Sermon Tone Analysis
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Everybody has a sinful nature – I do, you do, everybody does.
We’re all born with an innate ability to do the wrong thing.
Because of that, because sin entered the world, everything in the world is broken – the weather’s broken, the economy’s broken, every family is broken, every body is broken, every relationship is broken.
That’s why we’re doing this series on how do you deal with the brokenness in our relationships.
How do you make a relationship healthier and stronger?
Today we are going to deal with a very, very sensitive issue.
It’s a silent subject nobody wants to talk about.
But it’s an issue we need to talk about when we deal with broken relationships.
That’s the issue of abuse – physical abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse.
The Bible tells us in 2 Timothy 3:2 that in the last days abuse is going to rise.
That it’s going to increase in its prevalence.
And of course we’re seeing that all around as our culture decays, as people live more and more for themselves and less and less for God and we lose our spiritual roots.
Abuse is at an all-time high.
Let me read you some pretty sobering statistics:
The leading cause of injury to women now in the world, is domestic violence in the home from somebody she already knows, somebody in the family.
It’s more than the next three causes of injury combined – accidents, muggings and rapes.
It’s the number one cause of injury to a woman in the world today.
Every nine seconds in the United States a woman is assaulted or beaten.
Every nine seconds.
Around the world one in every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex, or abused in her lifetime.
That’s incredible.
One in five teenage girls have been in a relationship already where the boyfriend threatened violence or self harm if they broke up.
In one recent survey, 92 percent of all women surveyed listed reducing domestic abuse and sexual assault as their top concerns.
In a recent 32-nation study, it was discovered that women now commit half of all partner violence.
It’s not one sided anymore.
They are just as likely as men to “commit emotional abuse” but male victims report it even less than women because women don’t tend to report it.
America has three times more shelters for animals than for victims of domestic violence.
Physical abuse, sexual abuse, those are pretty easy to identity.
It’s much harder to pin down emotional abuse.
How do you know if it’s emotional abuse or not?
It’s much more subtle.
People make far more excuses for emotional abuse that goes on because you can get away with it a whole lot easier.
But the Bible is literally filled with examples of abuse – sexual, physical, verbal and emotional.
Let me just show you a couple of examples.
She was so abusive to Hagar that she ran out of the house, she left the home, ran away.
And by the way, he was an alcoholic too and was drunk when he was saying the stuff he was saying.
In Job 19, Job talks about his tormentors, those who were abusing him.
He says, “Why do you keep tormenting me with such words.
[This is verbal abuse.
Why do you keep tormenting me with such words?]
Time after time you insult me and you show no shame for the way that you abuse me.”
The reason we need to deal with those is because the damage of abuse is a lifetime damage—unless you learn to deal with it.
In many ways it’s kind of like Job says...
There’s no single passage in the Bible that says, “Here are all the steps.”
But there are literally dozens and dozens of examples in Scripture and dozens and dozens of verses that deal with the principles of what we must do when we have been abused by somebody else.
So I want to share these seven steps with you over the next two weeks.
How do I help someone break free from abuse?
Steps to breaking free from abuse…
(sexual, physical, verbal or emotional)
1. Don’t keep it a secret.
Nothing’s going to happen until you take step one.
Don’t keep it a secret.
It is the most common thing in the world when someone’s abused to say, I’m not going to tell anybody about it.
But the Bible says you’ve got to share your pain with somebody you trust who can help you break free from it.
You don’t want to hide it, you don’t want to conceal it, you don’t want to pretend it’s not there, you don’t want to fake it, you don’t want to ignore it, you don’t want to close your eyes to it.
What you need to do is you need to talk about it.
One of the sayings used in recovery all the time is “I’m only as sick as my secrets.”
That’s true.
Our secrets make us sick.
The way to deal with that illness is to let it out.
You’ve heard me say this before: “Revealing my feeling is the beginning of healing.”
I
The starting point is don’t keep a secret.
You’ve got to share with somebody.
Somebody who can help you break free from this.
The way we get free is to first face it.
That means to admit it, to open up.
Abuse is often called the silent epidemic.
Because it’s the big pink elephant in many, many marriages that nobody wants to talk about.
It may have been in the family you grew up in, it may be in the family you’re in right now, but we just don’t want to talk about it.
And people suffer in silence.
One national study did a ten-nation study –they studied 10 different nations.
Between 55 to 95 percent of women who have been abused by their partners have never told anybody.
Men are even less likely to talk about it or to get help.
What happens is abuse does a crazy thing in our mind.
It has an amazing way to create shame in us.
And we don’t want to talk about it.
If you don’t get anything else that I say I want you to hear this: If you have been abused as a child or a teenager or as an adult, it’s not your fault.
It’s not your fault!
“Yeah but I …” It’s not your fault!
You are not responsible for the wrong, sinful actions of somebody else.
It’s not your fault!
The abuser must accept responsibility for his or her actions—it’s not your fault.
We’re going to look at King David today because if anybody understood abuse it was King David.
In the Old Testament King David was the king who wrote most of the book of Psalms.
He spent much of his life dealing with abuse, because there were people who wanted to hurt him.
There were people who wanted to kill him.
There were people who wanted to abuse him.
There were people who wanted to defame him.
There were people who wanted to ridicule him, who wanted to discredit him – all kinds of different abuse.
But one of the things we learn from David right off the bat for modeling in the Bible is this: Don’t hold it in.
You’ve got to let it go.
You’ve got to talk it out.
You can’t keep it a secret.
David explains what happened when he tried to keep it a secret.
This is a classic response to abuse.
Classic response.
So notice the four things that happens when you hold it in.
Dangers of holding it in:
You risk being hurt again.
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