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So what’s your PROBLEM? We’ve all got them. We all need help unpacking them. And if we don’t deal
with them….they’ll deal with us! So glad you’re with us because today’s a good day to start to let God and a trusted friend help us do just that! Well that title is a fine way to end Mothers’ Day, isn’t it? Reminds me of a “Dennis the Menace” cartoon strip, where Dennis says to his Mom as he hands her a bouquet of flowers, “Happy Mothers’ Day, Mom. Today is all about you. But let’s face it. Tomorrow, you’re on your own!” I sure don’t mean to end the day too quickly, ladies. I hope it has been a great day for each one of you! I am so grateful for the godly women in my family circle. And I pray that today each of you have been honored, pampered to some degree, and blessed by the God who created you on purpose and placed you where you could give life, love and spiritual guidance to those who are still being shaped by your nurturing embrace! May the Lord continue to bless and use you to reach your family for Him! And now to return to speaking to all of us in this 55+ “Finishing Well” crowd…. We’re back in Hebrews 12 and still in a “3rd week on the first verse”. Yes, I know, I am moving at a “snail’s pace”! I get that a lot! I can no longer tease my buddies in the “BROS” men’s Bible study for going a verse at a time on Wednesday mornings! But in my defense, there is a lot to unpack, so here we go! It’s week 3 out of 4 and so far, we’ve answered the questions in Hebrews 12:1-3 of “who’s your HEAVENLY Crowd’? Those are the saints (listed in Hebrews 11) that have inspirationally gone before us in faith. They followed God even when they had no idea if they’d get there in their lifetime. Verse 35b says “they placed their hope in a better life after the resurrection.” These folks are cheering us on in the “cloud”, if you will. We remember their stories and their quotes that give us courage. And last week we talked about our “Earthly Crowd, those mentors and encouragers “in the flesh” in our lives, whose examples have brought tremendous “guidance and grace as we run our race”. So this week we ask ourselves, “What is our Problem?” Because the Scripture says we need to “throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles”, in order to fully participate in God’s calling on our life. Now that’s in the NIV. In the NLT, it describes these things as “stripping off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up”. OK, that gives a little more color to the picture. Sin slows us down AND trips us up! No argument here! But notice the wording that the PASSION Translation uses. “Let go of every WOUND that has pierced us and the sin that we so easily FALL into”. Wow! I love the painful beauty of God’s Word telling us we have to “let go” of our woundedness, our sinfulness, and of everything that hinders our emotional and spiritual growth. Alright, let’s all stand for our closing prayer. (if it were only that easy!) We all are wounded. All of us are still hindered to some degree and will be this side of heaven. We also are still somewhat entangled, still get tripped up, still fall into sinful, hateful or hurtful patterns of thinking and behavior. And we need help. God’s help. And a certain amount of “a little help from my friends”. (Thank you, Lennon and McCartney for some Biblical language from time to time) Now the Bible doesn’t tell us in this passage how to get that help. It does in other Scriptures. But here it’s more of a directive so we can “run the race marked out for us with perseverance”. And to run in such a way that we finish well, not losing heart along the way. So just how do we get to an “unhindered state” of spiritual living? How do we get free of sinful patterns? How do we shake off the Devil at our age? We REPENT, of course. We change our mind about sin, wrong thinking and disobedient patterns. But what if we struggle to even identify those unholy attitudes and habits? Dear friends of our family, Dr. John Walker and his wife Deanna and their grown now kids, Hope and Charity began “BLESSING RANCH” ministries in the 90’s. As psychologists, John and Charity developed and perfected a transformational strategy based on this passage with a great blend of theology and psychology. Their premise is that we all have had “HEART SHAPERS” (experiences that dramatically or traumatically affect us) that turned into “SORE SPOTS”, which led us to our own imperfect” lower case t” truth, rather than God’s “upper case T” Truth to operate by. In time we began to use our own strategies rather than God’s Strategy, which led to us justifying with our own Heart Logic and then having our own Life Outcomes, which leave us rather hindered spiritually to say the least. In their book, “Unhindered”, they” map out how we get out” of that entrapment. And that “exodus from the entanglement” begins with submitting “the pen of our life” to God and letting Him “rewrite our story”. Now that can be scary. And at our age, we might ask, “why try to heal up now”? The answer is painfully simple, but if we continue to resist, it will be simply painful. It is so God can “redeem the remainder” of our usefulness in this lifetime. So He can recycle our pain and use our woundedness to warn, encourage, and help heal our grown kids and grandkids. So He can bring our story back to where He wants it from this point on. So He can fully redeem His purposes. So He can continue to “conform us to the image of His Son” (Romans 8:29). So He can “restore what the locusts have devoured”. So He can in Isaiah 61 fashion, “bring comfort to the brokenhearted, release for captives, freedom for prisoners, give a crown of beauty for ashes, a joyous blessing instead of mourning, and festive praise rather