RECYCLING MY PAIN

The Road To Recovery—part 8

Matthew 5:3–12 and Selected Scriptures

I. A SUMMARY OF RECOVERY: THE BEAUTITUDES

Two thousand years ago Jesus went up on a hillside and set down and preached the greatest sermon ever preached. It was called the Sermon on the Mount. He started that most famous sermon ever told by saying, “I want to give you eight steps to happiness, eight principles that will bring happiness to your life.” Today we call those eight principles the Beatitudes.

We’ve been in a series for eight weeks that I’ve been calling the Road to Recovery—overcoming your hurts, habits, and hang-ups that have messed up your life. As I’ve studied this series I have been amazed at the striking similarity between the steps for recovery and the Beatitudes. In fact, when you look at them you find out that the Beatitudes Jesus gave two thousand years ago are simply a summary of the steps to recovery and as we close this series I want you to see what has been the biblical basis for all that I’ve been sharing in the past eight weeks.

“Happy are those who know they are spiritually poor.” That’s Step 1: Realize I’m not God, that I’m powerless to control my tendency to do the wrong thing and my life is unmanageable. Happy are those who know they are spiritually poor that they know they don’t have the power to make the changes that God wants to make in their lives.

“Happy are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.” You don’t have the power to change, but don’t worry about it, God’s going to comfort you. He’ll give you the power. Step 2 is “Earnestly believe that God exists, that I matter to Him, and He has to power to help me recover.”

“Happy are the meek.” Meekness means under control; it does not mean weak. It means strength under control. A stallion that has been broken and tamed still has the same amount of strength, but once it is broken and domesticated it was called a meek horse. It is strength under control. Step Three: “Consciously choose to commit all my life and will to Christ’s care and control.” That’s what meekness is all about. If you take that step you’re meek.

“Happy are the pure in heart.” Step 4 is “Openly examine and confess my faults to myself, to God, and another person I trust.” In order to have a clear conscience, in order to have a pure heart, I must clear out the garbage.

“Happy are those whose desire is to do what God requires.” That means “Voluntarily submit to every change God wants to make in my life and humbly ask Him to remove my character defects.”

Then we saw two verses in the Beatitudes about relationships: “Happy are the merciful”—to people who’ve hurt me and “Happy are the peacemakers”—to people I’ve hurt. “Evaluate all my relationships, offer forgiveness to those who’ve hurt me and make amends for harm I’ve done to others, except when to do so would harm them or others.”

Last week we looked at what I call the “maintenance step,” what keeps you on these other steps. I do that by “Reserving a daily time with God for self examination, Bible reading and prayer in order to know God and His will for my life and gain the power to do His will for my life.”

This week as we wind up this series, I want to look at the last step. Y in the word recovery stands for Yield: “Yield myself to God to be used to bring this Good News to others by both my example and my words.” God wants to use your experiences to help other people. He wants to use YOU. He wants to recycle the pain in your life for the benefit of other people. Usually we think God only uses real gifted, real talented people. That’s not true. God uses ordinary people. Usually we think, “God use my strength.” God says, “No, I don’t want to use your strength; I want to use your weaknesses.” Because people are helped by your strength; they’re helped when you’re honest about your weaknesses. You share your strength, they say, “Big deal, I’ll never have that.” You share your weaknesses, they say, “I can relate to that.” As you share from your hurts, habits, and hang-ups of things you’re recovering from, God wants to use you and that’s what Step 8 is all about. Yield myself to be used by God to bring this good news to others. When you understand this, that God uses your weaknesses and pain, life takes on a whole new meaning. But when you begin to practice this step, then you have genuine recovery. The proof of recovery is when you begin to focus outside of yourself. That means you’ve really recovered. You stop being so self absorbed—my needs, my hurts, my problems—and you start saying, “How can I help other people?” The proof of recovery is that you want to help others, not just keep focusing on what’s happened to you.

As we wrap this up, I want to do two things: First talk about why has God allowed my pain? and second, how can I use my pain to help others?

WHY HAS GOD ALLOWED MY PAIN?

