Breaking the Shackles

Back in Numbers, we have the story of the 12 different spies that Moses sent into the Promised Land. So they had gone through their journey, they crossed the desert, they were prepared to go into the Promised Land, and he sent 12 men to scope it out. And they came back. And Ten said, it's amazing! It's a beautiful place, it's got everything you'd want, but we can't go in there.

There's walled cities, there's armies, there's vicious people, and there's giants, and we're just like grasshoppers. And two of the men said, it's incredible, and God's given it to us, and God's going to take care of all that. Ten men saw one thing, and two men saw something else. Now, it's interesting, they had all been slaves in Egypt a year before. They had all watched God destroy the greatest empire in the world at the time.

They had all crossed the Red Sea. They had all eaten manna for a year. They all had seen the same miracles. They had all seen the pillar of fire, the pillar of smoke every day in the tabernacle. And yet, ten of them were there, and they turned the hearts of the Israelites against them, against following Moses, and God put them back out into the wilderness. Which shows that you can take people out of the slavery, but sometimes you can't take the slave out of the person.

They're so conditioned. And that's what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about how do we learn with the Kingdom of God values? How do we learn to respond to the events that happen to us all the time? We are very event-driven, right? We get up in the morning and say, I have to go to work. That's an event I have to go to. I have to plan it out. I have to get there. When I get there, different things are going to happen.

Different problems are going to come along. Different assignments are going to interact with different people. So what we have is we're event-driven, which is not always very good for us to be event-driven. Now, we have to plan with the face of events every day. But if we're driven simply by the events, we end up sort of being like those ten spies that all you see are the problems. So how do we change that? How do we learn to respond better to the world in which we live in?

And that's what we're going to cover today. And what we're going to look at – I'm going to walk just a little bit because I like to read off the slides – we're going to go through the process. Now, this is not a lecture in cycle babble. Okay, we're not done psychology here. What we're going to do is look at, though, how the brain works.

There are certain things about the brain that God designed in us that His Spirit must work in us. It must work in us to change who we are. So when we look at this, we all face events that happen to us. You know, good events, bad events, and they affect what we do next.

If you're really hungry and you get up in the morning and you say, okay, we've been planning this, the feast this year, we're going to go to the pancake house, which there's a whole bunch of them here. I've never been to one. The pancake house. And you get there and you have your kids and you're about to go into the pancake house and you realize that's an hour wait. The event that you plan for has been changed by another event, right?

And there's a lot of ways to take that. You can be so upset that you're miserable for an hour and you don't enjoy the meal. And if you're little kids, that's probably what's going to happen to them. So events produce actions. And there's steps to this. We start with, I call them personal filters. They're things we've learned in life. Sometimes it's just DNA. I mean, we all have certain personalities. So we're going to talk about these personal filters. We also have emotional processes. And when we talk about conversion, which is what we're talking about, sometimes it's the emotional processes we don't deal with much.

We deal with the doctoral impact, the biblical impact of the knowledge on the change of us, of who we are. But the emotional processes are very difficult. Then we have mental processes, and we have to talk about that. It's what we think. And that leads to an action. And guess what the action leads to? Another event. Because something happens from the action, right? So this is the cycle we live in all day long. Once again, it doesn't take much to figure out, yeah, that's basically what we do all day long.

We go through these cycles. So, let's talk about it a little bit. The event. Now, that can be the consequence of a personal action, right? We make a decision, and there's a consequence of that. And sometimes there's good consequences, and sometimes there's bad consequences.

Or, here's what's so frustrating. So many of the events in our lives happen from outside of us. Things that we didn't plan on, things that we don't want. You don't plan the car accident that someone, you know, they're driving drunk and they hit you, right?

So there's these other events that we have little control over and many times no control. And that can be so emotionally, mentally, spiritually debilitating the things that happen to us. Then you have those personal filters. Now, these include generic traits. You know, I've heard people say, well, you know, I feel so bad. I'm an introvert, and I feel like extroverts are so superior.

