Undivided Heart - Part 2

Good morning. I would like you, I'd like you just to take a moment as we get

started here and think back, this is a little follow up from last week,

just think back a moment of a really positive,

really warm emotion evoking experience.

A memory that you have that was really special, that was really,

really touched your heart, really impactful for you, okay?

I'm not going to make you stand up and talk about it or anything,

but I want you just, and if you're comfortable, close your eyes and just think

about it, and just bask in the warmth of that one, that memory for just a moment, okay?

And I'm going to give you 60 seconds to do that, okay?

Okay. I'm not going to call on anybody, But was everybody able to tap into a

memory that was warm and touched you and you could recall it and experience that?

I'll get to this a little bit later in the message.

But we want to get comfortable doing that. You know, it is healing for our brains.

It is soothing for our soul in general. and it is a coping strategy to deal

with some of the stress that we experience in our lives and so forth.

And you want to take the time to not only just remember it, but actually try

to go back and relive the emotion that you experienced during that time.

Try to engage all of your senses when you're doing that.

Remember what it looked like, all of the environment that you're in and what

it smelled like and stuff.

For me, I gave one last week. My wife wasn't so appreciative of the delivery

of my son, but I also have one with my daughter where it was her wedding day,

and I was walking her down the aisle, and just it got quiet,

you know, and it was time,

and everybody's waiting, and I looked at her,

and she looked, we caught each other in the eyes, And it was just,

I could just see the joy. It's like, dad, this is.

It was just wonderful. It was just this sense of gratitude and connection,

you know, and then we went down the aisle together, and it was so cool.

And then I got to preach part of the sermon.

Actually, I just talked to them and did the vows and so forth,

but it was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life because when I was

speaking to my son-in-law, you know.

I said everything that I wanted to say, And I didn't say more than I wanted

to say, which is a miracle for most preachers.

And I just felt this anointing, this transfer of the protector that,

you know, I said, I believe you will love her as I have loved her.

You will watch over her. You will provide for her. You will protect her.

I just felt the Spirit of God in that moment transfer that protection.

And there was just such a warmth that happened where it was like,

my girl was now his woman, you know, and it was covered.

And maybe that sounds, I don't know what that sounds like if it's inappropriate,

but it was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life and stuff,

you know. So, and every time I go there, I get emotional about it.

And that is just so healthy for us because most of us live in this left brain

world of linear logical processing.

I'll get to that in just a bit.

Okay, so this is part two of Undivided Heart.

And I talked about, it's from a scripture in Psalms where David is talking about,

Lord, teach me your truth, teach me your word so that I may have an undivided

heart to follow after you and live for you.

And in the world with the distractions that we have, the difficulties of this

life and all that kind of stuff, it is easy for our hearts to get divided and

not stay focused on what the Lord has in store for us.

So anyway, I want to follow up on this is part two. And the first thing is just a little background.

Let's go to the next slide, Stephen. Just a little foundational stuff.

We are triune beings. God is a triune God. We are triune beings. We are a spirit.

We have a soul, which is our mind, our will, our emotions, you know.

And then we have a body. and the salvation of our spirit happens when we make

Jesus the Lord of our life.

We are instantaneously transferred from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light.

As those scriptures say, for by grace, we've been saved through faith that not

of ourselves, it's the gift of God, not a result of works so that no one may boast.

So just through our faith in his grace and what he has done for us,

we are saved as in 2 Corinthians there. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature.

Old things have passed away, and all things have become new.

All right. We know that doesn't happen in the realm of the soul,

because we still have to change our thinking after we get saved.

We still can be very worldly even after we get initially saved, spiritually speaking.

And we also know that, you know, if we're skinny before we got saved,

we're skinny afterwards.

If we're overweight afterward, we're still overweight. So, there's a,

it's speaking specifically spiritually what the salvation is of our spirit. But.

But then there's the salvation of our soul, which is the lifetime process,

and that's what we are talking about.

I love this scripture in Philippians chapter 2. I don't have verse 13 there.