Many reasons, but we only have time for four this morning:

1. HE HAS GIVEN ME A FREE WILL.

A choice. Genesis: “You were made in the image of God.” How are you like God? God gave you a choice. You can choose good or bad, right or wrong, evil or life. God says, “You can reject me or accept me. It’s your choice.” Why? God didn’t want a bunch of puppets. He could have made you where you had no free will at all. He made you. He could have made you where every day you bowed down three times and prayed, and you always do what’s right, never what’s wrong. But God wanted people who love Him voluntarily. You can’t say you love somebody unless you have the opportunity to not love them. You can’t say you’re good unless you’ve had the option to not be good, to be bad. So God has given you free will and free choice.

That free will is not only a blessing but it’s also a burden, because sometimes we make dumb choices. And the dumb choices cause all kinds of painful consequences in our life. So it’s good that I am free and I can choose, but it’s bad because I often choose the wrong thing and that causes pain in my life. I can choose to experiment with drugs. If I get addicted, it’s my fault. I can choose to be sexually promiscuous, if I get a disease it’s my fault. God says “Yes, I would not like for you to have this pain, but it’s part of the package that comes with the free will.”

Not only does God give you a free will, He gives everyone else one too. Sometimes they don’t do the right thing and you get hurt as an innocent victim. Those of you who have been hurt deeply by a parent, a former spouse, a teacher, a friend, a relative. God could have prevented that hurt from happening to you. All He would have had to do would be to take away that person’s free will to do wrong. But if He had done that, to be fair, He would have to have taken away your free will too. You see the dilemma? The problem is that by having a free will we get blessing, but we also get a burden. And God says, “I’m not going to overrule your will.” God doesn’t send anybody to hell; you choose to go there by rejecting everything that He does. He says, “I love you, I want you to be a part of my family.” If you say, “Forget it God,” thumb my nose, and walk out the other door, I can’t blame anybody but myself. There is a free will.

2. HE USES IT TO GET OUR ATTENTION.

God uses pain to get our attention. Pain is a warning light, a buzzer, an alarm. It says, “It’s time. Something’s wrong.” Pain is not your problem. Your depression, your anxiety, your fear is not really your problem. It’s a warning light that says there’s something else that’s your problem. It’s just a symptom of your problem. Pain just says, “Something is drastically wrong in my life.” It’s God’s megaphone. God whispers to us in our pleasures but He shouts to us in our pain. Wake up! Something’s wrong. God shouts to us in our pain. Proverbs 20:30: “Sometimes it takes a painful situation to make us change our ways.” We don’t change when we see the light but when we feel the heat.

A number of years ago I had a pair of shoes that I loved. They were made out of deerskin and were real soft and real smooth. I loved these things. I always dress for comfort, obviously. But after a while, I got holes in the bottoms, in the soles. But they still looked good on top. So I wore them anyway, just be sure when I sat on stage I kept my foot on the ground. I was not motivated to buy new shoes until there were seven days of rain in a row and having put up with soggy socks for several days, I decided I’m motivated to change. Sometimes it takes pain to get us going. Second Corinthians 7:9: Paul says “I am glad not because it hurts you but because the pain turns you to God.” It got your attention.

I have a cousin who was Most Likely to Succeed in high school. He was a brilliant kid in school, lived in Texas, his dad was a millionaire. He had everything at his fingertips, the most popular kid in the city. He grew up and became a semi-pro golfer, great businessman, Mr. Charisma. And got into cocaine. Then started dealing cocaine. He got thrown into Federal Penitentiary. While he was there in that penitentiary he gave his life to Christ and he came out of that prison and he started a ministry called Exodus Ministry to help ex-cons reactivate themselves into normal society. He said, The greatest thing that happened to me was going to prison. God uses problems and uses pain to get our attention.

Remember the story of Jonah? Jonah was going one way and God said, “I want you to go the other way.” So He provided a typical Mediterranean cruise for him. And at the bottom of the ocean in Jonah 2:7: “When I had lost all hope I once again turned my thoughts to the Lord.” Isn’t that a great verse? God uses pain to get our attention.

