Fresh Starts 4

COMING CLEAN

Fresh Starts—Part 4

We’ve been in a series that I’ve been calling The Road to Recovery, and we’ve been looking at how do you handle your hurts, habits, and the hang-ups that are messing up your life. We said that we’re taking the word “recovery,” each week looking at a different letter to represent eight steps that help us get unstuck from the habits that mess us up, from the problems that would cause us difficulties, the memories we can’t seem to let go of.

The first week we talked about the Reality Step—Realize I’m not God, that I’m powerless to control my tendency to do the wrong thing and my life is unmanageable. In reality I realize that I have problems I can’t seem to control.

The next week we talked about the Hope Step—Although I’m powerless to control all the problems and all the things in my life, God has the power to control them, and E stands for earnestly believe that God exists, that I matter to Him, and He has to power to help me recover.

Last week we talked about the Commitment Step—It’s not enough to know that I’ve got problems and not enough to know that God can solve them, but I must consciously turn them over to Him. I must make a commitment of all my life and will and say, “God, here is my life, the good, the bad and the ugly.” And God begins to take those problems and begins to work on them. We call that the Commitment Step.

STEP FOUR—HOUSECLEANING STEP

It has to do with cleaning up the past, letting go of guilt, gaining a clear conscience, learning to live guilt free and the way God wants us to live. If you’ll take this step with me tonight you’re going to feel a whole lot better a week from today.

O STANDS FOR OPENLY EXAMINE AND CONFESS MY FAULTS TO GOD, TO MYSELF, AND TO SOMEONE I TRUST.

Why is this a part of the recovery process? Guilt keeps us stuck in the past. Guilt keeps us from growing, from becoming all God wants us to be. If you’re going to learn how to really enjoy life, you’ve got to learn how to let go of guilt. The truth is, none of us is faultless. We all have sins, we’ve all made mistakes. So we all have regrets. We all have remorse. We all have things we wish we could turn back the clock on and say, “I wish I would have done that differently,” but you didn’t. So you feel bad about it, feel guilty about it, carry it with you. As a result we carry guilt around—sometimes consciously, but most of the time unconsciously. There are a lot of ways you react in life that are caused by unconscious guilt. Things you’re not even aware of. Things you feel bad about. We may deny the guilt. We may repress the guilt. We may blame other people for our guilt. We may excuse our guilt. We may rationalize our guilt. But we still feel the effects of it. If you’re really going to recover from the hurts, and habits, and hang-ups in your life, you’ve got to learn how to let go of guilt, how to live with a clear conscious.

I was listening to one of these LA Cop radio shows the other day. They were talking to a call-in psychologist. Somebody called in: “I’m so consumed with guilt and don’t know what to do with it. What do I do with my guilt? How do I get rid of it?” The answer of the talk show host: “You can’t. You must just learn to live with your guilt.” When I heard that I wanted to say, “Give me that guy’s number. I know a better answer, a far better answer, than you. Rationalize is telling myself in my mind that it’s OK when I know in my heart it was wrong. We can rationalize all we want: It’s OK, everybody’s doing it or whatever, it was a long time ago, but in my heart I keep saying, I know it was wrong.

How do you get rid of guilt? By taking Step 4 in the Road to Recovery, and the good news is that this step is the key to relief. And if you take the steps of the procedure I’m going to share with you, you’ll be able to feel Psalm 32: “What happiness for those whose guilt has been forgiven. What relief for those who have confessed their sins and God has cleared their record.”

I. THE REASON FOR THIS STEP IS BECAUSE WHAT GUILT DOES TO US

1. Guilt destroys your confidence.

You cannot be a confident person if you have guilt in your life. It makes you feel insecure because you’re always worried, “What if somebody finds out? What if somebody really knows the truth about me then they may not like me, they may reject me, I may not be all that I’m cracked up to be?” As a result we’re afraid of other people and it destroys our confidence.

May years ago Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, writer of the Sherlock Holmes novels, was quite a prankster and one day he played a prank on five of the most prominent men in England. He sent an anonymous note to these five prominent men and it simply said this: “All is found out, flee at once.” Within twenty-four hours all five men had left the country.

Guilt robs you of confidence. It’s like a cloud hanging over your head and you’re thinking, “I just can’t get on with my life because I’m afraid somebody is going to find that skeleton in my closet, that deep, dark secret that I know about, and obviously God knows about, but nobody else knows about it and it carries a heavy, heavy weight.” And it robs your confidence.

