How Can I Deal With My Feelings When They Feel Out Of Control?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

We are gonna be in Romans 12 today. Romans 12 and I don't know if you've ever been here, if you've ever been so angry at something or someone that you throw your guitar down right on the stage. So angry, look at, we totally plan that. It's just like we rehearsed, I told you it would work. He didn't think it would work. He was like, no way, I'm gonna drum our guitar and it's gonna feel weird. No, no, I think we nailed it the first time. New fear unlocked, that happening in the middle of my sermon. Okay. Have you ever been so angry that you cannot even see straight? So mad, so frustrated, so,

I mean, you could probably think of a story. I've had several times when I'm trying to do one thing, but something else goes awry. A couple of days ago, I was weed eating my front yard in 107 degree heat. I don't know why, I have no explanation, but I was doing that. And I'm almost done and the wire just pops out. So I've got to like, it's 107 degree heat. I am sweltering and I don't have to like, wind the corn back up a thing and then I tried it again and the top flew off. Anyway, it was not my best moment,

but I was pretty angry. I was pretty frustrated. And I'm sure that you've been there. In fact, scripture talks a little bit about this. Proverbs 30 verse 33 says, for pressing milk produces butter, pressing the nose produces blood, and pressing anger produces strife. And that's just scripture's way of helping us understand that there's a way that whenever we are angry, whenever those things happen, whenever we got big feelings going on, that if you press into that, a lot of times it's gonna be pretty frustrating.

Sometimes whenever we are in the middle of that, we say words that are vile or degrading. We have a disagreement that turns into a full rage out. Whether it's verbal or whether it's internal, we are just blinded. And sometimes the big feelings are anger. And other times the big feelings are fear, crippling fear, where maybe you spend hours shaking, just recovering from whatever incident you just had. Maybe you have this overwhelming anxiety that just is like a low hum, and sometimes it kind of raises up and it just eats away at you. It just withers you down. Too often we are really, we feel victim to our emotions, to whatever we are thinking or feeling in a given moment. This is our question for today. How can I deal with my feelings when they are out of control? How can I deal with my feelings when they are out of control? There's a lot of ways maybe that we can go with this,

but I just wanna say that, and maybe we don't say this very often, I think sometimes whenever we ask this question, we go to coping techniques or calming techniques, which are fine. But calming techniques or coping techniques don't exactly hit the root of the problem. Sometimes they just dissipate whatever anger you have or whatever fear you have, and that's fine. And that actually can be pretty useful in a given moment. You know, if you're shaking in your bed because you are riddled with fear, then stopping the shaking is probably step one, okay? But if it's your only step, if you don't get to the root of your anger, if you don't get to the root of your fear of your anxiety, if you don't ever begin to deal with that, then you're always going to fall victim to it. It's never really going to stop. You're never going to experience healing. And I wanna tell you this morning

that Jesus is sufficient to help you through these times. And often, that's not something that many people would disagree with here this morning, but how? How does that work? What's the flow? What's the process? You know, it sounds great. Like it's the front of like a Christian greeting card, like Jesus can help you through this. Okay, great. That's true and good and right, but how? What's our steps? How do we kind of work through that? Jesus has the power to bring healing into our lives by addressing those thoughts and feelings directly and bringing healing to them. And that process where Jesus addresses our thoughts and feelings, that process changes our actions over time and it creates new patterns in our lives. So I'm not talking about silver bullets this morning. I'm not talking about magic wands, okay? This is slow and process oriented, okay?

The Bible says that really all this stuff that we deal with, when our emotions are out of control, the Bible actually says that this is all rooted in what we worship. That whenever our feelings, in other words, the reason that we are speaking harshly is because someone has challenged what we worship. So if you worship family, right? You kind of hold your family in the highest regard

and somebody threatens your family. Well, then you, your anger is going to start redlining immediately and you're gonna say and do whatever you need to do to protect that family, right? If maybe if you worship your own image, like your own social standing, your own status, your own whatever, your own image that you projected, somebody demeans you in public. Buddy, you're ready for a fight. Your feelings will go immediately out of control. Now you might like, I don't know, you might hold it in, go to your car and scream at the steering wheel. I don't know, I don't know what you're gonna do with that but you're gonna start peaking on that anger, on those feelings, on that anxiety. That's all gonna come rushing in tidal wave force and you're not gonna know what to do with it. It's just going to cripple you. The reason that oftentimes that we shake with fear is because what we worship has failed us, right?