3. GOD USES PAIN TO TEACH ME TO DEPEND ON HIM.

Paul’s example, Second Corinthians 1:8–10 (TLB) “We were crushed and overwhelmed and saw how powerless we were to help ourselves, but that was good for then we put everything into the hands of God who could save us and He did help us.” You don’t know that God is all you need until God’s all you got. When you’ve lost it all and it’s all falling apart, you don’t know that God’s all you need until you realize He’s all you got. And He is all I need. And if you never had a problem, you’d never know God could solve them. God allows pain to teach you to depend on Him. Psalm 119:71: “It was the best thing that could have happened to me for it taught me to pay attention to your laws.” The truth is, some things we only learn through pain. It’s the only way we learn them. In this series you’ve heard eleven different people stand up here and share lessons that they’ve only learned through pain, life’s greatest teacher.

4. GOD GIVES ALLOWS PAIN TO GIVE ME A MINISTRY TO OTHERS.

God allows pain in my life to give me a ministry to others. It makes me humble, sympathetic, sensitive to others ’needs. This is what Step 8 is all about: Yield myself to God to help other people. The truth is, pain prepares you to serve.

Second Corinthians 1:4 “Why does God do this? So that when others are troubled needing our sympathy and encouragement we can pass on to them the same help and comfort God has given us.”

Everybody needs recovery of some type: mental recovery, physical recovery, spiritual recovery, social recovery, relational recovery. We all have hurts, habits, hang-ups. Nobody’s perfect. Who can better help an alcoholic than somebody who struggled with alcoholism? Who can better help somebody dealing with the pain of abuse than someone who was abused themselves? Who can better help somebody who lost his job and went bankrupt than somebody who lost his job or her job and went bankrupt? Who can better help a couple of parents who have a child, a teenager, who’s going off the deep end than a couple who had a child who went off the deep end? God wants to use and recycle the pain in your life to help others, but you’ve got to be open about it and honest. If you keep that hurt to yourself, you’re wasting it.

God gave Kay and me a ministry to help people in problem marriages. The first three years of our marriage it was a major problem. Bad, really bad. So when people would come to me and say, “I hate my wife,” I can say, “I relate to that. It’s not that long ago. I remember how I felt. I don’t want to divorce her, I want to kill her.” I relate to that! A guy says, “Every bone in my body says, You don’t deserve this, Get up, Split, There’s something better out there.” Yes, I can understand that. Because that’s the way I felt. And we worked through those problems and you’ve heard the story before of how God helped us through a Christian counselor and turned our marriage around and made it what it is today. We learn through the hurts of others. A few years ago I did a series on Sunday morning on marriage. Each week I told of a different problem we had worked on and learned the hard way. Twelve-week series, it could have been fifty weeks. God uses your hurts, your hang-ups, your problems to help other people.

There’s a beautiful story in the Bible, in Genesis, about the story of Joseph. He was so mistreated. People did incredible things to this guy. He was good guy. He didn’t deserve the pain in his life. One day all eleven of his brothers decided to gang up against him and sell him into slavery. And then they went back home and told their dad he’d been eaten by a lion. That’s what I call a dysfunctional family. Major problem here. He’s sold into slavery and taken from Israel into Egypt, into a whole foreign country He’s sold into slavery there. He’s doing his job, he’s keeping his life pure and his master’s wife tries to seduce him, and he says, “No that wouldn’t be right.” So she cries, “Rape!” He’s falsely accused of rape and thrown into prison. The guy’s whole life is downhill all the way. But God knew exactly what He was doing, putting him in position that raised him up to second in command in Egypt. And God used him to save not only one but two nations from destruction and famine. Later his brothers came to him to get food, expecting to have their heads cut off, and he says in Genesis 50:20, “They intended it to harm me, but God intended it for good.” God’s bigger than those people who hurt you. No matter what other people have done to you, God can turn it around and use it for good.

God never wastes a hurt. But you can waste it if you don’t learn from it and you don’t share it with other people. How can other people be blessed if you don’t share the problems you’re going through with them to encourage them on how you made it?

HOW DO I USE MY PAIN TO HELP OTHER PEOPLE?