2. Guilt absolutely damages your relationships.

Guilt causes me to respond to people in wrong ways. Guilt can make me impatient with other people. Guilt can cause me to overreact in anger. Have you ever seen somebody overreact in anger, like a nuclear explosion to a firecracker cause? Often that’s motivated by guilt when you get down behind it. Sometimes the persons themselves don’t even know that. Guilt can cause you to spoil people, indulge people. “I feel like I’m guilty in this relationship so I buy them lots of things.” Parents often feel guilty and overcompensate by indulging. Guilt can cause you to avoid commitment in relationship. You get so close in the relationship but then no closer. Why won’t I do that? Why won’t I let people get close to me? One of the reasons is Guilt. So it damages my relationships, because it keeps me responding to people in ways that sometimes I don’t understand. A lot of marriage problems today are caused by things that happened prior to marriage that a spouse still feels guilty about. And it causes marriage problems today.

3. Guilt keeps me stuck in the past.

Last week we talked about this, how living in the past is like driving always looking in the rearview mirror. You’re going to end up crashing if you do that. You can’t just look at life in a rearview mirror. It gives perspective but you don’t constantly look at it. And if you’re always looking at a rearview mirror you never get ahead. What guilt does is it tends to replay in your mind over and over and over the things you wish you could change but you’re never going to change. Guilt cannot change the past just like worry cannot change the future. But it just makes today miserable. On top of that it can make you sick.

I read a report the other day that said psychiatrists say that probably seventy percent of the people in the hospital could leave today if they knew how to resolve their guilt. When I swallow my guilt my stomach keeps score, and if I don’t talk it out to God and to others I take it out on myself. This is a very important step. It’s a scary step. This is the one that separates the men from the boys. This is the one that separates those who want to talk about recovery and those who really mean business saying, “I’m going to get on with my life. I want to get well. I want to grow. I want to let go of the past. I want to be able to close it. I want to bury the past.” You can’t bury it as long as it’s alive. And so you have to know how you can take these steps.

II. HOW TO DO THIS STEP

Here’s how you do it. How do you take these steps? The procedure is very simple, it just requires a lot of courage.

1. Take a personal moral inventory.

What that means is that you get alone by yourself. You get a pencil and a notepad and you sit down and say, “What is wrong with me? What have I felt guilty about? What have I regretted? What have I felt remorseful about? What are the faults in my life that I know need changing?” And you ask God to help you out. You ask Him to bring to your mind, “What are the things I consciously feel guilty about, and what are the things I unconsciously feel guilty about that I don’t know about but are messing up my life?”

Lamentations 3:40: “Let us examine our ways and test them.” God says we need to examine our lives and then we pray and ask God in this time to help us. Psalm 139:23–24: “Search me O God, and know my heart. Test my thoughts, point out anything you find in me that makes you sad.” Lord, I’m sitting here, I’ve got my pencil and paper, You just bring it to mind.

When you take this moral inventory, you need to take your time, don’t rush it. I’ve done this many times in my life. It’s a regular habit, a discipline, that keeps me in tune, growing, healthy. This doesn’t work unless you are ruthlessly honest with yourself. And you say, “I’m going to be dead honest, quit pretending, I’m going to lay out what’s wrong with my life” and you sit down and start writing it down.

Why in writing? Because it forces you to be specific. Why can’t I just think about these things, pray about them. Thoughts disentangle themselves when they pass through the lips and the fingertips. That means if I’ve thought about it and I can say it and I can write it down, I’ve really got it clear. If I can’t say it, put it down in writing, it’s still pretty vague. You can’t just say, “God, I’ve blown it in life.” We all know that. Specifically, you need to write it down. This helps you be specific, face reality, helps you stop denying problems in your life.

Since many of you have never done this before I’ve asked Eddie James to come give us an example.

Eddie: OK, I’ve got my outline, Life Recovery Bible, paper, pen, Kleenex, food—just in case I get emotional. It says, TAKE A PERSONAL, MORAL INVENTORY: How about the time I cheated on my math final, my senior year. The times I know my mom is going to call and I let the machine pick it up. The time I bit my sister—and my brother and their friends. WRITE DOWN MY RESENTMENTS. I don’t resent anybody. Cause and effect of the resentments. I resent Timmy, he’s my next-door neighbor and he’s six years old. He knocks on my door and then runs away. He threw a baseball through my window and said his hand slipped. And he calls me at all hours of the night and asks for a guy by the name of Ben Dover. THE EFFECT? I guess it makes me a little bit irritated, a little bit short-tempered, a little bit edgy. My girlfriend, Leslie. Every other Saturday without fail, she will call me and want to go shopping. Grocery shopping. But she wants me to be in on this part of her life. She says I spend too much time doing other things and not with her. She says I listen to her but don’t hear her. This makes me a little bit irritated, short-tempered, a little bit edgy. WHAT PART OF IT AM I RESPONSIBLE FOR? I’m not responsible for any of it. It’s not my fault that I had to cheat on my senior test and make a B; my parents would have killed me. It’s not my fault when I screen my calls, I’m not the only one that screens calls when they know their parents are going to call. It’s like the ever-so-guilty zone, every time she calls me. It’s not my fault that my leg just kinds of extends when little Timmy runs by and then his face skids across the pavement. And it’s not my fault I bit my siblings. I was the youngest; it was self-defense. Why do I eat? Well, if you had a girlfriend that thought you would rather choose HBO over Alpha Beta and Double Coupons you might eat too. ADMIT TO GOD AND TO OURSELVES AND TO OTHERS THE EXACT NATURE OF OUR WRONGS. My mother could really work on this one!