Philippians 2 · chapter mention

So then, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only,

but now much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling.

I used to—oh, never mind, I'm going to skip that because I don't want to take too long.

So, Paul wrote both of these scriptures, Philippians chapter 2 and Ephesians chapter 2.

Philippians 2 · chapter mention Ephesians 2 · chapter mention

One, he says it's not by works, and the next one he is talking about works.

And the works in Philippians is the salvation of the soul.

We work out what happens to us spiritually, because spiritually,

it says in 1 Corinthians 6, Spiritually, they that are joined unto the Lord,

meaning you've given Christ your life, you've made him your Lord.

They that are joined unto the Lord are one spirit.

You and God are one spirit. So you're one with him.

God and sin can't coexist.

It'll blow up. So for us to be one spirit with God, we have to be perfect.

And the only perfection is through the blood of Jesus, washing away the sin spiritually.

So we are spiritually in this wonderful and great place, but working out that

salvation so we can see the perfection of our spirit in our everyday life, in our soul,

it takes this process of renewing our mind. Let's go to the next slide.

And the salvation of the soul, this working it out, is so captured in Romans 12, verse 2.

Romans 12:2

And I know we've talked about this a lot, but it continues to amaze me.

Even in preparation of this message, I thought of some things that I had—I mean,

really, the Lord revealed some stuff to me that I hadn't thought about before.

But anyway, it says, Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by

the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is,

that which is good and acceptable and perfect.

Transformation, that word transformation, is metamorphosis. We know caterpillars

to butterflies, tadpoles to frogs, major transition that's happening.

Paul wrote this not to unbelievers, but to Christians. So he's talking about

radical transition of people's lives that are already saved.

So there is a big transition from an immature Christian to a mature Christian.

This is the part that God revealed to me this week.

It's like this next line there, the metamorphosis that comes through renewing

our mind proves his will to ourselves and to the world.

And what is proof? So when we renew our mind, when we change how we think so

that it is what the Word says about us, it brings proof of what God's will is.

And proof is evidence.

Evidence. Evidence of what God's will is happens in our life.

And evidence, it is for all to see.

It is for us to see. It is for the world to see evidence of what God's will

is. and what God's will is, and I'm sure that you, I believe you feel the same way that I do.

There's much more in the Word of God that we do not see consistently enough,

you know, miracles and healings.

And, you know, there's things in the Bible that's like, you know,

like Dallas Willard talks about this whole book, you know, Life Without Lack,

where he talks about Psalm 23,

one of the most famous bit of scriptures in all the world, and people say it

and stuff, but they don't really believe it. They don't really live it.

It's not a part of their life.

It's not evidence of the will of God when you look at people's lives.

You don't see the evidence of Psalm 23 when you look at most Christians' lives

and what's preventing that because Psalm 23 is the will of God.

The Lord's our shepherd.

We shall not fear. I mean, it just goes on and on with incredible truths and incredible promises.

If we renew our mind, we will produce evidence of what God's will is,

Psalm 23 being an example of that.

Psalm 23 being an example of that. Yea, though I walk through the valley of

shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

And we were talking about mountain bike riding and the sightings of cougars

and stuff that's been fairly consistent around here.

I can ride my bike through the valley of shadow of death and fear no evil.

It doesn't mean I'm not going to take some steps to be prepared for a cougar

that might attack me, but I don't need to walk and live in fear.

There's a scripture that blows my mind in, oh, yeah, I have it up right there.

1 John 4, 17. By this, love is perfected with us so that we may have confidence

in the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world.

How is God? How is Jesus?

How is he? I think he's probably doing pretty good. but he's not nervous about

the Epstein list or anything else.

God is peaceful, joyful, perfect, right?

That's God. And as he is, so are we in the world. John wrote that. The Bible's inspired.

We got a long ways to go as far as providing evidence of God's will in our lives.

And that's what I want. I want, not for me and not to show how cool and mature

and all that kind of stuff is, but I want to see God manifest in my life and

through my life consistently.

And renewing our mind provides the proof of God's will for all people.