No, they're not. They're just extroverts. And you're just an introvert. There's not like one superior of the other. It's just who you are. And sometimes we have to accept that. I wish I was 6'3", 240 pounds, and could have played middle linebacker in the NFL, but that's not going to happen. Okay? So there's genetic traits, past experiences. We have filters, a lot of filters, that are based on past experiences. So we prejudge situations we're going into. We have perceived perceptions. We have our belief system, and that includes our belief system in God, how we view Christianity, and self-awareness. Now we're going to have to talk about all these things, okay? Now, we then have the emotional process, which is really shaped by all those other things. You ever see a baby that's two months old, and you're watching that baby, and someone says, boy, those parents are going to have their hands full. Because they just lose their temper every little thing. They're frustrated all the time, and there's just some genetic thing happening, and they're just like, oh, wow. That's going to be a hard child to work with, right? And yet sometimes those children grow up to be the ones who produce the most. Then you have the mental process, the response patterns based on thoughts. Now, as we go through this, the mental process is the one thing that we do have more control over, and then the action. We do have control over our actions. So we don't have a lot of control around a lot of things, but we do have control over some things. The problem here is that there is a gap between an event and some of the personal filters, because in these personal filters, we have reflexes.

Now, I'll show you what I mean. You're born with some reflexes. Most babies have a reflex to loud noises. You see that? They get scared, their eyes get real big, their hands go out, right? Or falling. If you have a baby and you do this, they're just this panic, and their arms and legs are failing. That's a reflex.

Or if you go towards their face with your hand, they'll close their eyes. That's a reflex. We have reflexes designed in us so that we will survive. God put them there, okay? If not, we'd all die. So we have all these reflexes. We also have learned reflexes. I'll share one with you. My son and I, years ago, we were hiking about 7,000 feet up in the Chizos Mountains on the border of Mexico, in Texas.

And we had hiked up, and we're going down, and we're both exhausted. And we're going down, and we're both sort of just not even paying attention to the beauty anymore. We're just going down, right? And all of a sudden, I stopped. I mean, just stopped dead.

He ran into the back of me. He said, what's wrong? And I stepped back. At this point, he had figured out, too, he stepped back. And in front of me was a...they have a rattlesnake there that has a green color to it. It's the only place in the world that has this light green color. And it's trying to curl up because I'm about to step on it.

And it's just warning me. I don't even remember hearing it at first. All of a sudden, I realized I heard the rattle. Now, that was a reflex. Why was it a reflex? Because in my life, I've heard that sound before. And my brain said...no, my brain just...it was a reflex. I had an emotional reaction, which was absolute fear, and I stopped and stepped backwards. I didn't think, oh, that's probably a rattlesnake. I wonder if it's green. I wonder how big it is. By that time, I'd have stepped on it, right?

The reflex kept me from stepping on it. And there was an emotional reaction of fear. I had learned throughout life to have fear to that sound. And so the reflex kept me from getting hurt. Here's the problem with emotional reflexes that we learn. Sometimes, they're not very good. We have all kinds of emotional reflexes, and they have effects on our lives. You ever have somebody you work with that's just really hard to get along with?

Until you get to the point you hate going to work, right? When you see them, oh, no. They're going to come up and they're griping, they're going to complain, and they're going to bother me, and they're not going to let me get my work done.

And he's just a hard person to work with. Over time, just seeing them causes an emotional reaction. Over time, when you get in your car to go to work, it causes an emotional reaction, and you start thinking about that person, right? Now your mental reaction is responding to your emotional reaction, which is okay if you're going to step on a snake. It's not okay if you're going to go to work and have a good day. And so what happens is now you get to work, you're already in a bad mood, and you're drinking a second cup of coffee, which you shouldn't have, and now you're getting nervous from the coffee, because you're having this emotional reaction, or you're really happy he didn't come to work that day.

And then you go home, and you tell your spouse, and your spouse is upset, and that emotional reaction, that reflex on that person is controlling your thoughts. And because it's controlling your thoughts, it's ruining your life. So much so that after working there for a year, you hate going to work, and then you meet somebody that says, Oh, do you know Joe? You say, Yeah, I work with him. You know, I met him. He seems like a nice guy.

And what's your next event? Oh, no, I've got to tell this person how rotten he is. And you spend the next 20 minutes telling this person what a terrible person Joe is, and how rotten it is, stay away from him, and now that person is going to have an emotional reflex to Joe, and they don't even know them. It's interesting, because reflexes are so important that there's... This is one thing that, oh, probably in the last, about 20 years ago, they did research and found out the brain doesn't work anything like we think it does. One other thing is reflex, especially emotionally stored reflexes, are stored in a different place than your cognitive memory.

