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Emotional Strength *

January 13, 2014 by Leave a Comment

samson

 

 

 

 

 

Samson – Emotional Strength *
Sycamore Creek Church
January 12/13, 2014
Tom Arthur 

Peace friends!

Today we continue a series exploring Samson, the judge of Israel who had high highs and low lows.  Samson was set aside at birth for God to save the people from the Philistines. Israel had become so closely connected and assimilated with the Philistines that they were at risk of losing their own identity and God’s call on their lives.  Samson was a man of great potential but made self destructive decisions.  He was an incredibly strong man with a dangerously weak will.  Last week we saw that he struggled with lust (I want it!), entitlement (I deserve it!), and pride (I can handle it!).  In the midst of those struggles this strong man became weak.  Today we’re going to explore a further key idea in Samson’s life:

Samson was emotion-driven not Spirit-led.

Now it may seem odd to say that a man known for his strength was emotion-driven.  We men don’t like to think of ourselves as emotional.  We say that women are emotional, and men are strong.  But this isn’t really true.  The difference is more about how men and women process emotion.  Women talk.  Men act.  Women say, “Come over and have tea so we can talk.”  Men do beer and balls…football, basketball, baseball, hockeyball.

Let me give you an example from my own marriage.  Here’s the difference between parenting styles with me and Sarah when it comes to potty training.  Sarah likes to talk it out with Micah: “Micah, do you need to go potty?  Micah, don’t you think you should give it a try?  Micah, it’s so much easier to go potty than to change a diaper.”  She tries to creatively cajole him into it.  The more frustrated she gets the more she talks to him about what he should do.  Here’s how I make it work: “Micah, go sit on the potty.”  If he doesn’t go, I pick him up and make him go.  The more frustrated I get, the fewer words I use and the more I rely on physical power to persuade.  Sarah: Creative Cajoler.  Tom: Physical Power to Persuade.

While generalizations are not always true, this one can be helpful for our exploration of Samson today.  Too often men allow their emotions to lead their actions.  You need to engage with kids when you get home, but you sit in front of the TV because you’re emotionally fried after working hard.  You do or say something and should apologize, but you don’t because of pride.  Someone angers you and you explode in anger even though you know you shouldn’t.

Paul, the first Christian missionary said:

Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.  For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh…
Galatians 5:16-17 NRSV

Emotions aren’t always bad, in fact they’re a gift.  But when we let our emotions take over, they become the “flesh” that Paul is talking about that is opposed to God’s Spirit at work in us.

So let’s get to Samson.  We find in the story of Samson a battle of the riddle.  Samson has a competition with a bunch of other guys around a riddle.  Do men always have to compete?  But he doesn’t leave it at a competition. He adds a bet.  Do men always have to bet to make the competition fun?  Here’s the riddle:

Out of the eater came something to eat.
Out of the strong came something sweet.
Judges 14:14 NRSV

So the answer to this riddle is a lion and honey.  Samson killed a lion, came back later and found in its corpse a bunch of bees and honey.  The Philistine men can’t figure it out, so they threaten Samson’s Philistine wife (not Delilah), and she cries to Samson and gets the answer from him.  He tells her, and she tells them.  They solve the riddle and Samson is furious.  He says:

If you hadn’t plowed with my heifer, you would not have found out my riddle.
Judges 14:18 NRSV

OK, guys.  First, don’t let another guy plow with your wife.  Second, don’t call your wife a heifer!  Instead of being led by the Spirit, Samson becomes driven by his emotion, particularly his anger.  He takes the lives of 30 innocent men to pay his bet.  Samson then leaves the party, and his wife’s dad thinks that he’s abandoned his daughter so he gives her to another man.  Samson comes back several weeks later and finds that his wife has been given to someone else.  So he takes 150 foxes, ties them together, lights their tails on fire, and sets them lose in the Philistine grain fields.  Philistines become furious and burn Samson’s wife and her dad.

Anger leads to a destructive cycle of violence in Samson’s life and becomes Samson’s default emotion.  But what did Samson have to be angry about?  He chose to marry with “uncircumcised Philistines” (this is a religious distinction not ethnic distinction), against his parents’ advice.  He picked the riddle.  He gave the answer away.  He took the foxes to burn the field.  Who should Samson be angry with?

Too often anger becomes the default emotion of many men.  We’re angry at the world, when we should be angry at ourselves.  We end up taking it out on someone else.  My wife won’t meet my physical needs, but have you met her emotional needs?  My kids don’t want to spend time with me now, but did you spend time with them then?  I’m angry at God about my circumstances, but they are the natural consequences of my choices.  Let’s call it what it is: I need forgiveness.  I need accountability.  I need to apologize to my kids, my wife, my boss, etc., and I need make real changes.  [Side note: wives, when your husband apologizes, receive the apology.  You are on humble ground.  Yes, keep your expectation of changed behavior, but an apologizing husband is a humbled husband.]

The anger and violence in Samson raises all kinds of questions about God, God’s people, and how God works in our world.  We read:

The spirit of the Lord rushed on him, and the ropes that were on his arms became like flax that has caught fire, and his bonds melted off his hands.  Then he found a fresh jawbone of a donkey, reached down and took it, and with it he killed a thousand men.
Judges 15:14-16 NRSV

How can God’s Spirit give him power and he be so violent?  Here’s a distinction that is very important to understand.  We can have the gifts of God’s Spirit in us and lack the fruit of God’s Spirit.  What do I mean?  Think about that passage about love that gets read at every wedding you’ve ever been at.  It’s from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians and it says:

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.  If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Corinthians 13:1-3 NRSV

You can have the supernatural gift of tongues and speak in all kinds of language but without love, you’re a noisy gong.  You can prophecy about the future in miraculous ways, but without love you’re nothing.  You can have amazing faith in God, but without love it’s nothing.  You can choose voluntary poverty and asceticism, but without love you’re really poor.  In other words, God gives all of us gifts, some of them quite impressive on the outside, but the character traits of God’s Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control—may be totally absent.  We can have external excellence and internal rot.  We are then white-washed tombs.

Angry, violent and abusive men are often loved by many, and many are surprised to find that at home they verbally or physically abuse their wives.  Powerful spiritual leaders can lead secret sinful lives (which is really most of us!).  Samson is super strong but without love he is just an aggressive animal, a violent tyrant, a brutal bully.  To be Spirit-led is to have not just the gifts of God’s Spirit at work in us but also the fruit, to have the talent and the character of Christ. 