You know, Jesus said, I came that you might have life and you might have it more abundantly.

Jesus said, if you say unto this mountain, be thou removed and be cast into the sea, shall be done.

Why in the world did Jesus put that in the Bible?

Why in the world did he do that? Why did he show these outrageous miracles and

then say things like this, as he is, so are we in this world? Okay.

I think as we continue to grow in our ability to understand what renewing the mind is,

we will see greater and greater evidence and proof of what the will of God is

for ourselves and for the world.

And that blows my mind. And that motivates me to fight this fight of faith and

to look into Scripture and look into what God wants to do in me and through

me and change me and all of that kind of stuff.

And, of course, for everybody around me, my wife, my children,

my grandchildren, my church family, you know, all of that. I want to see that happen.

All right. So, where was I? I got excited about that. Okay. So,

in reference to your former life, this is Ephesians chapter 4.

Ephesians 4 · chapter mention

So, this is the transition. This is the transformation, the renewing of our mind.

In reference to your former manner of life, you lay aside the old self,

which is being corrupted in accordance with the lust of deceit,

and that you be renewed in the spirit of your mind,

which is different than your spirit that gets renewed right away when you get saved,

but the spirit of your mind, and put on the new self, which in the likeness

of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.

All right, so, you know, a lot of times the impression that I think a lot of

preachers give and a lot of people come away with is this old self is like something

we purposely, consciously do,

like sin, we engage intentionally in sin, and as a result of that,

you know, we do bad things, and this old self keeps beating us up.

But as I spoke about last week, there's stuff that gets entrenched in us,

ingrained in us through our upbringing that impacts us and is a part of that old self.

And that's what we're going to talk about a little bit more this week.

Okay, let's go to the next slide.

All right. So, this is from a book, Kurt Thompson, Anatomy of the Soul. And I really like this.

One, if not the primal or the basic sinful desires, is the urge for instant

reduction of distressing emotions, okay?

When we get depressed, when we get anxious, when we get agitated,

unsettled, you know, jealous, all these icky kinds of feelings,

the primal desire that we have is to get away from that, okay?

That's what he's talking about.

So, we tend to turn away from unpleasant emotional states toward inner or outer

mental or behavioral means that will connect us from or eliminate those very states.

And God put emotions in us as a signal to us. They're like warning lights on our car.

It's like the light goes on. It says, hey, you should check your oil.

Hey, your air pressure and your tires down. Hey, it's time for maintenance.

The warning lights say that. Now, if you keep driving, your car's not going

to crash into the ditch and die and stuff.

But if you neglect it, it's going to cause a problem.

Emotions are the same way. Okay, when you're anxious, there's a sense of fear.

There's a sense of worry. It's a sense of, okay, I need to address something here.

What is happening that is causing me to get nervous here?

What is out of whack here?

And so you need to look into it. When you get angry, there's a perceived injustice.

Something's wrong here and I'm angry about it.

So that is opportunity, you know, and the Bible says it's okay to be angry. Be angry, but don't sin.

So when you pay attention to your emotions, you stop and go,

all right, why am I angry? What's going on here?

And so then there's an opportunity to investigate what's taking place inside

of me. God has given me this warning light.

It's popping up here. I need to do something about it. What's taking place?

And we need to address it. because we will address it. That's the thing.

That's the thing that he's saying here. We will not continue on in these distressing emotions.

We will do something to fix it. Okay. And what I'm saying and what God says

and what this guy says is do the right thing,

do the healthy thing to fix that distressing emotions because otherwise we'll play video games.

Otherwise we will, you You know, we'll doom scroll.

Otherwise, we will get high. Otherwise, we will watch porn.

Otherwise, we will do all these different kinds of things. You know,

most of the time it's spacing out.

So when we have these distressing emotions, we need to figure out,

all right, God's given me a warning light here.

What am I going to do about it? I need to take care of it. I need to do something about it.

And that's the unmet need that I'm talking about in that next line there where

it says, avoid pain and seek pleasure is the old self.

It's the very bottom line drive of the old self is that we like to avoid pain and seek pleasure.

