Sermon Tone Analysis

*The Road to Recovery*

*(Fresh Starts Pt 1)*

 

Isaiah 57:18 God speaking, “I have seen how they acted but I will heal them, I will lead them and help them and I will comfort those who mourn.

I offer peace to all near and far.”

This is a great promise of God.

Notice there are five parts to recovery that God wants to do in your life.

Recently a father was trying to take an afternoon nap on a Sunday afternoon in his living room and his little boy kept bugging him saying, “Daddy, I’m bored.”

So his father, trying to make up a game, found a picture of a globe in the newspaper, a picture of the world.

He ripped it up in about fifty pieces and he said, “Son this is a puzzle.

I want you to put it all back together.”

He laid down to finish his nap, thinking he would get at least another hour and a half to two hours of sleep.

In about 15 minutes the little boy woke him up saying, “Daddy, I’ve got it finished.

It’s all put together.”

“You’re kidding.”

He knew his son didn’t know all the positions of the nations and things like that.

He said, “How did you do that?”

He said, “Dad, there was a picture of a person on the back page of that newspaper and when I got my person put together the world looked just fine.”

We’re beginning a new series today called Fresh Starts.

·         We are going to work on your person.

It’s amazing how much better the world looks when your person is put together in the right way.

We’re going to talk in this series about how to handle and how to overcome the hurts in your life, the habits that are messing up your life and the hang-ups that have cause pain in your life.

Hurts, habits, and hang-ups.

The verse I’ve chosen for our theme verse in our series “Fresh Starts” is Isaiah 57:18, God speaking, “I have seen how they acted but I will heal them, I will lead them and help them and I will comfort those who mourn.

I offer peace to all near and far.”

*1) There are five parts to recovery that God wants to do in your life.*

a) If you have been hurt, God says “I want to heal you.”

b) If you’re confused, “I want to lead you.”

c) If you’ve ever felt you were helpless to change anything, “I want to help you change that.”

d) If you’ve ever felt no one understands your problem, “I want to comfort you.”

e) If you feel anxious and worried and afraid, “I want to offer peace to you.”

The fact is life is tough.

We live in a imperfect world.

We’re hurt by other people and we hurt ourselves and we hurt other people.

The Bible says, “All have sinned.”

That means none of us are perfect, we’ve all blown it, we’ve all made mistakes.

We hurt and we hurt others.

This series is for everybody.

Everyone in this room needs recovery, unless you’ve lived a perfect life.

But if you haven’t lived a perfect life, if you’ve ever been hurt, if you’ve ever had a hang-up or a habit that you’d like to get rid of, you need recovery

.

*2) WHAT DO YOU NEED RECOVERY FROM?*

The good news is this: regardless of the problem you need recovery from, whether it’s emotional, financial, relational, spiritual, sexual or whatever, regardless of what you need recovery from, the steps to recovery are always the same.

The principles for recovery are found in the Bible.

It’s the original recovery manual.

In 1935 a couple of guys formulated, based on the Scriptures, what are now known as the classic 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and used by hundreds of other recovery groups.

Twenty million Americans are in a recovery group every week and there are 500,000 different recovery groups.

The basis is God’s Word.

I have summarized these principles of recovery around the word “Recovery.”

We’ll take a letter each week and look at eight summarized steps on the road to recovery.

*3) THE FIRST STEP.

THE “R” IN RECOVERY STANDS FOR REALIZE.*

Realize I’m not God.

I admit I am powerless to control my tendency to do wrong things and my life is unmanageable.

Do you ever stay up late when you know you need sleep?

Do you ever eat or drink more calories than your body needs?

Do you ever feel you ought to exercise but you don’t?

Do you ever know the right thing to do, but you don’t do it?

Do you ever know something is wrong, but you do it anyway?

Have you ever known you should be unselfish, but you’re selfish instead?

Have you ever tried to control somebody or something and found it was uncontrollable?

If your answer is yes to any of those questions, welcome to the human race.

We’re all in need of recovery.

*I.

THE CAUSE OF MY PROBLEM: MY SIN NATURE*

·         The Bible has a word for this.

The Bible calls that tendency, my sin nature.

My sin nature gets me in all kinds of problems, and you in all kinds of problems.

I do things that aren’t good for me.

I do them even when they are self-destructive and I don’t do things that are good for me.

I respond the wrong way when I’m hurt and it just increases the hurt, rather than lessening it.

I react the wrong way to people.

I treat them in wrong ways and then it backfires, when I know it’s not going to work.

I try to fix problems and often when I fix them they are worse than they were when I started.

Proverbs 14 says “There is a way that seems right to man but it ends in death.”

·         You will always have this sin nature with you, this desire to do the wrong thing.

You’re going to always have it with you till you get to heaven.

And even after you become a Christian, you still have desires that pull you the wrong way.

Paul understood this.

In Romans 7:15 he said, “I don’t understand myself at all.

For I really want to do what’s right, but I can’t.

I do what I don’t want to do but what I hate.

I know perfectly well that what I’m doing is wrong, but I can’t help myself.

It’s sin inside me that’s stronger than I am, that makes me do those evil things.”

a)     The first step to recovery is you must understand the cause of this problem.

Why does this happen in my life?

You need to understand the cause of it, then the consequences of the problem, then the cure.

b)     What’s the cause of my problem?

The cause of all your problems is this—I want to be God.

Would you like to decide what’s right and what’s wrong?

You say, “I don’t want anybody telling me what’s right and what’s wrong, I want to decide what’s right and what’s wrong.

That’s called playing God.

What it says is, “I want to control.”

And the more insecure you are, the more you’re driven to control.

The more insecure you are, you want to control yourself, control other people, control your environment.

You are driven to do this.

And that’s called playing God.

c)      This is man’s oldest problem.

Even Adam and Eve had it.

God put them in Paradise and they tried to control Paradise.

God said “You can do anything you want to in this entire Paradise except one thing: Don’t eat from this certain tree.”

What did they do?