Maybe worship, maybe we worship kind of the security that money gives us. And whenever we go through a financial reversal, when we go through a lean time, we are destroyed. We are riddled with fear and anxiety because we don't know where that thing's gonna come from. And we need security above all. That's worship. Worship isn't about necessarily golden calves, actual golden calves. Worship is putting anything on the pedestal of God.

So you can take good things. Family's a good thing. Amen, family's a good thing? Amen, okay, family's a good thing. Family's a great thing. Saw a couple of new babies here this morning. The family continuing. It's just good to see them. Love to see a little baby. And that's a good thing. When you put that family in the place of God, that turns bad. That will deform your heart. And you might think, oh, it's so great that you put your family above all else. It's not, because your family can't sustain that. Your family can't give you what you need. The things that you need can only be given to you by your creator, and that's who belongs in that pedestal. That's who belongs at the top. So even good things, right? Like even things like I don't wanna seem stupid in public. That's a pretty reasonable thing to want, okay? I don't wanna seem stupid in public. But when you worship that,

when you worship your social image, your feelings will come crashing through the door. And there's not enough locks. There's not enough bolts. There's not enough dressers you can put in front of the door. It's just gonna bust in. And you're gonna fall victim to it. So we don't need to do this, right? Jesus invites us to kind of mature through a process. And this process that we're gonna look at, it's in Romans 12, 1, and 2. And that's gonna be kind of our base text. We're gonna be able to pull from a couple of other places in Scripture, but we're gonna try to base it there. It's a process that begins in worship. It moves to rejection. And it goes to renewal. And we need all three. You can see the first one here in Romans 12, 1, I appeal to you brothers by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

So this is kind of step one in this process. We start in worship and we see two things about worship. Sometimes, by the way, you might be thinking like worship. Oh, didn't we just do that? Isn't that just singing? Scripturally, worship's a lot bigger than singing. Singing is a great expression of devotion and kind of sacrifice, right? Like in praising, lifting our voices, that's good. It's just not the totality of worship. And so in worship, whenever we're kind of defining it here, and it's defined several places like this in the New Testament, as we start in worship, there's two things. The first is that we seek offer your bodies or present your bodies as a living sacrifice. Present your bodies as a living sacrifice. And that image that it's drawing up as we're kind of considering how the Romans would read that, they're imagining a pile of sticks arranged in a pattern

and you climbing on it and lighting the fire. That's the image that we get, okay? This is offering your bodies as a living sacrifice. Worship, how we define it here, worship is wholehearted service, sacrifice, excuse me, wholehearted sacrifice in real outcomes. Wholehearted sacrifice in real outcomes. So a way to translate that for today would be something like offer your money as a living sacrifice. Could you imagine walking up to something and just taking your life savings and putting it on there and just watching it burn? Offer your time as a living sacrifice, offer your hospitality as a living sacrifice. Consider how Jesus wants you to handle your career, offer your career as a living sacrifice.

Offer how you raise your children as a living sacrifice. Things that are very important to us, things that should be very important to us. It should be very important for anybody who has a child that they care immensely about how that child's raised. That makes perfect sense to us. And what we see here, we see in Romans 12, there is no quarter. It is everything, wholehearted sacrifice. You don't get to keep anything back because you like how you do that thing. Practically, on every decision, in every arena of life, in every moment, morning, noon, and night, you are saying, how does Jesus want me to do this? How am I going to talk to Jesus about this decision? How am I going, what's the next step? What is he leading me to do? All these things, on every single decision, Jesus requires us to sacrifice everything to him. Jesus requires us to sacrifice everything for him.

He says it a different way in Mark 8, 38, 8, 34, and 35, sorry. And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, Jesus said to them, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me, for whoever would save his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for my sake and the Gospels will save it. So Jesus is saying it's the whole thing. It's your whole life, mind, body, soul. It all belongs to him. In fact, that's what we just talked about with offering, where it's all God's anyway. And we are, as a sacrifice of obedience, giving back 10%, or whatever percent we're at right now. We're giving back a portion, a small portion of that and saying, God, it's yours anyway. We love you with it. And you might say, well, you know, like, man, if I'm losing my life, like that didn't sound like we're really going for happiness here. Doesn't Jesus want me to be happy?