I have had to wrestle with anger myself.  I’ve had to look at the rot in my own life.  Anger has raised its head more often that I would like.  Something I’ve come to notice is that anger is not the opposite of love, apathy is the opposite of love.  Anger and love are often very closely related.  In fact, anger by itself isn’t necessarily bad.  One book I read suggested that anger is a physiological readiness to respond (Neil Clark Warren, Make Anger Your Ally).  Anger is actually a secondary emotion to frustration, fear, or hurt.  Anger has a lot of power in it, but we need to take that power and put it purpose, to let it be Spirit-led rather than destructive.  Paul tells us:

Be angry but do not sin.
Ephesians 4:26 NRSV 

Anger by itself is not a sin.  It’s what you do with the anger.  Will you let it be led by the character of Christ in you?  Let me suggest from my own wrestling with anger a To Do List and a To Don’t List.  First the To Don’t list:

To Don’t List

  1. Don’t curse at your loved ones.  When was the last time you called your wife a word that better describe a female dog?  Don’t ever call your wife a B#%^&.  Don’t do it.  Just don’t.  It’s not kind or gentle.  Don’t aim any curse words at her.  Don’t use aggressive language to try to motivate your wife or your kids.  That’s being emotion-drive rather than Spirit-led.
  2. Don’t belittle your loved ones.  Don’t tell your loved ones how bad they are.  Don’t tell them they’re worthless or won’t amount to anything.  Don’t tell your wife this or your kids.  Don’t tear down your family with your words.  That’s being emotion-driven, not Spirit-led.
  3. Don’t use physical power to coerce your wife.  Don’t try to get your wife to do what you want her to do by treating her like she’s a toddler.  You don’t pick your wife up and move her.  She is her own person.  You don’t discipline your wife as though she were a child.  You don’t hit your wife in any way.  This is being emotion-driven rather than Spirit-led.
  4. Don’t always use physical power with your kids.  If your go-to method of discipline with your kids is always physical power, you are allowing anger to drive you rather than creative loving discipline.  Yes, restraint is often warranted.  Holding your kids back from hurting themselves is one thing.  Hitting them or pushing them is another.  If you find yourself not being very creative in your discipline and resorting to physical power over and over again, you’re being emotion-driven rather than Spirit-led.

To Do List

  1. Slow it down.  When you’re angry, you’ve got to slow things down.  Emotions and decisions can add up quickly.  How do you slow it down so that you can be Spirit-led rather than emotion-driven?  Here’s how…
  2. Walk away and cool down.  When you get angry you enter into a state of being flooded.  When your heart-beat gets over 100BMP, all kinds of things are happening in your body with adrenaline and hormones.  You won’t think straight when your heartbeat hits 100BPM.  You’ve got to walk away and let your body get back to a normal state so that you’re Spirit-led and not emotion-driven.
  3. Ask yourself: “What do I really want?”  That’s a key question that often gets lost  amidst anger.  The end goal gets missed and short-term goals of dominating the moment take over.  “What do I really want?” requires you think about what God really wants in that situation, and that’s being Spirit-led rather than emotion-driven.
  4. Come back and talk it out.  Take the initiative to come back.  Take the initiative to talk it out.  Don’t let your wife be the one who always brings difficult topics up.  Be a leader in your family.  Talk about the hard stuff.  God is in the hard stuff.  That’s being Spirit-led rather than emotion-driven.
  5. Identify and be aware of anger triggers.  Notice over time what things or situations trigger anger in you.  Consider keeping an anger journal.  The more aware you are of your anger triggers, the more you can use the power of anger to Spirit-led purposes rather than emotion-driven action.
  6. Use your anger to give you power to creatively seek what you want (long-term) rather than the short-term (explosion).  Use the power of anger to motivate you to find creative ways to discipline your kids (ask for help!), creative problem solving with your wife (ask for help!), and loving solutions.  Love is looking for the solution you would want if you were the person you were angry with.  That’s being Spirit-led rather than emotion-driven.
  7. Let your need drive you to God, and God will meet your deepest need.  Acknowledge you are in need.  Back to Samson:

By then he was very thirsty, and he called on the LORD…
Judges 15:18 NRSV

This is the first time that Samson called on the Lord through all of this!  He basically ignores God through this entire angry outburst with the Philistines, but when he finally acknowledges his need for water—a need that he can’t solve by himself—he meets the Lord again.

Men, when you call out to God, God’s strength comes in your weakness.  You can be a Spirit-led man of strength (gifts) and love (fruit) rather than an emotion-driven man of anger.  Acknowledge your need for God today and let the Spirit of God make you strong in love for God, love for your family, and all those around you.

God, may it be so in the lives of every man today.  Amen!

 

* This sermon series is based on a series by Craig Groeschel

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The Daily Grind – Emotional Margin

October 9, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The Daily Grind

The Daily Grind – Emotional Margin
Sycamore Creek Church
October 7 & 8, 2012
Tom Arthur
1 Corinthians 13:11-13

Note: This series is informed by the book Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives by Richard A. Swenson.

Peace, Friends.

I’ve been thinking about tires lately.  Maybe it was the trip I had recently to the Spartan Speedway to help raise funds for John Brinkerhuff and his brain cancer.  Recently I sat down with a race car driver who is sponsored by Grumpy’s Diner, Trina Wurmnest.  Trina explained to me a lot of things about how tires work in racing.  Tires are essential.  They’re what hold you to the track.  To prepare the tires, her team shaves down some of the tread.  She explained that if you keep all the tread on then when it heats up, it will bend over on itself and your tire will slide on the track.  That’s why NASCAR cars have completely flat tires.  More traction when the tires heat up.  While there are some spectacular blow outs on the racetrack, tires on a race cars tend to wear out rather than blow out.  Trina gets about 150 miles on one set of tires.  The harder you run your tires, the faster they wear out.

Maybe I’ve been thinking about tires lately because I see so many of us getting ground down by our daily lives.  We all have a certain amount of wear and tear on our lives, but some of us run especially hard and wear the tread on our “tires” down pretty quick.  Some of us are running on tries that are pretty bare.

This series that we begin today is about the daily grind.  Not the big spectacular blow outs in life, but the daily stuff that simply wears us down over time.  The stuff that grinds on us and grinds on us and grinds on us.  And before we know it, we don’t have any tread left on our tires.  Our lives are bare.

This series isn’t just about the daily grind.  It’s also about margin.  Because margin is the antidote the daily grind.  If you’ve got margin, then the grind doesn’t cause us many problems.

Grind = fatigue, Margin = energy;
Grind = red ink, Margin = black ink;
Grind = hurry, Marin = calm;
Grind = anxiety, Margin = peace;
Grind = culture, Margin = counter culture;
Grind = stressed, depressed, and exhausted, Marin = calm, content, and charged-up;
Grind = progress of accumulation, Margin = progress of virtue;
Grind = burnout, Margin = mission;
Grind = disease of our millennium, Margin = its cure.

Emotional Grind
Today we’re looking at emotional grind.  How the grind of our emotions can wear us down. I’ve been going through a bit of emotional grind lately as we’ve been giving birth to a new satellite venue at Grumpy’s Diner, but this experience is nothing like the emotional grind I went through when my son was born almost two years ago.  I was on an emotional roller coaster of frustration and anger.  After being married without children for thirteen years, we now had a child, and I found myself coming home every day to an environment that made me feel like I was going to go out of my mind.  It’s not too much of a stretch to suggest that I had a male form of post-partum depression.  So I went to see a therapist about it.  He asked me to list all the things that had changed in my life lately.  When I got done, the list filled an entire page.  Sarah and I had moved seven times in four years.  I had made and moved from very significant friendships in seminary.  I had gone from being the number two guy to being the number one guy in a church and along with that had come significantly more responsibility.  I had gone from thirteen years of marriage without children to an infant who demanded our constant attention.  I had been in a car accident and was suffering from the back pain.  All these changes were wreaking havoc on my emotions and my emotions were grinding me down.

I don’t think I’m alone.  While it might not be the same specifics, many of us have something wreaking havoc on our emotions while our emotions grind us down.

We have more stuff than any society has ever had, and yet we have less peace and more stress.  Depression is diagnosed at higher rates and at younger ages.  Americans have more of everything except happiness.