And unmet need and trauma are the things that drive this thing.

So, the bottom line is it's important that we pay attention to these distressing

emotions so we know what to do about it. All right, let's go to the next slide.

Boy, I put a lot on one slide.

All right, so this is cognitive triangle is a part of a cognitive behavioral

therapy, which is, and I view all this stuff,

you know, I was a pastor for 16 years, and we did, I spent a lot of time studying the Bible.

So this is for anybody that wonders if all I talk is about psychology.

I love the Bible. It is obviously the foundation of my life,

but what I have learned in psychology is there's a lot of techniques and a lot

of strategies and a lot of things that we have learned in psychology that help

us to accomplish what God is giving us directions to do, okay?

Particularly as it relates to renewing the mind and some of the stuff that I've already talked about.

So so cognitive cbt is cognitive

behavioral therapy it's the most popular most effective most science-based therapy

in the world and it is it works bottom line is it works and that cognitive triangle

at the top of it it says actions on the right side left side what does that say.

I didn't see what that sign was. Is that the thing I need to worry about,

right? Anyway, so it's your behavior, it's your thoughts, it's your feelings,

and they're all interacting.

And you can engage with cognitive behavioral therapy at any one of those points

in the triangle to bring about change in a person's life.

In this one, I'm speaking from the perspective of beginning with thoughts and talking about that.

So in this process...

The beginning is to substitute accurate, truthful thoughts for distorted thoughts.

And distorted thoughts are things that are contrary to the Word of God.

You're getting thoughts that are contrary to the Word of God.

You need to do something, and you need to sit down and write out some things

that are accurate, that are truthful, that are historical, that you have evidence for.

Okay and and that

is the very first part of it is is is watching

how you talk and one of the things is like how do you how do you believe that

people feel about you and think about you okay well you walk around you know

you want to capture that and see how you how what's going on inside of your head and so forth.

And then you begin the process of going, okay, why do I think that way? What's.

What drives that? What are some thoughts? And then you realize those are distorted

thoughts, and you want to begin to then capture the truth.

Truth from the word, truth from people that love you and care about you,

that will speak objective realities to you.

And then you begin the process of exchanging the distorted thoughts for the truth, okay?

Now, that isn't sufficient, as I'm saying there somewhere.

That isn't sufficient because the distorted thoughts, the bad thoughts that

we have about ourselves or about God or about other people and stuff,

they come connected to a memory and an emotion with that memory that causes

us to believe that much deeper because something bad happened to us and that

made us believe this bad way about ourselves.

And there was an emotion that went with it. And so where that gets stored in

your brain, that memory gets stored in your brain, it's connected to that emotion.

So every time that memory comes up, that distorted thought, that memory comes

up, It comes with that bad emotion with it. And so it's like, ugh.

And we try to ignore it, but that memory and that connected emotion is there.

And so it's really hard to shake off these old thoughts, these distorted thoughts about ourselves.

I am broken. I am twisted. I am evil.

I am whatever they happen to be. I know those are a little bit extreme,

but I know people experience those, okay?

So, what has to happen is, in the process of transitioning from these distorted

thoughts to healthy, honest,

truthful thoughts, according to the Word of God, we have to connect them with a positive emotion.

There's two primary ways to do that.

The first way is that you spend some time envisioning yourself living that way

as if you really believed the truth that you're talking about.

That you really believed, I am not that selfish, ugly, twisted person that I thought I was.

Whatever it happens to be, I am not that. What if I lived my life that way?

How would I be different?

How much freer would I be?

How confident would I be?

How much more could I openly say that I care about people, that I love people, all this?

How much more could God work through me if that was the way?

So you spend time connecting that positive vision of who you could be with that

list of positive thoughts about yourself that are based on the truth. Okay, so that's one.

The other way is, and this is why the Bible talks about the body of Christ,

we do it together and we confess our faults one to another that we may be healed.

1 John 1.9 says, if we confess our sin, he's faithful and just to forgive us

of our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Thank God for that.

And we do thank you for that, Lord Jesus.