Actually, he does. Jesus wants you to be totally happy. The only way that you can find happiness is to worship him as your Lord. Jesus does totally want you happy, totally. It's just that the happiness that often, what we settle for isn't really good. It'll destroy us. It will change us. It will make us do things we don't want to do. It'll make us become things we don't want to become. These things that we think are making us happy are not, they're fooling us. Jesus does want us to find our joy, our complete joy in him. And it's there, we can find it.

Worship him as your Lord. Jesus even, actually, in the next couple of verses, Jesus even frames it in terms of return on investment. If you look at 36 and 37, it says, for what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul? Jesus is saying it even makes sense if you think about it in terms of investment and return. What are you going to get from what you're putting in? Do you think by forfeiting your soul, you're gonna gain anything? You're not. It's gonna look like you're gaining all of it. But you're not. Jesus is saying, I want nothing less than wholehearted service. Wholehearted sacrifice. Not perfection. We're not talking about perfection here. You might say, well, you know, wholehearted sacrifice, I mean, I messed up that this morning, so I guess I'm cooked for the day. No, no, it's not, we're not talking about perfection.

We're not talking about that. We're talking about wholehearted sacrifice. And Jesus tells us in no uncertain terms, following me is worth every penny and more. It's worth every ounce of energy you have. It's worth all of your time. It's worth all of your money. It's worth adjusting how you think about raising children. It's worth moving your career around for. It's worth all those things and more. It's worth coming on a Sunday morning. Right, amen, we're here. This is good, we made it. All right, we made it this morning. It's worth it. Worship Jesus. This is what worship is, it's wholehearted sacrifice. The second thing it is, he says, I urge you at the beginning of the verse, he says, I urge you in view of God's mercy. I urge you in view of God's mercy. Worship is motivated by mercy. And motivation here, by mercy, is key, because if it's too off base, it's going to turn into something else.

Motivation is key, motivated by mercy. If you kind of sways to a different direction, let's just say your motivation would be like, I'm gonna do this for God and he'll finally like me, or things will finally work out in my life, then you are going to work to feel like God likes you, whatever that is for you, however you're kind of interpreting that this morning, you're gonna work for that feeling, and then your heart is just gonna go up and down based on how you're feeling. So sometimes you're not gonna feel like God likes you very much, and sometimes you're gonna feel like God likes you a lot, and your heart's just gonna do this. And it's not, you're not gonna get any baseline, you're not gonna establish, you're not gonna have any foundation, you're gonna be kind of wrecked, if your motivation is that. If your motivation is, hey, I'm gonna do this, and I'm gonna get God off my back, right?

I'm gonna do this and it'll be over, right? Then you won't do anything, here's how you know you're doing that. You won't do anything significant or spiritual or take any risk or anything like that until you are in crisis. If you are in crisis, then you're like, oh, I better pray, I better read, I better do, I better go to church, I better, because if I do those things, then God's gonna get me off my back and things will be okay again. And that's not how it works. That's not what we see here. That's not motivated by God's mercy toward you. Because every time in your life when the crisis subsides, the motivation is gone. What do we do about that?

When motivation has mercy in view, when we are moved by God's mercy, then we have God's holiness and our unworthiness in view, both. We have God's holiness in view and we have our unworthiness in view. We're never gonna do enough to be okay. And because God is holy and he has said that he's going to love us, then there's nothing we can do to kind of appease that or cajole God to do something or perform well enough to where he'll really answer this prayer or eliminate enough sin for our life to be a certain level of success or anything like that. Like, that's not how it works at all. We understand, when we understand that God is holy and we are anything but, then we now have a right relationship. We now have enough that God has to relate to us in mercy every time. I don't care what your spiritual streak is right now on new version. I don't care what your, it doesn't matter.