It’s important to understand that there are different kinds of stress:

Eustress = positive stress;
Distress = negative stress;
Hyperstress = destructive stress.

It’s the distress and hyperstress that we need to pay special attention to.  Christians sometimes take the Bible verse, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13) as an invitation to overload into distress and hyperstress.  But that’s not what this verse is intended to mean.  It’s not an invitation to take on so many commitments and so many relationships that we overload our limits.

Load = commitments;
Limit = What we can do before we break down.

For example, I used to have a Subaru station wagon.  It could hold 1000 pounds.  That’s it’s limit.  But one time when Sarah and I were working on our yard, I loaded it with about 1200 pounds of landscaping rocks.  As I drove from the landscaping shop to home, I felt my car doing something it had never done.  The shocks and struts were bottoming out and the car was shifting from side to side.  I had exceeded the limits of my car by the load I was committing it to carry.  Thankfully I only had about two miles to drive to get home!  But had I tried to do carry those rocks in my car for a hundred miles, I might have done irreparable damage.

Here’s the basic problem that we all run into: The daily grind leaves us without emotional margin.  Thankfully, God hasn’t left us alone when it comes to building emotional margin.

1 Corinthians 13:11 – 13 NLT
11 It’s like this: When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child does. But when I grew up, I put away childish things.

All of us struggle with growing up emotionally.  Children don’t know where their limits are, and they constantly overload them. My two-year old son gets pretty cranky when he gets tired.  But if you ask him if he is tired and needs to go to bed, he says no.  He doesn’t know his limits and so he overloads them.  But we adults have a better idea of our limits (or do we?!), and yet we constantly overload them.  We make commitments that we know there’s no way we can keep them without doing damage to ourselves or those around us, our co-workers, friends, and especially our families.

12 Now we see things imperfectly as in a poor mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity.

When we rely on our own “seeing”, our values and decisions are imperfect.  We have an idea of our limits, but sometimes its not totally clear.

All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God knows me now. 

But if we rely on God’s “seeing” we can get out of the grind.  God knows each one of us better than we know ourselves.  God knows us and knows what’s best for us, even when we don’t know it ourselves.

13 There are three things that will endure—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love. 

So God knows what we do that will last and what we do that won’t last.  These three things last: faith, hope, and love.  We tend to focus on faith and love and ignore hope.  The three are related and in many ways interdependent, but we do a lot of talking about faith and love and how to nurture them, but we don’t talk and study so much about how to nurture hope.  And yet hope is the key to the problem of emotional margin.  One of the Bible’s proverbs says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick” (13:12).  That sounds like emotional grind to me!

Main Point
So here’s the main point of this message: Emotional grind comes from neglecting hope.  Emotional margin comes from fostering hope.

Of course this begs the question: what is hope?  One of the Bible dictionaries I have defines hope this way:

While modern connotations include shades of uncertainty associated with a desired outcome (akin to “wishful thinking”), the biblical understanding of hope is a much deeper…Included are an expectation of the future, trust in attaining that future, patience while awaiting it, the desirability of the associated benefits, and confidence in the divine promises.
Eerdman’s Bible Dictionary

The kind of hope that God wants us to have isn’t wishful thinking.  It’s a confidence that God will meet us where we are with what we need to do what God wants us to do.  When you have that kind of hope, you have emotional margin.  When you lack that kind of hope, your heart is sick.

In his book on margin, Richard Swenson, a doctor, provides a prescription for nurturing hope in your life that includes three things: friendship, fun, and faith.  Let’s look at each one.

Friendship
When do you make room for friendships? Are you cultivating deep, authentic, transparent, vulnerable friendships?  I learned the value of this as a teenager.  I went on a spiritual retreat called the “Emmaus Walk.”  We were encouraged to be open and transparent with friends, to give a true account of ourselves, so that they could in turn help hold us accountable to becoming all that God wants us to become.  Those kind of friendships are invaluable.  But they require a deep and steady commitment.  It’s hard to be that vulnerable with someone if you think they’re going to ditch you as a friend.

Ever since that weekend retreat I went on as a teenager, I’ve been involved in some kind of small group with other friends.  Sometimes it was a formal small group that my church organized, but other times it was simply a weekly coffee “date” with a friend.  In fact, one of the best small groups I was ever a part of was a simple commitment to meet every Thursday with a friend for coffee.  We did that for four years while I was in seminary.  We didn’t hit every week, but we hit most of them.  That time with Bill every week was life giving.  It rebuilt emotional margin because my friendship with Bill helped nurture hope in my life.

Fun
What do you do for fun? And when was the last time you did it?  How often do you laugh?  Four-month old babies laugh once an hour.  Four-year olds laugh once every four minutes.  Adults laugh only fifteen times a day.  We adults get pretty serious by the time we “grow up.”  But we could learn something from the kids around us.

Speaking of laughter, here’s a joke to help you laugh and build some hope today:

A priest told three nuns that he wanted to teach them about forgiveness, so he told them to sin sometime the next week.  When they met again the next week the first nun said, “Father, forgive me for I have sinned.   I stole money from the collection plate.”  The priest said, “You are forgiven, my daughter.  Now drink some holy water.”  The second nun said, “Father, forgive me for I have sinned.  I broke a stained glass window.” The priest said, “You are forgiven my child.  Now drink some holy water.”  The last nun said to the priest, “Father, forgive me for I have sinned.”  “What did you do?” The priest asked.  She said, “I peed in the holy water.”

Friends, we need to laugh more.  I need to laugh more.  You need to laugh more.  Laughter is good for soul because it is fun and fun helps build hope and hope helps rebuild emotional margin.

Another way to have fun is to simply play.  What hobbies do you have?  Movies, Reading, Music, Trains, Art, Running, Biking?  How often do you give yourself time to play? Or maybe you’re like me and you’ve gotten so deep into work that you don’t have any hobbies any more.  Reclaim and old one.  On our fifteen anniversary, Sarah and I went swing dancing.  We hadn’t gone dancing in too long.  It was life giving to spend time with my best friend having fun playing on the dance floor.  It rebuilt the emotional margin in our lives by nurturing hope.

Faith
Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful.
Hebrews 10:23

Earlier I said that faith and hope were intertwined.  They are.  When you nurture faith you nurture hope.  But here’s the catch: The object of your faith is more important than the amount of your faith.  We tend to think that the thing that really matters is the quality of our faith.  It’s not.  It’s who you have faith in.  If you’re falling and someone catches you, what really matters, what you think about the strength of the person catching you or their actual strength?  It’s not so much your faith that matters, but the faithfulness of God.  Hope then is not built so much on our faith, but on the faithfulness of the one in whom we have faith.

This past summer I often took Micah swimming in the pool at the Holt Jr. High School.  At first he wasn’t so sure about this whole swimming thing.  He would cry and cling to me.  He recognized something primal about water.  It could kill him!  But over time as he found that I held him safely and didn’t let him sink, he began to trust me and have faith in his Dad’s good judgment.

Here is my definition of faith: the graced decision to believe in spite of uncertainty, a proper confidence that God will be faithful.  Faith is a gift that God gives.  It doesn’t wipe out uncertainty, but over time it builds confidence that God was faithful in the past and will be faithful again in the present and the future.