Now, it comes into your brain so fast, you don't know it into the consciousness, but it is a little bit faster. That's why I didn't step on the snake. And at that point, I stopped and then said, Oh, a snake. And that's what kept me from getting bitten. What happens is, we get controlled by that reflex so much that it controls how we think. And it controls how we think, and it's the thoughts that God says he wants us to learn to have control over, because you can't always control your emotions.

You ever be deep into some kind of just depression or grief, and someone comes up and very sincerely says, You just shouldn't feel that way. You can suddenly now flip a switch and change the way you feel. Actually, probably it does change the way you feel, because you're not depressed anymore. You just want to punch the person in the nose, right? Which isn't a good emotion either. Here's where a lot of sin takes place. When our emotional reactions control our thoughts. And then, of course, we have the mental process, which we learn, and that leads to our actions.

Okay? So, next slide. How change happens. Once again, if you're trying to change events all the time, you're going to be a miserable person. This is what we call a control freak. They try to control everything around them, everything that happens, and they try to control every person. Because that way, I can control my anxiety, because I have power over everything, but we don't. One of the things we learn is God has power, and we're not God, right? First step is I'm not God.

That's really important. I don't have power, and I'm not God, and I can't control everything. And then those personal filters, you don't control your genetics. You don't control your past experiences. And here's one of the problems. In order to spiritually grow, there's times we have to give up the past, and we hold on to our past way too much. As I talked about on the first Holy Day, we're carrying baggage we're not supposed to carry. Our wagons are full of stuff that we're not supposed to have.

We're supposed to dump the past and move towards where God is taking us. And so much of the time, we're still trapped in the past because of things that have happened to us that we no longer control. It's already happened. I remember one time a man telling me a man had done something wrong to him, and the man died. And he never got a resolution. The man never apologized. And he said to me, it's if the man is reaching up out of the grave and pulling me in there with him.

And I said, yeah, I understand that emotion I understand, but boy, is that going to hurt you. Because you're not hurting him. He's dead. And he can't do anything about it, and you can't do anything about it. But we can make changes in how we relate to the past, how we relate to our preconceived perceptions, how we can change our belief systems, and how we can be self-aware. So how do you change the emotions? You change filters. We can't process everything only through our emotions, until our emotions are educated by God.

That's 1 Corinthians 13, fruits of the Spirit. That's when our inner person is being educated by God, and that changes our emotions. That's why psychology can only go so far and is flawed. It can't change the corrupt human nature. It can only help people in very limited ways.

Corrupt human nature. By the way, this process requires God's Spirit. You and I can't do this on our own. This requires God's Spirit working in us. So we change the mental process, and when we do, we now have a choice of actions. It's in the mental process that we talk to ourselves. When I do our yearly, when I go through and do all of our taxes, my wife just leaves, goes into another part of the house. And here's sort of what happens when I talk to myself. And you say, I don't talk to myself. Yeah, you do. You talk to yourself all the time.

Because the first time I make a mistake, I'll say something like in my head, Oh man, that was a stupid thing to do. Now I've got to go back and do this. By the time I make the second mistake, I'm getting really frustrated. I'm having an emotional reaction. It's learned because I hate doing my taxes. And it's something like, man, alive! If I keep doing these dumb mistakes, it's going to take me forever to do this. By the third time, I'm saying to myself, you stupid idiot!

By the fourth time, I'm walking up to my wife and saying, I'm sure I have Alzheimer's. I'm having an event. Because I've convinced myself I'm an idiot. Right? You do that all the time. I do that all the time. We talk to ourselves. You know why God, or the reason He gives us the Bible, one of the reasons? It is to reveal Himself. What is to teach us what to think is to teach us what to think. Think of the process you went through for some of you who didn't grow up in the church, and you learned about the Sabbath.

Wow, that was a hard process. I mean, you had an event. Someone told you about the Sabbath, and you thought they were some kind of religious nut. Personal filters told them they're a religious nut. They're not a true Christian. I go to church on Sunday because that's when Jesus did it, and He was resurrected on Sunday. And that's the way we're supposed to do it. And this Sabbath-keeping person, what are they? Oh, they're just a Judaizer. They're trying to make me a Jew, and I'm not a Jew.