And those things are great, streaks are great, but it doesn't matter. God always is going to, needs to, has to view you, you, yes, you person, through mercy. Has to. Otherwise he can't relate to you. It is a miracle that the Lord speaks to us and prays God for it. That's why we sing because we're thankful. Change begins in your life when you begin to worship wholehearted, not perfect, wholehearted sacrifice of all things, motivated by God's mercy upon you. And you can start that right now. You can start right now. You can start it this week. You can take 10 minutes to worship Jesus.

I'm in a life group with my buddy Clint and we're doing, as he hangs his head in shame, sorry buddy. It's been great despite Clint's hanging his head. We'll read through the Psalms and that's been, man, that's been just good for me again to just read through the Psalms again and to remember just to say with the Psalms that God is holy and I'm not. To say with the Psalms, thank you for your mercy, God. Like it's just a good, like a reorientation of my soul. It's been great. You can do that. Read a Psalm.

And even right now, as we read scripture together, you can consider Jesus' majesty, his mercy toward you. And you can love him. In that moment right now, you can have a little moment of worship. You're gonna have to close your eyes. You can worship Jesus in a lot of ways. And when we begin to worship, this is kind of the next stop. When we begin to worship, we come to a rejection.

When we begin to worship, it's not just the, you know, the swell of emotion and we feel so great and then, you know, we got the afterglow and I'll, nope. And then with worship, we come to a point of rejection. This is in Romans 12 again. We just said, you know, offer your bodies as a living sacrifice. Romans 12 to A, just the first part of it, do not be conformed to this world. Rejection of something is necessary for change. In other words, spiritually, if you are going through this boom and bust cycle of your emotions rushing through the door and you don't know what to do and five hours later, you're full of regret and you have broken relationships and you have broken whatever. Maybe you don't have a job anymore. I don't know. But you've got these big emotions that are coming through. Begin with worship, but then there is this ownership that must happen where you look at the current state of your life

and you say, this is on me. Yes, there were things that happened to me that were beyond my control. It's fine. That's everybody. But what's your part? Own that. Own that part. You must own the current state of your life. You must seriously consider and choose to reject things in your life. Here's some things that we see in the New Testament. First, here in Romans 12 to reject conformity. This idea, rejecting conformity, is similar to what we read a few weeks ago. Ephesians 2:2, I'll put that up. This is a bit of a paraphrase from one, but Ephesians 2:2, in our sin, we were all following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air.

When we are in our spiritually dead state, when we are coasting, when we are on autopilot, our natural rhythm is to follow the puppet strings of this world, right? This is discipleship happening in your life that whatever you're paying attention to is whatever is shaping you. And if you think that you can beat that game, you are wrong every time. So if all you're doing, for example, if all you're doing is doom scrolling, if you're on Facebook and you get on the field and you're just, boom, boom, boom, boom, then don't be surprised after an hour of that that you can't pay attention to something for more than four seconds. Fair? Right, that's fair, it's totally fair. That your attention span is being shortened. Why? Why is that happening? I thought it's just you looking at something. You looking at something though is training your brain. Whatever you study actually,

this is kind of wild to me, I really love this. I've kind of stumbled upon this fact. I don't even remember where I learned it. But what you study, when you study the, you actually are, your brain is actually studying the organization of what you're looking at and then begins to adapt to that. So if you can actually train your brain to slow down, you can train your brain to not need stimulation every four to eight seconds. You can actually concentrate on something that takes a while to look at and to absorb. And that process will actually help you begin to change. I know it sounds wild, but that's why there's a huge emphasis on reading the Bible. Listening to the Bible is good too, so don't let me trash that, that's not what I mean. But when you read the Bible, you're not just reading the words, you're studying how it's organized. You're looking at kind of supplied motivation.

You're implying things and you're absorbing that. Reading the Bible, it doesn't, it's not just acquiring information. It's studying something that is changing you. Okay, rejecting conformity is standing firm and resisting the algorithm of the world. Maybe that's a better way to think about it. There is a flow, an ebb and a flow to how the world works. And it's not all bad. Like I'm not saying like Thanksgiving and Christmas and holiday season's a bad thing, okay, it's not. However, there's a lot of stuff kind of just wrapped up in that. And what Scripture's telling us here is that you have to be discerning, you have to be able to understand what the conformity is that's coming at you. And you have to be able to reject it. It doesn't mean go out of the world. It means stay in the world, but reject conformity at the same time. Don't follow the course of this world.