But in James, it talks about confessing our faults one to another,

and we pray for one another that we may be healed.

So, in the process of sharing our shame, because this is what we're talking

about, sharing our shame of...

Of these negative beliefs that we've had about ourselves, when we share those

with other people, we get mercy, we get kindness, we get acceptance,

we get forgiven, we get loved.

And that positive emotion that comes with that cleansing and that sharing of

shame builds a whole new positive emotion that will entrench this new positive belief about yourself.

That's the power of connecting. And the whole field of neurobiology is what

it's all about, is connecting people and letting these positive emotions be

connected with these healthy, righteous,

truthful thoughts about ourselves.

And that brings in the kind of transformation that allows God's will to be proven in our lives.

And that's amazingly powerful.

It's part of why therapy works and i'm

not here i'm i have a faith i have

a full caseload so i'm not out here marketing myself

we're very busy but that is why therapy works is because you you have a therapist

that that that is doing everything to help you to to break free from shame and

encouraging you in the truth and loving you and lifting you up.

Good therapists. Not all therapists are good, but that's what good therapists do.

Anyway, all right, let me find out where I was here.

I think I covered that slide pretty well. Yeah, let's go to the next one.

This is, I preach a lot different than Trey. That's why he's a pastor and I'm a psychologist.

Because I don't follow my script very well. Anyway, so the healing of the soul.

Increase, so this is the next step. That last little bit that I just talked

about, is really a whole message and process in itself.

Transforming, if you can wrap your head around it.

I just always pray that God helps me to be able to speak clear enough for that

to happen. Anyway, so healing the soul.

Increase your brain and body connection. Because I said this,

not this last sermon, but a time before that, I talked about the implicit memory.

In the implicit memory, we store things like emotional experiences,

traumatic experiences, and bodily experiences, like, for example, riding a bike.

Riding a bike, you can, if you chose to go, okay, now I'm going to ride my bike,

I need to remember, I got to get up enough speed, you know, before I start turning.

You know, you could go through all that process, but nobody does.

You don't need to because it's in your implicit memory. Your body knows it.

You get on a bike, you begin to ride, boom, you remember everything,

even if you haven't ridden a bike in 20 years. That's in our implicit memory.

Trauma's in our implicit memory. Strong emotional experiences are in our implicit memory.

And when we connect our body and our brain, implicit memory is apt to manifest,

to come up more frequently, where we can understand how our implicit memory

drives some of our behavior and reinforces some of those distorted thoughts I was talking about.

Let me give you an example. Last week, I talked a lot about me and ADHD.

This week, my wife's not here, so I can talk about her.

But actually, let me see if she's watching. She's supposed to be.

No, honestly, I got her permission because Because this is her life, and it is very personal.

But when I met her, I think most everybody knows this, but when I met her, she was 18 years old.

She was pregnant, five months pregnant with her second child from a different father.

She was, I think, 17 or not quite 17 when she delivered the first one.

And she was a Christian. She grew up in a church and stuff, you know.

But there's a lot to this story.

Anyway, I'll get back to how she grew up and stuff.

So I met her in a drug rehabilitation program, and she was five months pregnant.

And she was being a Christian, being pregnant twice as a teenager to two different fathers,

is a lot of shame involved, as you can imagine, a lot of shame involved.

She adopted out the first child because she knew she wasn't ready to raise it,

and she knew her family would end up raising it, and she just knew that that wasn't right.

And so she gave it away to a Christian family.

And being there, when she first came in the program, here she is with this baby.

She was dealing with the guilt of the other baby. And she, we had group therapy,

we had 40 hours of therapy a week, 40, that's a lot of therapy.

Anyway, my wife, besides how beautiful she is, and that was my initial attraction,

but the other part of her is that she wanted to live right and be right.

She was so hungry for the truth. And I just found that just so attractive.

And I just appreciated that about her. And she's still the same.

You know, she just hunger for, you know, doing what's right and being right

and knowing God and so forth.