This is what Step 8 is all about in the Road to Recovery. First Peter 3:15 is the basis for Step 8: “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you for the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.” You need to be prepared to give an answer to How did you make it in life? How did you recover? How are you recovering? Be prepared. Here’s what I suggest you do:

You need to make a list of all the experiences you’ve had in life to this day, positive and negative. Ones you’ve caused and ones you didn’t cause. Make a list of all those experiences. Then you ask, “What did I learn from that experience? How did God help me make it through that tough time?” Ask God, “How did You help me through that tough time?” Then write your story out on paper. Why? Thoughts disentangle themselves when they pass through the lips and fingertips. Write it out. Then ask yourself, “Who could best benefit from hearing my story?” The answer is people who are going through, right now, what you’ve already gone through, who are just a little bit behind you in the process. And you say to God, “I am available.” Then get ready. Because if you get ready to share the good news about God of how God has worked in your life God will wear you out. There are people who need to hear your story all over this world, who are going through what you’ve gone through.

Sometimes God wants you to take the initiative. This is called intervention. Galatians 6:1–2: “If someone is overcome by some sin, humbly help him back onto the right path, remembering that next time it might be you who is in the wrong. Share each other’s troubles and problems and so obey our Lord’s command.” Notice this is commanded here. God doesn’t say, “It’s a good idea if you share.” He says, “Do it.” If you are a believer, you are to share in the problems and troubles of other people. That is a command. If you’re not doing it, you’re not obeying God.

Three suggestions in sharing your story because you have a story to tell and God does not want you to waste the hurt, the problems you’ve had. How do you share:

1. Be humble. We’re all in the same boat. We’re all fellow strugglers. When you share your story, when you witness, it’s basically one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread. You’re not saying, “I’ve got it all together,” because you don’t. You’re getting it all together. You’re on the road to recovery. As you’re getting it all together, be humble and say, “We’re all in this together; here’s what happened to me.”

2. Be real. Be honest about your hurts and faults. We’ve seen this modeled by those telling their stories the past seven weeks, as they’ve stood up here and opened up themselves, been transparent and vulnerable and real. Do you realize the courage it took for those people to stand up here and do that? I’m grateful to be a part of a church family where real people can share real problems and real solutions without feeling put down or feeling guilty about it. We are committed to maintaining that atmosphere of acceptance in this church. You help other people by being honest about your hurts. It helps them open up. The other amazing thing is when you share your story it not only gives hope to them but gives healing to you. Every time you share your story with somebody, you get a little bit stronger. You’re healed a little bit more. You begin growth. People join Celebrate Recovery because of their pain, but they stay in Celebrate Recovery because of their growth. It keeps them growing in their life.

3. Don’t lecture. Just share your story. God wants you to be a witness not a defense attorney. You don’t argue anybody into heaven. You don’t force anybody into heaven. You just share—this is what happened to me.

John Baker’s story: I’m a believer who suffered with a very low self-esteem and a minuscule self-worth. I tried to fill that hurt, that void in my life, with alcohol. I accepted Christ at the age of thirteen. In high school I was president of my senior class, I lettered in track, basketball, and baseball. I felt God’s call at age sixteen. I was accepted at several Christian universities. There was this problem that I mentioned about my self-esteem. I never felt good enough for my parents, for my friends, for my girlfriends, teammates, so how could I be good enough to serve God? I must have missed the sermons when they talked about God’s mercy and Christ’s unconditional love and freely given grace. I wrestled with God’s call, and I judged myself unworthy.

As I packed for the University of Missouri I took my low self-esteem right along with me. I joined a fraternity, and it wasn’t too long after I joined the fraternity when I discovered what I thought to be the solution to my life’s problems. It was alcohol. It worked. I fit in. For the first time in my life I felt like I belonged. My senior year in college I married Cheryl. It’s been a long twenty-four years and she’s always in for another excitement. It’s never boring. I was a pilot in the air force. In nonety days they taught me to act like an officer and drink like a gentleman. I quickly learned the proper use of one-hundred-percent oxygen—to cure hangovers. I continued to abuse alcohol, viewing it as a cure to my problems, not a sin.