Don't follow the prince, don't follow the heir. Don't do that. The other picture that we see in the New Testament is not just rejecting conformity, it's also rejecting your old self or your old life or your old man. There's a, it depends on your translation. It's gonna be called a couple of different things. Ephesians 4:22. It's talking about this process of change and it says that you need to put off your old self, which belongs to your former man or life, and it's corrupt through deceitful desires. So you need to put off your old self. The former, your former man or of life is corrupt. People have, you and I have these things that the Bible calls corrupt action pathways. Or we can just go with ruts, okay? But if you wanna get technical, they are corrupt action pathways.

With a rut, sometimes we think it's just what we fall into because we're lazy or something. This is talking specifically about your old life, things that made sense to you, things that you did in your old life, and those pathways were actually the in and of themselves corrupting you. Following that path actually corrupted you to follow the path more. This is what it's, this is the picture that Ephesians 4:22 is painting for us. And oftentimes when we talk about change, when we talk about being able to not be riddled with fear, when we talk about controlling our anger, when we talk about those big feelings that are come rushing through the door, oftentimes we go straight to this and we're like, yeah, we just need to stop doing that. We focus on eliminating the behavior or eliminating the outcomes, but we don't do it with worship. We don't worship first. We just run straight to this

and we try to eliminate it all on our own. All that is is dressed up with Bible self-reliance. That's all it is. If all you're doing is trying to change yourself from the inside, okay, it's not gonna work. It might work for a little bit and you might feel good about it, but it's gonna be boom and bust and you're not gonna see this gradual, you're not gonna see maturity happen. You're gonna continue to fall for it every time. So when we say something, okay, I'm not gonna blow up at the kids this time. I'm not gonna do that, but you're still worshiping your own image or your own pride or whatever, whatever the kids are picking at, right? Well, listen, then you're going to fail. If you're not dealing with the root of the cause, you're gonna yell at your kids again. I'm not saying it's an inevitability. I'm saying that it's inevitable if you don't get to the root.

If you think I'm not gonna let people walk all over me anymore, but you still believe that what people think about you matters more than what you think about yourself or what God thinks about you. If you actually believe that, then yeah, you're gonna let people walk all over you every time. All they have to do is just threaten you with a little bit of disappointment and then you're toast. They're walking right on over you. Do you see the connection between your actions and what you worship? I want you to see that. And you must pair, whenever we're talking about rejecting behavior, you have to pair that with worship. You can't just jettison a main motivator out of your heart like, oh, I'm just not gonna care about what people think anymore. But you're not pairing that with worship of the Lord God. Listen, your hearts are gonna worship something. They're gonna worship something.

And if you're throwing out a thing that you're worshiping but you're not putting anything in its place, you're not like revering the Lord God in heaven. You're not letting Jesus tell you who you are, where you're going, what's important. If you're not doing that, then it doesn't matter what you throw out, something else is gonna come back in that's just as corrupting. If not more, if not worse, you might trade people's affection for you for heroin. I don't know, like, you're in a much worse state. I'm just saying, like, I would almost rather you just be addicted to people's opinions of you.

If we're picking, none of them are good. We must pair worship with rejection. Colossians 3, 8, 9, it says it a different way. But now you must put them all away. Anger, wrath, malice, slander, obscene talk with your mouth. Do not lie to one another seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices, its old self with its practices of lying, of gossip, of slander. Why do you slander someone? Why do you slander somebody? Think about it. Why do you slander somebody? When you slander, you're like, well, then gossip, I don't know, pick one. How do you commit old self practices with your mouth?

Do you lie? Do you gossip? Do you slander? What do you do? The reason why maybe that you would gossip about somebody, maybe your quick answer was, I don't know, it feels good. You know, think about it. Why? Why do you gossip? You're gossip because whatever you're worshiping is making you push somebody down so that you can push yourself up. That's it. Why do you lie? One reason you could lie would be to make sure that these other people don't know, you keep these other people in the dark so that you can have this secret information over here so that you can have control. You're worshiping your own control. Why do you slander somebody? Why are you jealous of people?