I'm a Christian. Those are the kind of things you think. Those are the kind of things you tell yourself. And the emotional process is... I mean, there is a strong emotional process against that person. How dare they challenge true Christianity? And then if you go through the mental process of studying it, a lot of times, to prove that they're wrong, what happens? God starts talking to you.

And you say to your friend, you know what? Jesus kept the Sabbath, and they look at you and say, have you been talking to that other person? Boy, they're starting to just really twist your thinking, aren't they? No, He did keep the Sabbath. And in this mental process, God starts to change all those filters.

And He starts to change your emotions. And here's the problem. No positive change isn't without pain. Emotional pain. And the stress of... I can't be... No, no, no. My Baptist Church can't be wrong. The Methodist can't be wrong. Even the Catholics keep something. I mean, no, not everybody can be wrong. And in this mental process, as you learn the thinking, there is a change of emotional reflexes. I mean, if I asked you today, when there was...

and for some of you, you know, there was a time you thought the Sabbath, keeping the Sabbath, was a bad thing. And now you look forward to it as a highlight of the week. How did that change? How did you come out of slavery? Because God works right there in that mental process. And that's where we get to make the choices.

We get to make the choices. If you make your choices with your emotions, most of those aren't very good. Until the emotions are actually changed by God, it's in that mental process. That's where it happens. This is where we talk to ourselves. And where do those things come from? What we learned as children, our parents, our teachers, our experience maybe in a church, our experience with our friends. In other words, it's the experience of living in this world that's caused us. The way we think has been shaped and molded. And this has to be changed. Romans 12, verse 1. Let's read Romans 12, 1.

I just want to give you the process. And we're going to show you how it works a little bit. And once again, all processes put down in charts are not...this is a lot more messier than this. I wish it was this easy. Human nature is not this nice and clean in little boxes. It's messy. Well, welcome to the messiness. This is what God's doing. He's changing us. Conversion. Romans 12, verse 1. I beseech you therefore brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, wholly acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.

This is what makes sense. Well, this only makes sense if your mental processes are being changed. This doesn't make sense any other way. I mean, how do you become a living sacrifice? You know what they do to sacrifices? They kill them. It's sort of an oxymoron. I've got to be a living dead thing? Yeah, that's sort of what this change is that you're going through. Part of you is dying so that you can live.

And Paul understood that. And do not be conformed, verse 2, to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God. Proving here is a mental process. We have to think about it.

And what we have to do is we have to change our self-talk into...well, we have to have the Bible change our self-talk.

The Bible has to change our self-talk.

Genetic makeup. I just picked out a few things that we will decide emotionally, keep us from being able to do what God wants. I can't do that. And here's where it comes out. God can't use me because I'm too much like my mother. I'm only taking things I've heard in counseling, so, you know... How do you know I feel that way? I don't. I'm just taking this from what people say. Or from my own experience, sometimes. Dad was an alcoholic, so I'm never going to overcome my alcohol abuse.

I can't help it. I have a violent temper. I was born this way.

And there may be some truth to that. There may be part of a genetic issue that doesn't mean you can stay that way.

This is all about transformation. That's what Christianity is all about. Accepting Christ as our Savior, accepting Christ's sacrifice for what we deserve, and then, through God's Spirit, being transformed. And this transformation happens inside our hearts. Right? That's what the Scripture says. Which means our mind and our emotions. Both have to be transformed. And you start with, how do you talk to yourself?

I was born a homosexual, and God expects me to be what I am.

Doesn't work, does it? You know why some of you when I read that immediately said, well, that's wrong. Because you replaced it with a Scripture. That's why.

The only way that person is ever going to change is be so close to God and know the Scripture so that in their struggle, which is a horrible struggle, and we need to support people in those struggles. Whether it's alcoholism or... I mean, everybody's coming out of some sin. Well, all of us is a lot of sins, right? We just consider them little sins. But they're... Oh, I don't have any big sins. I have little sins.

But they will replace that with a Scripture, with a God-thought. Isn't that what this is? If this was inspired by God, and I know there's some problems in translation here and there, understanding certain words, but overall we know this is inspired by God. So they're God-thoughts, and as God speaks to us, if we want to change, we have to let God change us.