And she mourned and she cried and she suffered the shame and she talked about

it and confessed and just at length multiple,

multiple times in group therapy,

you know, and just cried her heart out.

And it was just so moving to see.

And she's like, I'm five months pregnant with this baby.

You know, I can't give it away, but I'm not ready.

And so she just shared and shared and shared.

And finally, it's like she came to a place where she was able to forgive herself.

And she moved on.

And then she had the next child. and we

a year later we ended up getting

married and and I adopted that that girl and I

was raised her and and everything was okay you know and

we talked about her first child if we ever encountered him

you know we'd we'd embrace him and and it'd all be cool and stuff and we told

the rest of our kids about it and so forth you know that that this happened

and everything so we went on about our business for a long time and there's

a point to the story I'm getting there really quickly.

I don't remember exactly when it was. I think it was 25 years later.

He called us, and we connected, and my wife connected with that son that she gave.

And at this initial meeting, they hugged and cried, and all this stuff happened.

And then something weird happened because the wife, who was also adopted...

She didn't like this, and she came unraveled, and they cut off all communications

completely after that and wouldn't respond in any way, shape,

or form, and my wife lost it.

I mean, she came unraveled, and all of a sudden, all this stuff that she thought

had been processed, which was stored in her implicit memory,

the touch of this boy that she gave away when he was an infant,

triggered that implicit memory in her, and man, she came unraveled.

It was the worst time in our marriage. We've been married 50 years.

It was the worst time in our marriage, and it lasted a long time.

We had a child die, one that was alive, and we raised, and it was our next baby.

This circumstance was worse than that baby dying, and it was awful.

And, and I, I bring it up and, and my wife worked through it. She got a therapist.

We, we talked to adoption people. We, you know, and then eventually we got back

together with that boy, man now, and talk through some stuff,

you know, and stuff that was going on in his life and so forth.

It was a, it was probably about a 10 year process of really getting restoration

and, And my wife, you know, forgiving herself and getting comfortable again and so forth, you know.

And I use that example that I tell you that story because there's stuff in our

implicit memory that impacts us.

Now, of course, very few people have stuff that is as dramatic as giving away a baby.

You know, that's pretty dramatic. But stuff happens to us, and we,

you know, way back to that, what we do with distressing emotions,

we don't embrace it and take care of it.

You know, we need to do it because otherwise it gets stored away there.

But then also ones that have happened to us, even clear back when we were children

and so forth, it's stored in our implicit memory.

We don't know what's happening. This is part of that old self,

and we want to talk to God about it.

We want to connect our brain and our body to be able to perhaps tap into something

in that implicit memory that prevents the will of God from being proven in who

we are through renewing our minds.

Okay? Does that make sense?

Kenny's nodding his head. That's all I need.

Okay, so that's why we need to connect that brain and body.

It's why we need to connect our left brain and our right brain.

The right brain is very much, and our lower brain, is connected very much to

that implicit memory and what has happened to us. So, we want to connect that.

It happens through a body scan, which there's, A body scan is just simply that

where you take a guided meditation where you sit quietly and focus on every

single part of your body bit by bit,

starting with your big toe and all the way through your head.

And they have body scans on Palouse Mindfulness, which I told you about last week.

But there's a lot of body scans you do in YouTube, and it will take you through

that process. It's really about deep breathing, being quiet,

being connected with your body and allowing God to speak to you through that

time. Yoga does the same thing.

I do a yoga routine with a psychologist that's on YouTube that slows me down

but also stretches out my body. So it's really helpful for me.

I did it this morning, as a matter of fact, after I was being a little sore

from my ride yesterday. But it connects you with yourself.

It slows you down and connects you with yourself, which is what we need to do

to contact the implicit memory and our right brain.

The other part, writing your story. Writing your story and in the next line

where it says develop coherence, you want to write your narrative,

write your autobiography,

and write down not only the history of it, but also what you remember emotionally

experiencing throughout your history.

Because a lot of people will write out, well, in the third grade I did this,

I had this teacher, blah, blah, blah. But take yourself back to those times

that you can remember throughout school, throughout your life.