than despair, that we might be like great oaks of righteousness the Lord has planted for His glory”. Now I know that language seems a little religious and flowery as some passages might. But please catch what Isaiah is saying here. God wants to restore you first, so you can restore others back to Him! He wants to heal. When James later in the New Testament says in chapter 5, we are to “confess our sins to one another and pray for each other so that we might be healed”, he’s talking about this type of “mutual revealing and healing”, which is done only with a “very trustworthy” friend. This is not as much godly group therapy as it is a brother-to-brother or a sister-to-sister “sacred companionship”. It’s how we “walk in the light as He is in the light and we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Christ cleanses us from all sin”, as seen in 1 John 1:7. And that is a big part of us becoming unhindered in our walk with the Lord and with each other. My hope and prayer is that we let God “unhinder” us more all the time. He does it thru His Word, His Spirit and thru His People. He wants us to run with perseverance, not lose heart, and finish well the race He has placed us in! And He wants us to do it together. So lean into your faith, your local church fellowship, and your area of calling and serving. And lean into a special friendship where you can grow in even a more open conversation with perhaps a “vulnerable trust” so God’s healing can spill out of your life into your friends, family and grandkids if you sense God leading you to. If I ever write a book, one of the chapters will be “My Talk with Grandma without Milk and Cookies”. Let me explain. Our maternal grandmother lived with us as long as my sister, Kathy and I can remember. She was precious. But she’d been thru a lot. Widowed in 1939. Was the lunch lady at our small elementary school cafeteria. Wonderful Christian lady but remained single. Had significant curvature of the spine, but never missed a beat on doing things in our home. One day during my college years, she pulled me aside and said, “I want you to know the truth about your grandpa because you Mom will never tell you”. I didn’t know much at all about my grandpa. He died in’39 and I was born in ’54. He taught school and loved baseball and that was about all I knew. So this “came out of nowhere” for me. And I sat attentively, realizing this was a privileged conversation she wanted to have with me for some strange reason. With deep emotion and many tears, she spoke of my grandpa’s “suspicioned unfaithfulness”, though never admitted or shared by anyone else’s perspective. It appeared to be steeped in his weekend traveling due his small town baseball obsession. Now Babe Ruth played from 1914 to 1935 and grandpa died in ’39 at the age of 56. I tried to imagine the era, though it was present day 1974 at the time. I also tried to contextualize why she was telling me this. And yet she’d already told me why. Because, she said my Mom never would. And she was right. My Mom passed away within 5 years and never did tell us. I began to see this “heart shaper” my grandmother had that left what author, Charity Byers would call a “sore spot”. And it hadn’t gotten better on its own in 35 years. I learned later that my grandpa was quite an organizer of sporting events on a small scale. He became personal friends with Satchel Page, who brought a team of his friends up from St. Louis on a couple of occasions to my hometown of 800 about 90 minutes away. Another “old timer” in our community told me that a few years later, which I thought was so incredible! To do that, he had to have some respect and influence and I could understand how grandpa couldn’t tear himself away and get back home on time when you’re hanging with THE Satchel Page! But that was the “guy” in me. I’m glad I didn’t know that at the time my grandma was sharing her broken heart with me or I would have struggled with being sensitive to her pain. As it was, my heart was broken as I listened to the broken heart of this incredible godly woman, who handled her social anxiety that comes in big doses in “village life”, where everybody knows your business. It was an honor for me to hear her painful retelling of what she suspected but could never find closure with. To catch the tears of your godly grandma even on that one occasion was a “sacred and holy ground” kind of moment for me. I think it marked me more than I could imagine at the time. It was left in God’s hands. That’s where she put it long ago, but she was led to ”guard my heart” in case I would make a stupid decision in the future. Grandparents do that you know. When they see an opportunity, they blurt things out. I do at least. At 63, I became “filter free” and that was 6 years ago! Our poor grandkids….they’re in for quite a few spontaneous sermons I’m afraid! Thanks for letting me share a part of me this week that was shaped by a godly Mom and Grandma. They were in the “Eunice n Lois crowd” as Timothy had. They were devout, but they, like all Moms and grandmas carried some woundedness. And as much as they could, they let God heal them. As author, Henri Nouwen has described it, they were “wounded healers”. May we be that to one another as well. Sorry to take you into extra innings this weekend. May we become “less hindered” with every prayer, spiritual conversation, sermon and small group meeting. May the Lord heal us with His grace as it is applied to our brokenness. And may we in turn, respectfully listen to the hurts in the hearts of those God has placed in our path this week. As always….love you guys…and talk to you next week, George (in case you are interested in the book “Unhindered” at blessingranch.org)
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