If you’re a guest here today you might be asking yourself: How do I get this kind of faith?  Here’s the answer: Faith is a spiritual muscle that requires spiritual exercise.  It comes over time.  I grew up in a Christian home going to church, but when I got to college I had a faith crisis and left the faith for a time.  When I left the faith, my life became very dark.  It felt like I no longer had any purpose or meaning.  Over time I found that I was just as uncertain not believing as I had been believing.  The only difference was that when I believed in the face of uncertainty, I also had hope.  So I chose faith and hope over unbelief and darkness.  I can’t say that everything became great all at once, but over time, I found that God was faithful and my own faith in God grew as I continued to seek God out.  When I look back on that time I realize that two things were at work: first, I chose faith.  I simply made a mental choice to trust in God.  Second, with hind-sight, I think God also was reaching out to me holding me and inviting me to chose that trust and faith.  And when I did, my life had hope again.  And with hope came emotional margin.

Retread Factory
For some of you, the tire of your life is so worn down today that it’s fraying.  You’re going to have a blow-out not because you hit some major obstacle in the road of life, but because you simply wore through all the tread.  What if the church, what if those of us who were committed to friendship on the journey of following Jesus acted like a retread factory?

Did you know that there are factories that put tread back on tire?  Imagine with me if Sycamore Creek Church was a “factory” that put the emotional tread back on people’s lives after the daily grind had worn it down.  I think that happens all the time here at SCC.  We are a community filled with hope!

Now hope is important because it is the foundation that we build all the other margin on in our life.  If we don’t have hope it will be hard to have the emotional motivation to work on building physical, time, and financial margin.  Hope gives the emotions a positive outlook.  In face of the daily grind, hope gives us the emotional motivation to work toward physical, time, and financial margin.

In a distressed world, may SCC be a retread factory of emotional margin, a retread factory that invited people to join in.

For to this end we toil and struggle, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe.
Timothy 4:10

Prayer
God, let me today over come the toil and struggle and daily grind of my life because my hope in you is hope in a living faithful God who saves all people.  Rebuild the emotional tread in my life and give me margin so that I can serve you and those around me without blowing out from the daily grind.  Amen.

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What should I feel?

November 9, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Off the TracksAfter this past Sunday’s message, Off the Tracks – Personal Sin, I received the following question:

How do I know when I’m back on the tracks? Does it feel different? Should I feel different after asking God into my life?

It’s a great question.  Let me back up and review just for a moment before answering the question. I suggested that sin is anything whether intentional or unintentional that causes our lives to jump off the tracks of God’s will.  There are two basic steps for getting your life back on the tracks.  First, tell the truth about yourself.  Admit to yourself and God that your life is off the tracks.  Second, receive God’s lift of forgiveness back on the tracks.

So how do you know when you’re back on the tracks?  Does it feel different?  Well, yes and no.  Paul talks about the “Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:16-17a).  I think that the general experience of Christians has been that when they experience God’s forgiveness, there is a kind of peace in their spirit and soul.  It is God’s Spirit dwelling in friendship with your spirit.

And yet, not every Christian experiences this quite the same way.  John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, desired to experience this “witness of the Spirit” all his life and wrote a couple of sermons about it, but while he sought it himself and preached that we should expect it and look for it, his diary shows that he often did not feel it himself.  Some of us will simply experience a new confidence or commitment in seeking and following God’s way for our life, but nothing that seems “supernatural.”

But on another level we may actually feel worse.  If we continue reading Paul’s thoughts we hear him say, “If, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him” (Romans 8:17b).  We should expect there to be suffering involved in following Christ.  This suffering may come from persecution or it may come from denying our bodies all their passions and lusts.  It also may come from the paradoxical experience that the more spiritually mature you are the more you realize how far you have to go.  The more that sin loses its grip on your life, the more you realize just how deep sin runs. Should you feel different?  Yes.  You should feel peace.  And no.  You may feel worse.

Maybe the best image to help one understand this situation is that of a storm over deep water.  The top of the water may rage at the tempest of the storm with rolling breakers, but below the surface the water is as calm as it ever has been.  The outside of your life may be filled with suffering, but on the inside there is a deep reservoir of peace that was not there before.

Then again, I wonder if God isn’t wonderful enough to work in as many ways as there are individuals, and that means every person’s experience will be a little different.  I will never forget what Rick Ray said when I baptized him last summer: “For forty years I have wondered how God could forgive me for things I couldn’t even forgive myself.  Then I realized that it didn’t matter what I thought.  It only mattered what God thought.”  Amen.

Filed Under: Ponderings, Sermons Tagged With: , , ,

Clearance: Restocking Your Emotional Inventory – Addiction

October 4, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Clearance

Clearance: Restocking Your Emotional Inventory – Addiction
Sycamore Creek Church
October 2, 2011
Tom Arthur
Proverbs 23:29-35

Peace, Friends!

Do you have any emotions you’d like to run a clearance sale on?  Today we wrap up a series where we’ve been restocking our emotional inventory.  Addiction isn’t exactly an emotion, but it does have a lot of emotions surrounding it, and emotions tend to keep us in our addictions.  So today I’d like to explore the world of emotions and addiction.

Addiction Is…

Let’s start out with a definition.  It’s not a definition I got from someone else.  Rather it’s my own definition for today’s message.  An addiction is a habit of loving the wrong things too much and the right things too little. Let’s unpack that definition beginning with “habit.”

When I was in college studying psychology I learned about a little contraption called a Skinner box.  A Skinner box is named after B.F. Skinner, the founder of behavioral psychology.  For Skinner all behavior could be boiled down to punishment and reward.  A Skinner box is a box that trains a rat to push a lever by way of punishment and reward.  It has a light, a lever, and a floor that can deliver an electric shock.  Using a Skinner box, you can quite easily train a rat to push the lever when the light is on by giving a reward  for doing so (food or water) at the right time (when the light is on) and an electric shock when the rat pushes the lever at the wrong time (when the light is off).  Essentially you are creating in the rat a habit of pushing the lever when you want through punishment and reward.  The key is giving a reward or punishment at random intervals.  By the end of the rat’s training in a Skinner box, the rat has the habit that you want.

Addictions are like that.  They work toward creating within you a habit for doing something.  A habit can be good or bad, but an addiction is a bad habit of loving the wrong things too much and the right things too little.  An addiction can be “soft” or “hard.”  The level of addiction has to do with how destructive the habit is.  The more destructive the habit, or the more “wrong the love”, the “harder” the addiction.  This is usually the case for substance abuse addictions.  But I think it would be unfortunate for those of us who don’t struggle with substance abuse addictions to disregard the issue of addiction.  That’s why I’ve decided to define an addiction as a habit of loving the wrong things too much and the right things too little.  All of us have at least some “soft” addictions according to this definition.

I have never had a real hard addiction, but I have had several soft addictions.  When I was growing up I had a soft addiction to porn.  I looked at porn almost every day throughout high school.  I had a habit of loving the wrong thing, an objectification of women for sexual gratification and lust.  I had a habit of loving the right thing too little, holiness and purity in God’s eyes and viewing women as a whole person made in the image of God.

Having an addiction to porn is a soft addiction, but an addiction nonetheless.  Still, porn is somewhat obvious.  As I have prepared for this message and searched my own heart and life, I’ve come to notice another addiction I have.  I am addicted to success, achievement, or getting A’s.  When I was in seminary, I got a B- on a Methodism midterm, and I fell apart.  I had the habit of loving the wrong thing too much, an identity wrapped up in performance, and the right things too little, an identity wrapped up in who I was as a child of God.  This addiction continues to plague me in many ways even today.  As I have been reading through the book of Proverbs, God’s wisdom book of the Bible, I came across this proverb that spoke to me about this addiction:

Proverbs 25:27 NLT
Just as it is not good to eat too much honey, it is not good for people to think about all the honors they deserve.