All these things are ways to kind of push people down or keep people away and raise yourself up or keep control, control. You think you're in control, but we must reject these things. And I wanna be really clear. This does not mean that if you aren't pushing away everything, if you aren't completely conscious of every sin that you're pushing away, then you can never come to Jesus. No, no, no. Rather, it means this, that when you come to Jesus, anytime you come to Jesus, it's going to mean a reckoning, a rejection of something. Unless you've been perfect. It's going to mean a rejection of something. Jesus is always going to just confront what is inside you.

And sometimes what's inside you, it feels very good and religious and right. But sometimes Jesus comes to you and he says to you very gently like, hey, you're worshiping your family. It's making you do, say things. It's making you believe things that aren't true. It's getting in the way of worship. Coming to Jesus means rejecting your old life. So practically, practically when you kind of feel this, when you feel like you are slipping back into your old life, when you have fallen back, when you have done the thing that you're trying to not do anymore. This might not work.

But I want you to try to remember in that moment. Here's your big problem. Your big problem is not, I need to quit doing this thing. That's not your problem. Your problem is I need to worship. I need to worship. Don't try to sort out, if it's your mom's fault or your dad's fault, don't try to sort out what coping mechanism. When you find yourself in the thing, whatever the thing is, think to yourself, I need to worship. Pray to Jesus, help me worship. In that worship, you are going to be confronted with the thing that you need to reject. In that worship, I'm not saying it's gonna come immediately, but in that worship, in that process of worshiping, living a worshiping life, you are going to find the thing that you need to reject or repent of. And so in that worship, you're saying, I repent of that gospel. I repent of that lust. I repent of that stealing.

And you don't have to know the details. You don't have to be this super highly aware of everything going on person in the middle of your sin move. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm not trying to create this weird situation where you have hyper-consciousness of everything. I'm saying when the moment of regret hits you, when you realize, oh, I've been an idiot. I need to stop doing what I'm doing. I need to, when that hits you, and we all know that moment, I don't think I need to preach on that moment. We all know that moment. When it hits you, I need to worship. And you don't have to know all the details. All you have to say is Jesus, help me say no. Jesus, replace this with something else, please. You think your father in heaven won't hear you? You think Jesus doesn't hear that prayer? You're crazy. He's hoping for that prayer. He's on the edge of his seat for that prayer.

He's not clutching the pearls because you sinned. He's like, okay, let's go. Let's worship. Let's start walking in accordance with how I created you to be. Let's find joy in the things that you need to find joy in, things that'll really fulfill you. Your emotions are out of control, I understand that. But as you're drowning in them, just try to just even just mouth the words like Jesus, help me say no to this. Jesus, help me in the middle of this. I need you, I need to worship, I need something. Change starts with wholehearted worship,

wholehearted sacrifice motivated by mercy. And in that sacrifice, we are continuing to cut ties with our old life. Just keep cutting them. I know they keep forming back. I get it, just keep cutting them. Don't stop. Get people to help you cut them, but just keep cutting them. Keep cutting them. Here's the promise. The promise isn't that somehow you'll get a badge for cutting a lot of times with your old life. The promise is that you are going to be made new on the inside and that will change your life.

This is the healing that Jesus promises. It doesn't have to do with anybody coming down front, shaking and me doing that to them. That's not what we're talking about here this morning. We're talking about biblical healing. We're talking about actual healing that Jesus does and this is it. This is hard work. Sometimes Jesus heals fast. Jesus can heal how often he wants to heal? He can heal whatever speed he wants to heal. That's up to him. That's not up to me. But what I see in the New Testament, what I see in Scripture is that Jesus says there is a process. I want you to worship. I want you to begin to reject some things. And lastly, I want you to embrace renewal of the mind.

I want you to embrace renewal. So you're worshiping, you're rejecting, and then you're embracing renewal, Romans 12-2. We've read the first part already. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. Let your mind be renewed. God's doing the renewing. Let your mind be renewed so that you can discern and do.