And some people that have experienced a fair amount of trauma,

they have very little memory of their high school, their elementary school.

They can't bring that stuff up.

And it's because it's blocked by, you know, they don't want to access that trauma

that's in their implicit memory because it scares the daylights out of them.

It's so painful for them, you know, which is why they need therapy to be able

to work through that because there are therapy types that are created just to

deal with people's trauma.

I've used it with, there's a particular kind for children that I've used a number

of times with kids that have just been horribly abused and it works.

It's so wonderful to see that process take place.

But anyway, writing that story, you want to go back through and begin to understand

where do some of the thoughts that are deeply entrenched in you that are distorted thoughts,

meaning contrary to the Bible—,

Where did they come from? And as we get in touch with both the emotional part

as well as the historical part, we bring about this coherence that connects

our implicit memory and our explicit memory,

our right brain and our left brain, and our brain overall becomes integrated,

connected, which is where we connect with God and what God says about us,

where we can manifest the proof of His will in our lives. Okay, that's the process.

This last one, or not the very last one, but the second to last one,

improving the mentalizing process.

Developing empathy and learning how to love better is a really good way to do

that is to find mentors and models, people that are doing it.

The man that led me to the Lord, I went into the drug program because I wanted

to see how he was the way that he was.

And he was the most sacrificial, giving person I'd ever met.

And I just watched him and watched him and watched him and eventually moved

into the same house with him and watched him every day of how he gave and loved and so forth.

So, doing things like what Tony and Erin do,

going to the REACH ministries in downtown Seattle and watching the work that

they do with the homeless and so forth is just one example of that,

but a variety of ways to do that.

Gosh, I'm taking a long time to do this. And the last one there,

develop optimism and faith.

Expect God to work in your life as you renew your mind. Let's go to the next slide.

I'm going to skip a whole bunch of my message. I love this.

Looking only at Jesus, the originator and perfecter.

I grew up with the author and finisher of our faith. Who for the joy set before

him endured the cross, despising the shame. and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

Now, several other translations say despising the shame.

One says ignoring the shame. Some say disregarding the shame.

The point is, I don't think Jesus spent a lot of time with the shame.

I think he quickly dismissed it and said, let's get on with this.

Let's get on with this suffering. He hated it, but he didn't embrace it and

become entrenched in it. And I think that is our example.

When we see shame, we don't flinch.

We just power through it and say, nope, you are not controlling my life.

I'm going to hate you, I ignore you, I disregard you, and I move on. Okay.

And I think, of course, this isn't eliminating the need to confess,

especially when we have distorted thoughts and emotions from previous behavior

that continually haunts us with shame.

We want to confess that and get that healing that I talked about before.

But after that's happened, when shame comes up, you recognize it,

but you don't let it control it.

You despise the shame and you move on to healthy, happy living.

You know, I just, I'm going to just pray for a minute. Thank you, Lord.

I think we have the worship team come up, and I just want to pray.

Lord, we're so grateful to you. We know how good you are.

And we know there's so much, so much more supernatural reality for us to experience.

There's so much more in the realm of the Spirit for us to embrace and live in.

There's so much more that the new self that is destined to be conformed to the

image of Jesus can experience.

And Lord, we just pray that as we continue to renew our minds and be transformed as a result of it,

God, that your Spirit and your Word will produce the evidence of your perfect will in our lives.

And we will become more loving, more joyful, more free than ever before.

And we will loosen the grip of sin, the lies of the devil, the accusations of the enemy.

We will loosen their hold on us, and we will be the free, liberated,

loving, joyful people that you have created us to be.

Lord, I pray all these things that I've talked about today,

Lord, I pray that you bring them to every person's mind as they're catching

themselves with distorted thoughts and be able to turn to you,

Lord, and that you'll give them guidance on how they can break free from it

to be the awesome people that you have created them and created all of us to

be. We're so grateful to you, Lord.

In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, while we wait for our massive, wasn't it as great the worship that

Ben and Drew are able to do, just the two of them?

Let's stand up and worship the Lord as we go.