Our Addictions

If an addiction is a habit of loving the wrong thing too much and the right thing to little, then there are as many addictions as there are things.

A USA Today poll gives us a list of some things we are addicted to.  Apparently we struggle with very different things depending on whether we are a man or woman.  Here are the results of their survey:

Sex: Men (50%), Women (22%)
Food: Men (29%), Women (56%)
Money: Men (14%), Women (15%)
Alcohol: Men (7%), Women (2%)
Power: Men (2%), Women (7%)
(USA Today quoted in Leadership Magazine, Summer 2010).

It’s interesting to note that the percentages are almost opposite of each other across sex.

While gambling is not on this list, gambling can be something that many people struggle with as an addiction.  When I first moved to Michigan, I was traveling through the Upper Peninsula.  Growing up in Indiana there were no casinos, so I was intrigued to see a casino up in the U.P.  On the way back home I decided to stop in and see what was going on.  I felt a little awkward walking in, because I expected that I would be underdressed.  In my mind, I was going to walk in and find good looking men in tuxes surrounded by gorgeous women in evening gowns standing around card, roulette, and craps tables laughing and having a grand ole time.  What I found instead was a bunch of senior citizens sitting passively at slot machines pulling on levers with glazed over eyes.  My mind immediately went back to a Skinner box.  Lights? Check.  Lever?  Check.  Random reward?  Check.  Here was a voluntary Skinner box where people trained themselves to have the habit of loving the wrong thing too much, throwing away their money, and the right thing too little, being a good steward of the resources that God has given them.

In today’s day and age I think it is also appropriate to consider the digital addictions we have.  Do you know that Facebook by its very nature is addictive?  Those little rewards it gives you—a comment from a friend, the next level of a game, a new picture of a family member—all work to produce a habit in you of loving the wrong thing too much, constantly checking for updates, and the right thing too little, staying focused at work or being present to those around you at home.

I haven’t named every single addiction that is out there.  We’d be here all day.  But you get the idea.  Today I’d like to run a clearance sale on addiction and replace it with something better.  Let’s do so by looking at God’s wisdom about addictions in the book of Proverbs.

God’s Wisdom on Addiction

The Bible has a lot to say about our habits and what’s right to love and what’s wrong to love.  Let’s take a look at one particular example.
Proverbs 23:29-35 NLT

Who has anguish? Who has sorrow? Who is always fighting? Who is always complaining? Who has unnecessary bruises? Who has bloodshot eyes? It is the one who spends long hours in the taverns, trying out new drinks. Don’t let the sparkle and smooth taste of wine deceive you. For in the end it bites like a poisonous serpent; it stings like a viper. You will see hallucinations, and you will say crazy things. You will stagger like a sailor tossed at sea, clinging to a swaying mast. And you will say, “They hit me, but I didn’t feel it. I didn’t even know it when they beat me up. When will I wake up so I can have another drink?”

In this description of alcoholism, we see all kinds of habits piling up on top of each other, which add up to loving the wrong things.  There’s the habit of spending a long time in the wrong place.  There’s the habit of continually seeking a new drink, a new high.  There’s the habit of being deceived by the immediate gratification of the taste and buzz of alcohol while being drunk.  All these habits lead to certain ends: anguish, sorrow, fighting, complaining, bruises, and bloodshot eyes.  The chemical dependence sets in and the addiction grabs hold of you through these harmful and destructive habits.

It should be noted that not everyone experiences this kind of addiction with alcohol.  The issue here isn’t the alcohol.  It’s the habits around alcohol.  Some of us can drink responsibly without forming these habits.  Some of us cannot.  Some of you aren’t addicted to achievement the way I am.  Some of you are.  Remember that addictions are very particular to each person.  So the problem here with alcohol isn’t alcohol but the habit of drunkenness.

When an addiction grabs hold of us in this way, all kinds of wrong loves set in.  I’d like to illustrate those wrong loves with quotes taken from addicts themselves.  While the quotes are all from hard addictions, I think they just as easily apply to soft addictions too.

(Most of the following quotes come from the book Addiction and Virtue by Kent Dunnington.)

Friendship

“When you’re drinking, liquor occupies the role of a lover or a constant companion.”

Addiction is the habit of loving the wrong kind of friend.  We turn the thing itself into a friend, lover, or companion, but alcohol, porn, gambling, sex, or overeating are all poor substitutes for real human friendship.  We love the wrong thing, friendship with a substance, over the right thing, real people.

Unifying Principle for Life

“I vividly remember what it was like to organize my whole life around smoking.  When things went well, I reached for a cigarette.  When things went badly, I did the same…Smoking became a ritual that served to highlight salient aspects of experience and to impose structure on what would otherwise have been a confusing morass of events.”

Wow!  What does it mean to organize one’s whole life around something?  How many things are really worthy of that kind of devotion?  I know something of this myself when it comes to achievement.  I structure most every day around achieving more and more.  How can I get the most bang out of this day?  This is not necessarily bad, and some of you would do well to move more in this direction, but when your entire life becomes unified around achieving this particular end, you have to ask yourself, is this an end worthy of that kind of commitment?

A Way of Life

“I became reliant on alcohol to enjoy stuff.”

I found this quote by Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who played Harry Potter, in a Newsweek issue.  It is sad that Radcliffe has achieved an amazing amount of success beyond most of our grasps, but is unable to enjoy it without the use of alcohol.  In fact, he says that he had to use alcohol to enjoy pretty much everything.  His addiction became a way of life for him.

An Idol

“Before A.A. we were trying to drink God out of a bottle.”

Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, said this.  I think Wilson gets at the core of what an addiction is about.  It is ultimately an idol.  We love this substance or experience, the wrong thing, more than God, the right thing.  We seek friendship and love from our addiction.  We unify our lives around it so that it becomes a way of life.  Our addiction becomes our god.  It competes with the true living God, the only “thing” worthy of all this time, energy, devotion, and love.  An addiction is a habit of loving an idol over the true God.

Restock with New Habits

So here’s what I want you to do.  I want you to replace the habits of addiction (loving the wrong things) with habits of God (loving the right things).  Here are three new habits to put on your emotional shelves:

1. Put God First.

Proverbs 1:7 NLT
Fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge. Only fools despise wisdom and discipline.

Whenever you read “fear of the Lord” it is easy to make the mistake that this means an angry god who we most obey or else.  That’s not primarily what “the fear of the Lord” means.  First and foremost it means love, respect, and reverence for God.  So there are certain ways that we do that.  The primary way is that we spend time with God.  We put God first in our lives by cultivating the habits of staying in love with God.

I like to use H.A.B.I.T.S. as an acronym:

Hang out with God (prayer)
Accountability (giving a true and transparent account of yourself to others)
Bible reading (daily reading your Bible)
Involvement with the Church (connecting, encouraging, and supporting people)
Tithing (living simply and giving generously)
Serving (the church, community, and world).

The habit of putting God first means cultivating a fear, respect, reverence, and love for God by practicing these specific H.A.B.I.T.S.