After the war, God blessed us with two beautiful children, Laura and Johnny. I got my MBA and began a very successful business career. I got promoted eight times in the first eleven years in business. We relocated about every two years. It was pretty difficult to find a church home with that much moving and relocation. That was all right with me because I was getting a little uncomfortable sitting in church because of my lifestyle, my business practices, and my priorities were certainly not Christ-like.

I was known as a functional alcoholic. I never lost a job to alcohol. I never got a 502, arrested while drinking, under the influence. The only things I lost with my alcoholism was my relationship with Christ, my family (Cheryl and I were separated for thirteen months), and finally all purpose for living. I was dying, physically, mentally, emotionally, and most importantly, spiritually.

I was finally ready for Step 1: Realize that I am not God, realize that I am powerless to control my tendency to do the wrong thing and my life is unmanageable. God has never kept me from making a mistake. He’s a gentleman. He’s doesn’t intrude where He’s not asked or He’s not wanted. He loved me enough to allow me, to protect me, to make my own decisions, and make my own mistakes, knowing that when I finally used all my own resources I’d return home to Him where I belonged. It was His plan all along.

I was ready for Step 2: Earnestly believe that God exists, that I matter to Him and He has the power to help me recover. This is where I began to find hope. I finally understood about God’s unconditional love. Today my life with Christ is an endless hope. Yesterday, my life without Him was a hopeless end.

This led me to Step 3: Consciously choose to control all my life and will to Christ’s care and control. I had to change my definition of willpower because mine left me empty and broken. I changed that to the willingness to accept God’s power for my life. I worked the first three steps and I said, “I can’t, God can,” and I made that decision to let Him one day at a time.

I thought the first three steps were hard, now came Step 4: Openly examine and confess my faults to God, myself, and another person whom I trust. I found a sponsor in recovery, a sponsor who gently led me through the steps and on the Road to Recovery and it was after taking this step, after I ‘fessed up that I was able to face the truth, accept Christ’s forgiveness for my life that led me out of the darkness of my sins, my secrets, into His wonderful life. Now I was finally willing to have God change me.

Step 5: Voluntarily submit to any and all changes that God wants me to make in my life. I had to let go and let God. Not much changed in my life, just everything changed in my life. I had to allow God to transform my mind, its nature, its condition, its identity. I had to learn to rejoice in steady progress, patient improvements that sometimes I couldn’t see myself, but others could see in me. It was during that time that God gave me this definition of humility: “My grace is all you need, for My power is strongest when you are weak. I am most happy then to be proud of my weakness for when I am weak then I am strong.” Now for my favorite step.

Step 6: Evaluate all my relationships, offer forgiveness to those who have hurt me and make amends for the harm I’ve done to others when possible, without expecting any reward. I said this was my favorite step, it wasn’t the easiest step. My most special amends was to my wife, Cheryl. I simply told her I was sorry for all the pain and hurt I had caused in her life and if there was anything I could ever do, anything, just ask. Over the months of our separation, Cheryl had begun to see the changes God was making in my life, changes that occurred as I worked my program. I went back to that sixteen-year-old boy in high school with the low self-esteem who attempted to drown all his problems with alcohol. This is where it really gets interesting. Cheryl and the kids had begun attending Saddleback. I was visiting the kids one night and they asked me to go with them on a Sunday morning. To their surprise, I said yes. I came in. I heard the music. I heard Rick’s message. And I was home.

Cheryl and I began to work in earnest on our problems. Really for the first time in a long time, we started to work together. Five months later, God opened our hearts, and we renewed our vows. Isn’t that just like God?

The next step was Step 7: Reserve a daily quiet time with God for self-examination, Bible reading and prayer in order to know God and His will for my life. As a family we took 101, we were baptized, we took 201 and it was in 301 and finally understood what Pastor Rick means, God never wastes a hurt. All the pain, all the heartache of my addiction finally made sense. God had shaped me and now was going to lead me to develop a Christ-centered program. Not just for alcoholics, but for the whole church family, anyone who wanted to face their hurts, their hang-ups, and their habits. After twenty years I was finally able to answer God’s call. I entered the seminary and committed to serve God wherever He chose.