And if we say, well, I'll just follow God's Holy Spirit, whatever God tells me through His Spirit is what I'll do. But how do you know your thought is from God? People think, oh, all kinds of crazy things came from God.

It's because you'll find it supported in here.

This guides us to know, well, maybe that's my thought. Maybe I'd better go pray about that. Maybe I'd better study that.

1 Corinthians 1. I say, well, it's just my makeup.

You have to understand, I'm a weak and small person. I read this quite often to new people who are coming into the church, and they'll say, why did God call me? And I'll say, you know what? I don't have all the answers to why God does things. He doesn't tell me. But there are certain things He does tell us. So let's go read this.

For you see your calling, brethren, that not many wise, according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, were called. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise. God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty. And the base things of the world that the things which are despised God has chosen. And the things which are not to bring to nothing the things which are.

That no flesh should glory in His presence.

You know why God called you? Well, God shouldn't have called me with all my problems. God called you and me to show the world it could be done.

Because it's not us, it's Him doing it in us. He's called us to show us what He can do. You are to be an example of what God can do. And if you're going to be that example, if I'm going to be that example, we have to learn to think like the Bible tells us to think.

And that's very uncomfortable because we're really comfortable with our emotional and mental processes. And sometimes it's easier to keep the Holy Days and tithes and keep the Sabbath than it is to take the next step of the conversion process. It's letting God change who you are and your heart in the core of who you are as a human being.

See, those things are just the first steps. They're the first steps of the process. If you start going through the Bible thinking like this, you start to find all kinds of instructions on these very things. How about this? Do you say this to yourself when it comes down to your past experiences?

If you knew my background, did you know that God really can't love me? Now, I've heard that one a lot of times. We believe God's love is limited. If you knew what I did in my background, if you knew what I was like when I was younger, God could not love me. You know the danger in that? You find the answer to that?

Look up every scripture that talks about the love of God in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Because if we hold on to that past belief that my past experiences, God can't help me, God can't change me, then what you're saying is the death of Jesus Christ wasn't enough. And I had a man tell me that one. The death of Jesus Christ wasn't enough. He was too evil. I don't know what happened to that man because we couldn't talk anymore. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ isn't enough. I have nothing to give you.

Me? I have nothing to give you. I don't know what happened to him. He was dying from AIDS, but he didn't have AIDS. His guilt was killing him. He'd been thrown out of clinics and hospitals by frustrated doctors, but you don't have AIDS, but you looked at him. He was dying. And it's because his guilt was killing him. Someplace along here, we read those scriptures, and they override.

They override the preconceived reflexes, emotional reflexes that have been developed in us. I'm so ugly. Everybody must treat me the way I want to be treated. Now, I've seen people – they don't say that, but that's how they live life. I'm the center of the universe, and everybody must treat me the way I want to be treated. They're unhappy, and everybody else around them is unhappy, and they don't know how to love others.

I've always been controlled by my anxiety, and I always will be. There's physical reasons for anxiety, and other reasons for anxiety are emotional processes that need to be changed. My whole family was smart, but I'm stupid, and people tell themselves this all the time. You could start filling in all the things you talk to yourself about when no one else is around. And sometimes you say it to yourself out loud.

Some people verbally out loud. Others, it's just in their heads. Philippians 4. I'm just going to a few scriptures, because at the end here I'm going to show you what you have to do to deal with this. Philippians 4, verse 6, Those two verses tell you at least three things you have to do for this to happen. How to change your emotions isn't just saying, I'm going to change my emotions. It's taking this and letting this come to your mind. Letting this come in and then going and doing what it says to you. God says, okay, I understand where you're at.

Let me give you some things to do. And then you go do them. And you begin to receive help. But the self-talk has to stop. Preconceived ideas. We all have a lot of preconceived ideas that are false. God is always angry with me. No, He's not. He is sometimes. Sometimes He just feels compassion for you. Sometimes He's amused by you. Sometimes He suffers with you.

Now God's interaction with us is very complex because He's personally involved with each one of us. He's not always angry with you. Maybe your dad was, but he wasn't God, by the way. Everybody's against me and my family. I've heard that one numerous times. Everybody's against me and my family. I have gone through this one many times. I don't know how many times over the last 40 years I sat in someone's house and said, Oh, this is so much better than I thought it would be.