2. Develop habits of self-control.

Proverbs 25:28 NLT
A person without self-control is as defenseless as a city with broken-down walls.

Often our addictions flow out of a lack of the habit of self-control.  This is not always true as is the case for some eating disorders like anorexia, which is characterized by an over-control of one’s eating behaviors.  But anorexia is an exception to the rule.  Most of us would do well to cultivate more self-control over our desires, passions, and the things our bodies love.

A key practice for nurturing self-control is fasting.  Fasting is giving up something good to attain something better.  When we regularly fast we are practicing not giving into our desires in an area where we are not struggling with an addiction so that when we find ourselves tempted with the addiction itself, we have new strengths of self-control to resist the addiction’s habits.  In this way we attack the addiction indirectly.

3. Seek outside help.

Third, replace the isolating habits of addiction with the habit of seeking outside help.  By outside help I mean addiction groups, therapy, friends, books, or support groups.  Don’t walk this journey alone.  A team is always stronger at practicing new habits than an individual.  You will learn new things, be encouraged, and find role-models and coaches when you seek outside help.

Several outside helps have guided me in preparing today’s sermon, and I think some of them might be helpful to you.  Addiction and Virtue by Kent Dunnington is a somewhat academic book, but several of the quotes from addicts in today’s sermon come from this book.  A more accessible book is Thirty Days to Hope and Freedom from Sexual Addiction by Milton S. Magness.  Magness has created a smart phone app for helping overcome any addiction (www.recoveryapp.com).  Barb Flory, the founding pastor of SCC, found www.settingcaptivesfree.com very helpful in overcoming an overeating addiction.  Another helpful website for overcoming an addiction to pornography is www.xxxchurch.com which offers free accountability software called X3.  I have X3 loaded on all of my computers and meet regularly with an accountability partner who reviews my internet browsing habits.  Also, SCC holds an umbrella support group on Wednesday evenings at the office run by Pat Orme.  Each of these can be a good way to create a habit of seeking outside help.

New Loves

Proverbs 21:21 NLT
Whoever pursues godliness and unfailing love will find life, godliness, and honor.

What would life be like if you replaced the habits of loving the wrong things too much with habits of loving the right things?  Imagine your priorities, passions, and loves all prioritized in the right order.  Instead of warring against each other, your time and behaviors would be driving you more toward God.  You don’t have to wait to die to experience heaven or hell.  An addiction is hell or at least a taste of hell right here.  It’s all your priorities in the wrong order.  Freedom from addiction, habits of loving the right things, can be heaven right here too.  Consider what it would be like being able to take all that time you’re using to feed your addiction and put it toward loving the right people in the right way!  Wow!  That would be an awesome life.  That’s the kind of life I want to live.  And ultimately godly habits end in delight and joy.  Virtue or loving the right things is formed in us when practices lead to new habits and new habits lead to a new nature and eventually we begin to delight in those new habits.

So put your addiction on clearance today.  Restock it with habits of loving the right things.  Let me pray for you.

God, it’s hard to let go of some of these habits of addiction.  Some of them have a destructive grasp upon us.  I confess that these addictions are really idols.  They compete with our love for you.  Break the habits of addiction in each of us today and give to us a desire to love you through new godly habits.

Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: ,

Clearance: Restocking Your Emotional Inventory – Anxiety

September 13, 2011 by 1 Comment

Clearance

Clearance: Restocking Your Emotional Inventory – Anxiety
Sycamore Creek Church
September 11, 2011
Tom Arthur
Proverbs

Peace, friends!

Today we begin a series about emotions called Clearance.  We’re running a clearance sale on emotions and restocking our emotional shelves.  Today’s clearance sale: anxiety!

If you know me at all you will have begun to notice that I have something of an emotional poker face.  What I’m feeling inside rarely shows on the outside.  That’s not to say that it never does, but it is often very hidden or subtle.  What I look like on the outside on an average day, bad day, and good day is almost identical.  My wife of fourteen years still occasionally looks at me and asks, “Are you angry with me?” when I have no anger in me at all.

But the truth is that I am full of emotions under the poker face.  We went to the last Harry Potter movie and I cried through almost all of it.  We were watching Amish Grace, a movie about the Amish school house shooting, and I cried so much I was exhausted by the end of the movie.

There are also a lot of things that cause me anxiety.  I worry about money.  Are we saving enough?  Are we giving enough?  Do we have enough to begin with?  I think this is something we all struggle with at times.  I was shocked to read recently in a poll that a lot of young people worry about money too.  Forty percent of 8-12 year olds, 57% 13-17 year olds, and 68% 18-24 year olds worry about money.

Then there’s anxiety around time.  Do I have enough time for my family?  Do I have enough time for each person in my family?  My son?  My wife?  Do I have enough time for church?  What about having some time for my broader community?  And then what about me?  Do I get any time to myself?  I had at least five conversations this past week with people about time issues in their life.

Now that I’m a dad, I’m finding all kinds of other things that cause me anxiety.  My nine-month old son, Micah, is getting faster and faster at crawling.  I stopped paying attention to him for a minute when I was watching him the other day while Sarah was away.  Soon I realized he was gone. He had crawled into the office because I had neglected to close the door as we usually do.  I went in and grabbed him and brought him back out to the living room.  I closed the door.  Then it hit me.  In the office is the ironing board with the iron sitting on it.  All of a sudden my mind starts whirring.  What could have happened?  What would I have done?  How would I have told Sarah?  What scars would Micah be left with?  Could he have died?  I kept thinking about this over and over and over and over.  I couldn’t get the images out of my mind.  Poker face on the outside.  Inside a mess of anxiety.  Joyce Meyer says, “Worry is a down payment on a problem you may never have.”  Amen to that, sister.

While preparing for this message, I was looking at men’s and women’s magazines to get some ideas of what causes men and women anxiety.  I was surprised to find that men and women pretty much have the same anxieties.  They just use different language to talk about it.  Take healthy bodies for example.  Men worry about having muscles, being buff, having  six-pack abs and gut, and having the right set of buns and guns.  Women, on the other hand, worry about weight, fat, their thighs, their butts, “healthy” skin, and aging.  Same anxieties.  Different language.

But we don’t just have individual anxieties.  We also have communal or national anxieties.  Today is the anniversary of 9-11.  That brings up a lot of anxiety, doesn’t it?  This past week we’ve replayed over and over the images of ten years ago.  We worry anew as a nation about our safety and security.  I was reading in the last Newsweek magazine how much all this anxiety over safety and security costs us. The answer is 3.2 trillion dollars!  That’s a big price tag for anxiety.  We also worry about our economy, job growth, and the direction of our government after 9-11.  Then there are the worries about radical elements of various religions.  Are there Islamic terrorists out there planning something today or in the future?  Don’t forget about our own tribe.  Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who threatened to burn a Quran, visited Lansing this past week, and that brought up a lot of anxiety.

What exactly is anxiety?  Here’s my own working definition: anxiety is worry, disproportionate focus, or rumination about the wrong things.  Sometimes we focus a disproportionate amount of our energies on things that are out of our control.  Or we replay something over and over in our head like a broken record or like a cow chewing the cud.  Chewing the cud is good for cows, but bad for humans.

What do you worry about?  What do you spend a disproportionate amount of energy focusing on?  What do you ruminate on and just can’t let go?  What anxiety do you need to run a clearance sale on today?