What a blessing to be called to serve God at Saddleback. I pray that I will be able to spend the rest of my life doing Step 8: Yield myself to be used by God bringing this Good News to others, both by my example and by my words. As Pastor Rick said, over the last eight weeks you saw eleven very courageous people, loving people, share their lives with you. It’s this step. They are just some of the people from Celebrate Recovery that are working this step every day, especially on Friday nights. The leaders, the sponsors, the accountability partners, the band, we’re all there on Friday nights.

Rick: I want to challenge you to take four action steps:

1. If you have not yet committed your life to Jesus Christ, do so today. What are you waiting on? The greatest tragedy would be for you to go all the way through this series, hear these great truths, and the hope that it brings, and not do anything about it, like stepping across the line, giving your life to Christ. If you haven’t done so, do so today.

2. Write your story out. Take some time to set down and look at “What has God done in my life, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and how can He use that to help other people.”

3. Commit yourself to some church family for support. Attendance is not enough for recovery. It takes commitment and it takes relationships.

4. Ask God to give you somebody you could share your story with, to share the good news of how God can make the difference in somebody’s life. The world is full of people who need your story and if you don’t tell it, where are they going to hear it from? You are the only Bible some people will ever read. They wouldn’t be caught a hundred yards from this church. They’ll never hear me, but you have a story that can reach them, that they can identify with. God wants to use you. We don’t need any more TV evangelists, we have too many already. That’s why this church is never going to be on TV. What I want is you sharing your story with normal people, because you can reach people I could never reach, because your experience is different from mine. Once you step across the line, become a believer, why doesn’t God just take you on the fast track to heaven and get you there quickly? There are two things you can’t do in heaven. You can pray in heaven, sing, sleep, eat, relax, have fun, fellowship with other Christians, read your Bible. There are only two things you cannot do. One of them is sin. It’s a perfect place. The other is tell the good news with people who have never heard. Which of those two reasons do you think God leaves you on earth to do? Obvious isn’t it? The moment you step across the line, you become a carrier, you become a missionary. It’s called the Great Commission. It’s part of your job description, if you claim to be a believer, to share the good news with other people. The world is far more ready to receive it than we are ready to share it, and there are people who need to hear your story. You don’t have to be a biblical genius. You just say, “This is what happened to me.” That’s the most powerful kind of story anyway. “I don’t know where all the verses are, it doesn’t matter where all the verses are. This is what happened to me.” Nobody can refute that. That’s a personal experience.

Acts 20:24: “Life is worth nothing unless I use it for doing the work assigned me by the Lord Jesus.” What is that work? The work of telling the others the good news about God’s mighty love and kindness. There is no greater accomplishment in life than helping somebody find assurance of heaven. Because when you do that you’ve made a friend for eternity. When you get to heaven, God’s going to say, “This is great. You’re here. Did you bring anybody with you?” You make a friend for eternity when you share Christ. There is no greater accomplishment than to have their eternity secured, no greater joy, no greater satisfaction, than helping somebody find the good news. God wants to use you. Share your story. He made you for a purpose. Can you imagine getting to Heaven and seventy years from today, somebody walks up to you in heaven, “I just want to thank you.” “Thank me? I don’t even know you.” “No, but you were one of the pioneers at Saddleback church, before they even had a building. You were going there and you were praying and you joined and you supported the church with your gifts, your time, and your offerings. You sat in that tent when it was freezing in the winter, and hot in the summer and you worked and sacrificed to build a lighthouse for Southern California that could share that good news. And fifty years after you died that church reached me for Jesus Christ. And I’m in heaven because of you and I just want to thank you.” Do you think that will be worth it? I make no apology whatsoever in saying that maybe the most significant thing you do with your life is first, give your life to Christ, become a part of Saddleback’s family, get involved in a ministry, start sharing your story. It will far outlast anything you do in your career, far outlast anything you do in your hobby, because what we’re talking about here has eternal implications, getting people from darkness into light, from hell into heaven, from an eternity without God to an eternity with God, and people will be thanking you the rest of eternity. There is no more significant cause in life.

I challenge you to take this eighth step with me: “I yield myself to be used by God to bring this good news to other people, in my example and in my words.”