Let your mind be renewed so that you can discern and do God's will. All these places we've been reading before, like in Ephesians 4, they kind of resume this thought. So let's read it, Ephesians 4, 23 and 24. It says, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds and to put on the new self, created after the lightness of God in true righteousness and holiness. There is a picture in the New Testament. It's this many times over. And it's a weird thing to think about, but it's a picture of pulling Jesus over you. I know that's weird, but it's Bible, so I don't have to apologize too hard, right? It's putting on the new self. It's not like putting clothes on, but it's like pulling Jesus over you. You are in effect becoming clothed with him, authentically so, but true as true gets. You are being clothed with Jesus. And this is the gospel in a picture. If you have not heard the gospel of Jesus Christ this morning,

let me just tell you very, very quickly, here's what it is. It's that you didn't deserve to be clothed with anything. That there's a holy God and there's unholy you. And that holy God said, I'm gonna make a way. I'm gonna invite people into my family. I'm gonna make a way for them to have fellowship with me, to be united with me. I'm gonna send Jesus to live a perfect life and to die a death that he did not deserve. And that death is died on our behalf. And we then are given, so Jesus dies our death, because we all deserve to die because of our sin. Jesus dies our death, we live his life. This is this clothing that we're talking about that we get to all the righteousness, all the perfection that Jesus had, we get to wear that by God's mercy because he loves us, not because we deserve it. This is the gospel. So it says to put on the new self, put on Jesus, created after the lightness of God,

in true righteousness and holiness. So look, let's begin to put this together. You and I, we need to begin to build a discipline of worship. And look, we're doing that this morning. It's great, it's great. Singing the word of God, it's great. Listening to the word of God, it's good. But you need to have a discipline of worship that includes corporate worship, which is here together. Personal worship. You need to be able to read the Bible on your own. You need to be able to pray on your own. And sometimes you need to even find momentary worship, just like some happenstance worship. Like you're in the car and you're like, and you feel like the Lord's saying like, hey, why don't you take a second and pray right now? You're like, okay, I'm here for it, let's pray. Let's do whatever you wanna talk about. Sometimes you just need that momentary worship, that moment right there.

If that's the only thing you're going on, I would say maybe broaden the horizon a little bit. So corporate worship, personal worship, and just kind of this normal happenstance momentary kind of worship. Take time to behold Jesus's grace and majesty and mercy. Reject conformity, reject your old life, and pray and mean it. Pray Jesus, clothe me in your right. And righteousness, clothe me in your newness.

Unless you are doing something like I just described, you will not make it. I'm not an alarmist. I don't get chicken little very often. If you're not doing something like this, the sky is definitely falling. Unless you are, it doesn't have to follow everything I just laid out. But if you're not having a time where you are pouring out your heart to the Lord and you are saying to Him, Lord, I love you. Lord, I wanna be with you. I wanna sacrifice things for you. And you know it's not perfect. I'm not, you're not pointing to some awesome record that you have, but you're just saying, Lord, I want this. I wanna come to you. I wanna lay my life on the altar. I wanna be a living sacrifice for you. Unless you're willing to do that, then you're not taking steps two and three. If you're just trying to clean up your life by stopping doing bad things and starting doing good things,

I'm telling you, I'm telling you, unless you are worshiping your Creator, it won't work. You're just going to trade problems. Colossians 3:10, let's read that. Colossians 3:10 is another, we read 8 and 9, now we're gonna read 10. You have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator, renewed in knowledge. We are renewed by knowing God more. Remember what I said about what you study, you kind of assume the way that something is organized is the way that when you study it, your brain organizes itself the same way of what you're studying. So when you take time to behold your Creator, when you take time to meditate on His mercy, His grace, all of His good deeds, when you meditate on that, something begins to change in you. Now I wanna give you a few warnings. Number one, I already gave you this one a little bit. It's organic.