Why? Because I'm leaving now. Because we had a nice talk for 45 minutes or an hour and drank some tea and it was great. Because I thought you were coming to correct me. And I always say, Why? What did you do? No, don't tell me. We had such a good time. Don't tell me what you did. We'll talk about that another time. And so we have this anxiety or this fear. I had a man one time sit down and tell me all his sins.

I said, Why did you tell him this? He said, I thought that's why you were there. Here. I said, No. I just came to get to know you. I don't even know you. He says, I thought God had revealed my sins to you. So I thought I'd better just tell him to you.

Go talk to God about this, okay? I'll help you. Let's start talking to help you through some of these things, okay? But he actually thought God told me his sins. Scott, have you ever had that happen? Not lately. Yeah. I don't think God taught. I think most people figured out God doesn't talk to us personally. This was years ago. Yeah. You figured out. No. God doesn't talk to those guys personally. So it has to come out of the Bible. One last thing I'm going to bring up here is self-awareness before we sort of wrap up some things.

Self-awareness is a unique human condition. I've only met a few people that were self-aware most of the time. You can't be self-aware. We're too small, too finite to be self-aware all the time. God, on the other hand, is self-aware all the time. What I mean by self-aware isn't knowing what your feelings are, knowing what's going on in your head. To be self-aware is a concept that you are aware of what you're doing and what you're saying and the effects it has on other people.

In other words, you're actually interacting with others, being aware of how they think and how they're feeling and the impact you're having. I worked with a minister years ago, Roger Foster. He was retired, and I just...that man, I just love that man. He taught me so much over the years.

I used to take him visiting. I'd say, I've got an issue, and I can't figure out this person. I've been working with this family two or three times now, and I can't help them in their marriage. Would you come with me? So we had a little routine. We would go, and Roger would say hi, and we'd sit down, and he wouldn't say a word. I would talk to them and ask them some questions. It usually took about 10-15 minutes, and he'd say, can I say something?

I'd say, oh, this is going to be good. Yeah, sure. Mr. Foster appreciated it. And in one sentence, because he understood what was going on, he understood the environment. He wasn't caught up on what was in his head. He was caught up on what was going on. And he would say in one sentence, and I'd watch two people break down, weeping and crying, and I'd think, how does he do that? And it's because he could always figure out, or most of the time, what the core issues were, because he divorced the situation from himself.

He was aware of them. God is extremely self-aware. He's so secure. He's so unselfish. You know, there's no anxiety in God. There's no, you know, I wonder if everybody knows how powerful I am. Okay, that's no problem with God. He knows who he is. Because he's actually interacting with us at our level, understanding everything that's going on with you and what's happening with you. And our first response to that is, at least mine is, then why aren't you doing more?

And he's saying, well, I'm doing all I need to do. You need some work here. You need some help here. I'm not going to fix everything for you, child. I'm just not going to do it. Sometimes my self-talk is, Son, get up off the floor. You've got things you need to do. Go do it.

Okay. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. So you've got some problems. Tomorrow, go visit some people who have real problems. God does that. I know it comes from God. Why? Because it's in the Scripture. I could go to Scriptures where God's telling people that. God is, ah, yeah, got it. Because if I go by my own thoughts and feelings, usually I'm not self-aware much of anything, except me. Why would he say that? Because you're like that, too.

That's why. Self-awareness is part of this Christian process of growing. And we need to be self-aware of others, both in the church and outside the church, and how we are interacting with them. You know, the first thing I think of is 1 Corinthians 13, agape, and the Sermon on the Mount. If you want to grow in self-awareness, I mean study. When I say study, take these verses and write them down, either by hand or type them out. Not just cut and paste. And print them on your mind. So here's the things that I want to encourage you to do. One is ask God to help you recognize your wrong filters.

In other words, you're asking God to go inside your heart and mind and show you what you need to change. And this is going to be hard. I'm not telling you something that's easy. I'm telling you something that's going to challenge you at the core of who you are.

That you're going to find out your human nature is still corrupted. You say, well, yeah, but I've been keeping the Ten Commandments for 30 years. Good! God's taken you that far. And he says it's not enough. We have to become Christ-like. Somehow, you and I aren't finished products to the resurrection. So you're going to say, oh, this is too much. Sure it is. God has to do things in us and is completed at the resurrection. We're not ever going to be perfect until then. But we're in the process of being made perfect. That's what sanctification is.