Rick: Step one is you make a moral inventory. You sit down and write out what’s bugging me, how have I bugged others. What are my faults, my sins, my mistakes.

2. Accept responsibility for my faults.

Proverbs 20:27 “The Lord gave us a mind and a conscious. We cannot hide from ourselves.” The greatest holdup to the healing for my hang-up is me. The greatest holdup to the healing for your hang-up is you. It starts with being radically honest and saying, “I’m the problem.” I keep saying, “If I just change relationships, just change jobs, or just change towns, just change locations, then everything will be fine. The only problem is wherever I go, I’m there. And I keep messing it up.” So you accept responsibility for your faults. Don’t rationalize. Don’t say, “It happened a long time ago or it’s just a stage or everybody does it.” You don’t rationalize it. You don’t minimize it. You don’t say, “It’s no big deal.” If it’s no big deal how come you still remember it twenty years later? And you do. Don’t minimize it. Don’t blame others, “It’s mostly their fault.” It may be mostly their fault, but God holds you responsible for the ten percent that’s your fault. It may have been mostly their fault but what about your ten percent? And you just admit you messed up. “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” Phillips translation: “We live in a world of illusion.” Living Bible: “We’re only fooling ourselves.” The point is that if I really want to stop defeating myself, I’ve got to stop deceiving myself. And pretending that it’s everybody else’s fault—when the issue really is me.

What are you pretending to not feel guilty about, but in your heart you still do? Don’t you think it’s time to finally deal with it and get over with it so you can get on with your life? You make a moral inventory and then you look at that list and say, “Yes, that’s me. I accept responsibility for my faults.”

3. I ask God for forgiveness.

First John 1:9: “If we freely admit that we have sinned we find God utterly reliable. He forgives our sin and makes us thoroughly clean from all that is evil.” If we freely admit it, God will forgive us. What is the right way to ask God for forgiveness? How do I do this?

HOW NOT TO GET FORGIVENESS FROM GOD:

1. Don’t beg. You don’t have to beg for God to forgive. He already wants to forgive you. God wants to forgive you more than you want to ask for forgiveness. He is a forgiving God. You don’t have to beg.

2. Don’t bargain. Don’t say, “If You’ll just forgive me, I’ll never do this again.” If that’s your area of weakness, you’re probably putting yourself on. You don’t have to bargain with God to get His forgiveness. You don’t have to beg.

3. Don’t bribe. Don’t say, “God if You’ll forgive me, I promise to do a bunch of good things. I’ll go to church, I’ll tithe, I’ll do this or that …”

You just believe. You believe that He will forgive you. When we freely admit that we have sinned, we find God utterly reliable. He forgives our sin and makes us thoroughly clean from all that is evil. Admit. “Admit” is a Greek word that we get the word “confess” from. And the word admit there is homo meaning “same” (like homogenized milk) and logo meaning “word” or logo. It means to speak the same. To admit or to confess means to speak the same thing about the stuff on your list that God says about it. I say, “God, You’re right, it’s wrong.” That’s what it means to confess. It just means to say, “God, You’re right, it’s wrong.” Agree with God.

The basis for forgiveness is because He’s utterly reliable. It’s God’s nature. But you say, “If I make that list you don’t know what’s going to be on that list, I know. And I could never be forgiven for that.” You’re wrong.

As a pastor, nothing shocks me anymore. I’ve heard it all. There is no sin you could think of that I haven’t already heard of and somebody’s told me personally. And every time I’ve taken people through this step, I have seen dramatic change in their lives. Every single time. There is no sin too bad, too great.

A while back, a woman, not a part of this church, came to me, and said, “I’m depressed. I’ve been in bed for weeks, and I don’t have any energy to get out of bed and live anymore.” As I began to talk with her I said, “Is there something you really regret in your life?” She began to pour it out. Yes, her husband travels, she had an affair and got pregnant and had an abortion, and she had never told him about it. I explained to her how Jesus Christ said, “I can forgive and I can cleanse you of every sin.” She said, “It just doesn’t seem fair. Somebody’s got to pay for my sin.” I said, “Somebody has. His name is Jesus Christ. That’s why He died on the cross. And He died for that sin and every other one you’ve confessed and committed and ones you’re going to.”