It's organic. It's not mechanical. Let me explain what I mean. Organic growth versus mechanical growth. Tim Keller, I owe the man everything on this one. If I have a pile of bricks and I throw more bricks on, that pile is growing. That's not what we're talking about. That's mechanical growth. That's just adding some of the same thing to the thing and the thing gets bigger. Organic growth is something that happens on the inside that blossoms on the outside. Organic growth is slow. Organic growth takes time. Organic growth takes like packing things in, in faith that you know one day it will come to fruition. We talk about this all the time. The Bible's full of this kind of language where change is not happening overnight, change happens slow. So I'll tell you, it's organic and not mechanical. It's also mystical and it's not very procedural. And that's why I hesitate a little bit on prescribing,

like, oh, just do A, B, and C and this thing will happen. I mean, it's not... Some things do have a procedure and it's fine. We just actually just talked about one where it's worship, rejection, and renewal, and that's great. But even in the middle of that, even in the middle of worship and rejection and renewal, there is a mystical thing that is happening that I cannot explain. Where somehow by God's power, by his mercy, by his Spirit, he is changing you from the inside out. I don't know. There's no chemical. I can't measure the photosynthesis of the Holy Spirit shining on you and that's producing something in you. And I can't. I want to even, but I can't. It's just mystical. It just happens. And so with that, I just want to tell you, man, study the Bible and memorize Scripture.

If I have beat a drum this summer, I have beat this drum. We have verse cards to memorize right outside. And they are there for you to just... They're not hard. They're not long. They are helpful and they can remind you of the sermons that we've been going through this summer. And that is not necessarily that you would memorize words in order, but that in repeating that, you might worship. That in repeating that, the Holy Spirit might use that to just like spark something in your mind.

That when you read that you have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator, that the Holy Spirit's gonna use that to do something in you, to like spark something, to start a fire, it's gonna change you kind of from the inside out. And it's a thing that you and I cannot explain. And then if somebody tried to, I would be extremely suspicious of them.

It is just God's prerogative. The Holy Spirit wants to change you from the inside out. The way that you grab hold of that, the way that you say, I'm ready for change, is when you are worshiping, when you are opening scripture, when you're reading his word, when you are praying to him, when you are praying these things that you don't even know, like you were saying, God, I don't wanna do this anymore. Help me do something different. Look, you don't even know the beginnings of what that means. You don't know that, but you're definitely trusting the Lord for it. You're saying, Lord, I have these desires and I don't want them, but I'll replace them with other desires. Well, like God's not looking at you going like, what are the desires, Drew? Can you name them for me? Because if you can't name them, I don't know if I can, no. God's like, I'm ready for that. Let's go, let's do it.

God wants you to change. He wants you to become more like Jesus. He wants you to become like Jesus while being yourself. I know that's weird, but it's true. That me fully matured in Christ, it looks very different than you fully matured in Christ. The Lord has made us different. That's part of the spice of life, okay? But that's what God wants to do. He wants you to be conformed into the image of his son. He wants you to look like Jesus. He wants you to worship Jesus and he doesn't wanna do that in some dull, drab way. He's laced that entire process with joy and goodness.

So here's my encouragement today. This change that's coming, this change that the Lord wants to bring into your life, all of these things that are, that they can seem really far off. They can seem kind of impossible. I wanna end with this story. There's this, there's this Veggie Tales episode, I know, it never starts well whenever you say there's this Veggie Tales episode.

There's this Veggie Tales episode. Called The Snoodles Tale. Oh, it's so good. I mean, you ever watch Veggie Tales with your kids and you're holding back tears in the middle of it and you're like, this is a great veggie tale? You know, and you just start not trying to, ah, it's so good. And if you could find it, watch it. It's called The Snoodles Tale. So noodle with an S, A Snoodles Tale. And in it, this kid gets, he's a little kid character and he is just not measuring up in all the classic ways. Not big enough, not strong enough, not whatever. And then he pretty much meets God. I'm giving you the very short form of the story. He meets God and God paints him a picture of what he will look like.

Man, it's so good. He gives him a picture of, of stupid cartoon. Oh, gets me. He gives him a picture of what he can look like. And I think that if a lot of us could see David come on up, I don't think I can finish, bro. Ah, let's pray, let's pray. Lord, thank you for all these dreams that you have for us. Thank you for, thank you for the breakthrough that you are drawing us into. Thank you for your great care for us. These small things that seem so big to us and you could just, you could scoff at all of them. They are so small compared to history. Compared to eternity, they're so small, but you don't do that to us.

You meet us right where we are, you help us understand that you care. Lord, we thank you for caring for us even. When it's hard for us to dream. That's your name that we pray, amen.