.

It says, confess to each other and pray for each other,

and then you'll be healed. Now we've talked about this

verse dozens and dozens of times. Here settle back, So

I want us to memorize this verse today, just the

first part of it. So look up here on the

screen James five sixteen. Remember the hardest part is to

remember the address where the verse is in the Bible.

So you always say the address at the beginning and

at the end of the verse, and you'll memorize the

verse by saying it aloud over and over. You don't

remember something by saying it silently. You only memorize it

by saying it aloud. So you write it on a

card and then you read it over and over till

you get it down. So let's say this together, James

five sixteen. Confess your sins to each other and pray

for each other, so God can heal you. And where

is that verse found? James five sixteen? Now today our

memory verses what verse James five sixteen? And what does

James five sixteen say? Confess your sins to each other

and pray for.

Each other so God can heal you?

James five sixteen.

I want you to write that down in a card,

and I want you to say it every day this week.

Revealing your feeling is the beginning of healing. Confess your

sins to each other and pray for each other, so

God can heal you. Now, one last version will close.

Galatians five sixteen says this, live according to your new

life in the Holy Spirit. Circle that phrase in the

Holy Spirit. Live your according to your new life in

the Holy Spirit. Then you won't do what your sinful

nature craves. Now The difference between Roman seven, which is

a picture of total defeat, and the picture of Romans eight,

which is a picture of a man or woman in total.

Victory, is this word spirit.

In Roman seven, the phrase holy Spirit is never mentioned,

not one instead forty one times. We have I, me,

my myself, mind, all these personal pronouns. It's all about me,

it's not about the spirit. In Romans chapter eight, the

word spirit is mentioned nineteen times.

And that's the difference.

Is whether you are going by my spirit are going

by the Holy Spirit to empower me. An example, let's

say you and I go down to the lagoon of

this afternoon and we're walking on the beach and I

see a dead seagull, and the seagull has only been

dead less than a minute, still warm. And I pick

up this dead seagull. Now it's still got the same muscles, bones, feathers,

wings that it had a minute earlier. But I pick

up that dead seagull and I throw it up into

the air, and what happens It comes right back down.

Why because the life is going out of it. It

is not the muscle, it is not the bones, it

is not the wings, It is not the feathers. That

makes a seagull fly. It is the life that God

puts into it. And when the life, when the spirit

is out of that bird, it ain't flying.

It's still got all it's all the same equipment, but

it's not going to fly.

You have the equipment to live a successful, victorious life,

but it's not worth anything if you don't have the

spirit powering you to do it.

You cannot do it on your own.

If there's anything I want you to understand this week

as we start this very long series on spiritual warfare

and understanding the deeper things of God and getting to

know Him better, is willpower doesn't work. It's like throwing

a dead bird in the air. It's got all the equipment,

but it can't fly without the spirit of God in it,

without the life that God puts in it. And you

can go out and have all the best intentions and

make all the promises to yourself which you have broken

over and over and over because you cannot do it

on your own. You cannot be like Christ. You have

to let Christ live through you. We'll be talking about

that in the days ahead. And what the spirit does

is two things the spirit does for me the Holy

Spirit does for me the things I cannot do on

my own.

I don't have that power.

And second, he fulfills in me what God desires to

do in my life. Now, resolutions are good, they're a

good start, but they'll only get you so far. Then

you've got to have spirit power in your life.

That's power. Heads.

Now, all of our best intentions are not good enough.

The alcoholic who says I'll never take another drink, and

the violent person who says I'll never lose my temper again,

and person controlled by porn who says I'm gonna I'm

never gonna look at it again is going to fail.

How many promises to yourself have you broken?

A lot?

The only way to win this battle against the first enemy,

the old nature, is.

To let the Holy Spirit do it.

Now, you're never going to get to the victory of

chapter eight until you experience the frustration of chapter seven

and you finally realize you can't live the Christian life

on your own power.

So what's your problem?

Temper, impatience, self control, being honest, fought life, pride, laziness,

self centeredness. You know, every one of us have our

skeletons in the closet. The problem is that skeletons don't

stay in the closet, and you want to do the

right thing, but you end up doing wrong, and that's frustrating.

So it may as well be honest and say it

isn't working.

Me trying to flap my wings against gravity is like

me trying to live a life that's good on.

My own power.

God has given you a new nature if you've invited

Christ into your life. But we are still sinners after

we believe, and there is that battle between the two dogs.

Some of you really feel defeated today and you say,

I feel like giving up. And my answer to you

is good, give up. Stop trying to do it on

your own. You cannot be Jesus Christ. Nobody can be

Jesus like Jesus can, and He can live through you

if you will let his spirit empower you with new

life and it will lift you, lift you up out

of the cycle of sin. I want you to pray

this prayer right now. Dear God, you know the confusion

in my life.

You know the frustration I feel.

You know the guilt and the shame, You know the

compulsions and habits and addictions, and you know how many

times I've made promises to myself and to you that

I haven't kept. Today I realize that I have two

natures inside of me, and they are at war. I

ask you to use this series to help.

Me have victory.

Deepen my understanding of what Jesus Christ has done for me,

show me how to let go and how to let

your spirit live through me.

And this week, help me.

To challenge the lies that Satan puts in my mind,

and to challenge the lies that I tell myself, to

detect them and to disarm them, to stop deceiving myself.

I want to know the truth about me, and I

want it to set me free and help me to

have the courage to declare my struggle to one other person,

a battle buddy, a co worker, a friend in arms

fighting their battle too, and may I be offer unconditional

love and receive it. Help me to confess my sins

to others and pray for others so that God may

heal me and help me to live according to your

new life in the Holy Spirit. If you've never invited

Jesus into your life for the first time, you don't

have any resources.

You need to say Jesus Christ, come into my life

right now, live in me.

I don't understand it all, but I want to learn

to trust you, love you, follow you, and most important,

let you live through me by your spirit.

I pray this in your name. Amen.

Hi everybody, this is Rick and I hope you enjoyed

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