Wisdom about Anxiety

The Bible is full of wisdom about anxiety.  When we’re talking about wisdom, the book of the Bible that comes immediately to my mind is the book of Proverbs.  It’s not the only wisdom book in the Bible, but it is the most well known.

A friend of mine who is an Old Testament scholar says that Proverbs:

shed light on things all of us worry about, for ourselves and for our children, the things people regularly consult their pastors about: how to avoid bitter domestic quarrels, what to tell your children about sex and about God, what to do when somebody asks to borrow money, how to choose the right friends and be a good friend, how to make a living that is decent, both ethically and financially.  In short, the proverbs are instruction in the art of living well (Ellen Davis, emphasis mine).

The proverbs are often very witty sayings that hold wisdom that is applicable to most of our situations most of the time.  Part of learning wisdom is knowing when to apply what wisdom to what situation.  There are some real zinger proverbs in there.  Take these for example.

It is safer to meet a bear robbed of her cubs than to confront a fool caught in folly.
Proverbs 17:12 NLT

Anyone have a fool in their life?  Yep.  Don’t mess with that fool.  It’s better to turn around on the trail and go back the way you came.

Even fools are thought to be wise when they keep silent; when they keep their mouths shut, they seem intelligent.
Proverbs 17:28 NLT

Some of us, me included, could learn the wisdom of knowing when to keep our mouths shut.  We’ll seem more intelligent that way!

It is better to live alone in the corner of an attic than with a contentious wife in a lovely home.
Proverbs 21:9 NLT

I love that last one.  So true.  But it’s also true about husbands, isn’t it?  Who wants to live with anyone who is contentious or as some other translations put it, “quarrelsome”?

Everything looks good on the outside.  Nice home.  Nice car.  Nice yard.  Bickering relationship.

So those proverbs aren’t directly about anxiety, but they give us a good feel for the kind of wisdom the book of Proverbs has to share with us about our life situations.  So what kind of wisdom does Proverbs have to share with us about anxiety?  Here’s a key verse:

Worry weighs a person down; an encouraging word cheers a person up.
Proverbs 12:25 NLT

Run a clearance on worry and restock with encouragement! Let’s unpack this proverb a bit more.  It seems to me that there are at least two kinds of encouraging words: words others tell us or we tell others and words we tell ourselves.

When you share an encouraging word with someone, it’s like you help them run a clearance sale on anxiety.  This past week a friend of mine gave me a little booklet about myths of being a pastor.  Here’s my poker face: I don’t have any anxieties about being a pastor. Here’s what’s underneath: am I a good enough preacher?  Am I working hard enough?  Is our church growing enough?  And on and on and on.  This little booklet was a refreshing encouraging word.  I read through it and my spirit immediately lifted.  The weight was gone.  The clearance sale had been run.  “Words satisfy the soul as food satisfies the stomach; the right words on a person’s lips bring satisfaction” (Proverbs 18:20 NLT).

Those are the words we tell others or others tell us.  But what about the words we tell ourselves?  You know.  The dialogue you have within your own mind and heart.  What does that kind of dialogue sound like?  You’re not good enough.  You’re stupid.  You really messed that one up.  You’ll never amount to anything.  You are worthless.

Paul, one of the authors of the New Testament wrote to encourage us to have a different set of things we think about.  He says:

Don’t worry [Greek: merimnao. This word will be important in a moment] about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. If you do this, you will experience God’s peace, which is far more wonderful than the human mind can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.

And now, dear brothers and sisters, let me say one more thing as I close this letter. Fix your thoughts on what is true and honorable and right. Think about things that are pure and lovely and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise. Keep putting into practice all you learned from me and heard from me and saw me doing, and the God of peace will be with you (Philippians 4:6-7 NLT).

What would our inner words look like if we followed Paul’s guidance?  Thank you, God!  I’m loved by God!  I’m forgiven by God!  God shows me mercy and forgiveness!  I’ve got a role to play because God gave me specific talents and gifts!  I’m priceless!

Now which set of words do you want to run a clearance sale on?  The first set.  Run a clearance sale on “You are worthless” and restock with “I’m priceless.”

Practice

Did you notice that Paul told us to “practice” all this?  That means we don’t have to get it right the first time.  There is room to improve.  You may not clear out all the anxiety right away, but over time you’ll slowly restock your emotional inventory.  I’d like to suggest a couple of ways to practice running a clearance on anxiety and restocking with encouragement.

First, practice before you get to the thing that causes you anxiety.  That is to say, practice every day.  You can’t expect to have no anxiety when you step up to the plate if you haven’t practiced before the game is on.  With practice, you may still have some anxiety, but the encouragement of the practice will overwhelm the anxiety of the moment.

One great way to practice before you get there is to spend time in the proverbs seeking the encouraging words God has to give you about your everyday situations.  I’ve been practicing over the last several months a daily proverb.  I’ve been reading one chapter of Proverbs a day (there are 31 chapters so you can cover Proverbs in a month) and picking one proverb from that chapter to write on a 3×5 card and put it in my pocket.  I contemplate this proverb throughout the day.  I’ve even come across several situations where I’ve taken the card out of my pocket to see if God’s wisdom can give me any direction for the situation I find myself in currently.

If you’re not a big reader, then there are several websites out there that make this whole thing automated.  www.dailyproverb.net and www.facebook.com/pages/Daily–Proverb/279306469078 put up daily proverbs. EHYP Productions makes a smart phone app called “Psalms Proverbs Daily Inspiration” that I’ve also been using.  You get one verse or proverb each day from either the book of Proverbs or the Psalms.  If you’re looking for a specific issue to seek wisdom on, here’s a website that lists the proverbs by topic: www.knowgrace.org/proverbs/proverbs.html.

Next, once you find a proverb that speaks to your situation, memorize it and carry it with you in your mind and follow its wisdom.  Let’s look at some proverbs about money to give you an example.  We all carry at least a little if not a lot of anxiety about money.

If you find yourself anxious because you’re not making as much as you think you should, consider this proverb:

Do not wear yourself out to get rich; be wise enough to desist. When your eyes light upon it, it is gone; for suddenly it takes wings to itself, flying like an eagle toward heaven.
Proverbs 23:4-5 NRSV

Remember that the thing you think you have to have to be happy will soon become uninteresting once you’ve got it.  You can probably be happy and less anxious if you learn to live with what you’ve got.

Or what if you are getting anxious about debt?

The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.
Proverbs 22:7 NRSV

How about you take that proverb and wrap it around your credit card?  Then as Dave Ramsey says, “Live like no one else now [by working super hard and paying off all your debt], so that you can live like no one else later [being generous].”

Or perhaps you get anxious about giving money to the poor.

Those who are generous are blessed, for they share their bread with the poor.
Proverbs 22:9 NLT

Proverbs gives us practical advice and counsel, wisdom, for doing what we can do to live in non-anxious ways.  Running a clearance sale on anxiety isn’t just about sitting back on your heels.  There is some stuff you can do.  As Steve Furtik, a pastor in North Carolina, says, “Work, don’t worry, ‘cause worry don’t work…I’ve been learning that if there is something for me to do then do it, but if there is nothing for me to do then worship through the worry.”