We humbly come to God and we say, Ask God for forgiveness. Isaiah 1:18: “No matter how deep the stain of your sin is, I can take it out and make it clean as freshly fallen snow.” That’s what I call a soap-bar verse. Detergents are bragging about who can take out the deep stain. I was laughing when I saw this verse, because Amy, my oldest child in junior high did a science project comparing about thirty different popular stain removers. If you really want to know what works, ask her. I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t Tide. God says, “No matter what the stain is, I can take it out.”

4. Admit my faults to another person.

God says it is absolutely essential for your recovery. James 5:16: “Admit your faults, to one another and pray for each other so that you may be healed.” How are we healed? By admitting our faults to one another. Why do I need to drag another person into this? Why can’t I just admit it to God? Why don’t I just pray about it, make a list, talk to God about it? But why do I need to tell one other person? Because the root of our problem is relational. We lie to each other. We deceive each other. We’re dishonest with each other. We wear masks. We pretend we have it together. But we don’t. And we deny our true feelings, and we play games. It isolates us from each other and prevents intimacy. We end up living with shame and it makes us insecure. If they really knew the truth about me, they wouldn’t love me. They’d reject me.

So we get sick. I am only as sick as my secrets. The secrets I hold onto are the secrets that make me sick. God says, “Revealing your feelings is the beginning of healings.” If you don’t do that, the more you hide it, the bigger it gets, you exaggerate it internally. But the amazing thing is, when you risk honesty with one person, all of a sudden, this feeling of freedom comes into your life. You realize that everybody has problems, and often they have the same ones you do. You admit it to one other person. Everybody needs one. You don’t need more than one, but you need at least one person in life you can be totally honest with. Why? There is something therapeutic about it. It’s God’s way of freeing us.

Do I just go out and broadcast my sins to everybody? No. Telling the wrong person could be big trouble. You don’t just go out and indiscriminately tell your problems. No.

Who do you tell?

1. Somebody you trust. Somebody who can keep a confidence, who is not a gossip and who has a reputation for keeping a confidence. You don’t need to tell somebody and then next week it’s in National Enquirer.

2. Somebody who understands the value of what you’re doing.

3. Somebody who is mature enough that they are not going to be shocked.

4. Somebody who knows the Lord well enough that they can reflect His forgiveness to you. That may be a lay pastor, a close trusted friend, a Christian counselor. Most genuine Christians I know would be honored to listen to your fourth step.

Then what do you say?

You find a safe place and take your moral inventory list and say, “I just need somebody to listen to me take my fourth step in recovery. Here’s some things I know are wrong in my life, this is what I’ve done, this is what I’ve felt. Here are the habits, the hurts, the hang-ups.” Whenever I have somebody tell me, “What I’m about to share I’ve never told anyone in my life” I get so excited because I know that the moment they share it, they are going to experience relief like they’ve never felt before.

You don’t have to tell everybody, just somebody. And all of a sudden the secret that’s been making you sick, stops making you sick, because you start sharing it. Remember, be specific. The secret you want to conceal the most is the one you need to reveal the most because that’s the one that will heal you, so you can experience God’s grace.

When do you do it?

As soon as possible. Don’t procrastinate. This is one of those things. You’re going to take this sermon home, “I’ll just think about this one for a while. I don’t know. I acted on those first three.” Maybe you’re not ready to take this step yet. That’s OK, keep coming. You just need a little more pain. Then God will get you ready and once you’re ready you’ll take this step. But as soon as possible.

5. Accept God’s forgiveness and forgive myself.

Romans 3:23–24: “All of us have sinned.” All. Some of you are feeling a little lonely right now. “Rick is talking directly to me. He planed this sermon for me, I know it.” No, I didn’t. All have sinned. We’re all in the same boat. Every week somebody comes up to me, “Pastor Rick, you’ve been reading my mail.” No, I’ve not. I’ve been reading my mail. We’re all in the same boat. Pastors need to take step 4. We’re all in the same boat. We’re just a bunch of sinners. Who are we trying to kid? Nobody is perfect. We’ve all blown it. We’ve all made mistakes. It’s not like anybody is more righteous than anybody else. We’ve all got different problems, just different areas. “All of us have sinned, yet God declares us not guilty if we trust in Jesus Christ who freely takes away our sins.” What happens when I take this step? How does God forgive?

1. God forgives instantly. He doesn’t wait. The moment you do this, you’re forgiven. He never makes us wait, make us suffer for a while. Humans do that, but God doesn’t do that.

2. He forgives freely. He freely takes away our sins. You don’t deserve it, you don’t earn it, you can’t work for it. It’s free.

3. He forgives completely. He wipes it out. “There is no condemnation for those who live in union with Christ Jesus.” From personal experience, I want to tell you how great that feels, to live with no condemnation. I keep short accounts with God.