That's the concept of holiness in the Bible. We are being made holy. All of you are already justified because of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. You have a right to go and have a relationship with God. He's opened the door. Jesus Christ says, come, child. Come up here and talk to the Father. That's already happened in your life. But now we're being sanctified. We're being made holy. We're being converted. And so now we have to have this process take place. Do a series of in-depth Bible studies and write down the Scriptures that apply to your personal filters.

Ask God to reveal to you what you have to work on and then ask Him to find that in the Bible. And you find it. And when you find it, you write it down or you type it out and you post it. You put it in a notebook. You put it on the mirror. Some of them on the mirror. You put them all over the place. And you read them and you read them and they read them.

And then sometimes something's going to happen like that impossible guy at work. And he's just driving you nuts. And suddenly that thought comes into your mind. Well, we were yet enemies. Christ died for me. There you go. He died for him too. He just doesn't know it. Yeah. God's already let me know that. This guy doesn't know it.

He's just a big buffoon and doesn't know it. Yeah, he is a big buffoon. But he doesn't know it. Someday he has to face God too. And then you're thankful that God is already working with you because probably he would be just like him.

Right? Why would we be different than anybody else? Why don't we just like everybody else? So do as a series of studies, get out your concordance. Get out the Bible. Do it online. You know, you can go online, get into any Bible program and type in depression, Scriptures on depression, and you can get hundreds of them.

Don't just, you know, print them out, cut them out, write them down. Let God talk to you. Make this your self-talk. The next time you're just so frustrated with your wife or your kids or your husband, go read what you've written down about frustration.

Go read it. Put it in here because what's coming into your mind? Scriptures, let God talk to you. Let God come in and talk to you. Put these Scriptures that they're just part of our hearts. Analyze your self-talk and use the Scriptures of self-talk. And then ask God to help you become more self-aware of your interactions with others.

That there are times when you can be totally outside yourself and totally involved with how can I help this person?

Now, what can I say? You know, sometimes it'll come to your mind. A Scripture.

You'll give them something from God. Every time I go and I'm talking to a person that's dying, every time I go into a situation where someone's burying a child or a friend or their husband or their wife, and there's this, what am I going to say? What am I going to say that just doesn't sound like everything else? And a lot of times it's a simple Scripture about suffering that God will help us through. Not that God's going to heal all this tomorrow, right? Oh, you'll be okay. Yeah.

No. It is helping that person turn towards God, and you give them a little peace of what God says.

Because we're being trained by the Scripture. You and I, if you've been at this long enough, you're pretty much trained on a lot of doctrines, of the core doctrines, right? You know what Scriptures go to if someone says, oh, you can eat pork, and you can whip out the Scriptures. But you know, showing them those Scriptures doesn't change them. What changes them is when they go home and they think about it, and it starts eating away at their brain, and they start looking it up, and they go through the whole process of change. Oh, yeah, no. Yeah, I can't mean that. Peter said, or God told Peter, you can eat anything. Then they study it, and it's like, no, that's not exactly what's being said there. I don't like this. And so they sit it aside for two months, until they see you again, and they have a...they actually have a reflex action to you. And they say, people don't eat pork. And you know, Peter didn't say what I thought he said. And they either accept or reject. But you know what you accept or reject? The truth. We can't let our emotions lead us to accepting or rejecting truth. We have to come to truth, and we accept it because we say, no, this is God, what God is saying.

It is there in these mental processes that we change how we talk to ourselves. And we let God talk to us. Well, let God talk to us.

It helps our lives now because we're a whole lot happier. It doesn't take away all the stress. You keep going back to God. It doesn't take away all the anxiety. You keep going back to God. It doesn't help you not sin every time you keep going back to God. Because remember, it's just an ongoing process of God changing us. But so much of it is we have to think like Christ, which means we have to think Scripture. We have to think the Bible. And that's even at the core of our personal issues, not just our doctrine, but the core of our personal issues. And when we do so, we will find that we won't be driven so much by events as they happen. We'll be driven by something that happens inside of us when events happen. Because we will be more open and we will be more prepared to receive what God's Spirit, what He is doing through His Spirit, is doing in us. And then it is God helping us react to everything. Because we've been prepared, we know His thoughts, we know what He's taught to us, and events may happen, but our response comes from God.