Maybe your own anxiety goes deeper than the kind of worry we’ve been talking about.  Maybe you struggle with clinical anxiety or panic attacks.  The proverbs know about your situation too:

The human spirit can endure a sick body, but who can bear it if the spirit is crushed?
Proverbs 18:14 NLT

This kind of deep anxiety is certainly spirit crushing.  I’d suggest that the wise thing to do with this kind of anxiety is to see a doctor.  If your bone is broken, you can’t fix it just by thinking differently.  If you’re clinically anxious, you can’t just insert some encouragement and hope it all turns out better.  I know this because I have at times struggled with a mild form of this kind of anxiety.  While I was in seminary I experienced the strongest anxiety I had ever experienced.  It wasn’t crippling, but it concerned me enough that I decided to see a counselor about it.  This counselor connected me with a psychiatrist.  This psychiatrist told me about six non-drug practices that have been proven to reduce stress and anxiety.  I found them all very helpful and was able to manage my anxiety without the need for drugs.  I’d like to pass these practices on to you:

  1. Take a day off.  Does this sound familiar?  Yeah.  The Ten Commandments: “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.”  This wasn’t a Christian psychiatrist, but it was amazing how many of the practices fit with wisdom right from the Bible.
  2. Get enough sleep.  How much is enough?  If you’re anxious, then “enough” is probably more than you’re getting.
  3. Do enjoyable exercise.  Your body is a temple of God’s Spirit.  Keep it healthy and it will be less anxious for you.  But pick an exercise that you like.  If you try to exercise with something you don’t like to do, then it will cause more anxiety rather than being an anxiety reducer.
  4. Journal briefly each day.  Don’t fill up pages and pages about your anxieties.  Try a half or one page a day.  Get it out of your head and onto paper.  Journaling has been a Christian practice for centuries.
  5. Pray.  Remember, this was a non-Christian psychiatrist who was telling me this.  She said that prayer has been scientifically shown to reduce stress and anxiety.  Duh!  “Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything.”
  6. Practice breathing.  Practice breathing?  What’s that?  Some kind of mumbo jumbo, right?  Nope.  The diaphragm that inflates your lungs is attached to the nerve that goes to the part of your brain that processes stress.  When you exercise your lungs, you’re exercising the stress reducing part of your brain.  I practice breathing ten minutes each morning.  I also turn it into mediation.  I breath in, “Be still and know,” and breath out, “that I am God” from Psalm 46:10.

Good Worry

What would life be like without anxiety?  Peace.  Rest.  Ah…  Yes, internal peace and rest.  Isn’t that what we’re all looking for?  Peace.  But what does that internal peace let us do?  It lets us focus our energy rightly on being at peace even more with those around us, spreading that peace to others.

As we saw earlier, Paul told us not to worry (merimnao) about anything.  But in another place he tells us to “merimnao for one another” (1 Corinthians 12:25 NRSV).  Merimnao can be translated either as “anxiety” or “care.”  Care for one another.  Anxiety can be worry, or it can be care.

If we ran a clearance sale on anxiety and restocked our emotional shelves with encouragement, then we could spend all that energy that we were using on anxiety and “worry” about caring for one another.  Earlier I said that anxiety was worrying about the wrong things.  That implies that there are some right things to worry about.  I see that kind of good worry happening all the time around here at Sycamore Creek Church.  Just this past week I saw people in our church “worrying” about providing school uniforms for a family in need.  I saw people “worrying” about caring for marriages that are struggling.  I saw people “worrying” about helping someone unemployed find a job.  I saw people “worrying” about being real with one another and taking off the poker face.  I saw people “worrying” about encouraging one another to get through their current anxieties.  These are good worries.

Today, run a clearance sale on anxiety and restock it with encouragement and care for others.

I’d like to pray for those who are struggling with anxiety. Here’s a prayer I found this past week.  May God help you clear out your shelves of anxiety and restock them with encouragement and care for one another:

Almighty God, who after the creation of the world rested from all your works and set apart a day of rest for all your creatures: Grant that we, putting away all earthly anxieties, may be well prepared for service to you and others, and that our rest here upon earth may be a preparation for the eternal rest promised to your people in heaven; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

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Make Anger Your Ally by Neil Clark Warren

May 2, 2011 by 1 Comment

Make Anger Your Ally
By Neil Clark Warren
Rating: 8 of 10

Becoming a new parent has a way of bringing up stuff from the basement of your soul and forcing you to look anew at yourself.  After thirteen years of marriage living a somewhat monkish kind of lifestyle, my wife and I had our first child, a son who we named Micah.  Micah is a beautiful little boy who also happens to cry and fuss.  While he may do this about as much as an average infant, it is a lot more than I am used to.  The first several months I found myself getting very frustrated, irritated, and angry at his fussing and crying.  It’s a good thing he is really cute, or I probably would have thrown him outside in the snow (or at least that’s the way I often felt).  Five months into this new parenthood thing, I’m enjoying him more often than being frustrated and angry.  There are two reasons for this.  First, I’m simply getting used to the whole fussing thing.  Second, thanks to Neil Clark Warren I’ve been practicing turning my anger into my ally.

Ok, cheesy title, yes, but also helpful methods. Warren is best known for being the founder of eHarmony, but I knew of him long before eHarmony because of a book my mom gave me titled, Finding the Love of Your Life (a great book by the way).

Make Anger Your Ally is based on one basic idea: anger is a physiological response of readiness that can be expressed in helpful ways or harmful ways.  Warren makes the assertion that anger is a secondary emotion.  It is a physiological response to one of three primary emotions: hurt, frustration, or fear.  So far while practicing his methods I have not found a situation where I felt anger that did not begin with one of these other three basic emotions.  Warren makes it very clear that aggression is only one of many possible responses to anger, and he believes that aggression is rarely if ever a helpful or right response to anger.  I think this fits well with Paul’s teaching to not let your anger lead to sin (Ephesians 4:26).

The first half of the book explains Warren’s outlook on anger as a physiological response of readiness.  The second half of the book provides a step-by-step method for turning that readiness away from aggression and into something constructive.  The most helpful part of this process for me has been that when I recognize that I am angry (a seemingly simple task that is more complicated than it appears at first glance), I need to determine or ask myself, “What do I really want in this situation?”  Over time in practicing asking myself this simple question, I am beginning to learn how to take all that energy that anger produces and direct it toward long-term delayed-gratification constructive goals rather than short-term immediate-gratification explosions (or internal stewing).  Easier said than done.  Warren will show you how.

If I have one critique of this book it would be that Warren, who is a Christian psychologist, does not explore more fully the biblical principles or stories that underpin his ideas about anger.  He does have one chapter about the Bible and anger alongside another chapter on ancient philosophy and anger, but I think he tends to lean more on the philosophy chapter than the Bible chapter.  At the same time, Warren is attempting to write for a broader audience than just Christians, and so his leaning toward philosophy may be justified.

If you’re wrestling with anger, this book is definitely for you.  It’s out of print so you’ll have to find it used (easy to do in today’s online world).  But be careful not to think that simply by reading the book you’ll get your anger under control.  It will take a lot of work to follow the plan that Warren lays out.  I’m finding that work to be well worth the time and energy as I learn to use the energy inherent in my anger to move me toward being a more loving dad.

Currently Reading/Listening
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
Sacred Parenting by Gary Thomas
Scandalous Risks by Susan Howatch
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Phillip Pullman
Love Wins by Rob Bell
Leading from the Heart by Mike Krzyzewski
Exponential by Dave and Jon Ferguson

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