Expecting Perfection, Accepting Humanity

Part 3: Getting Help – March 31, 2019

Perhaps some of you grew up like me. I grew up in a self-doctoring family. My mom was widowed at 28 and raised two sons. We didn’t have a lot of money. I don’t know if we had health insurance, but if we did, I’m fairly certain it wasn’t like insurance today. There were no copays to cover a visit to the doctor for every little thing. If we had a fever, we took baby aspirin (and I still love that orange flavor) and cool baths. We might do this for days until the fever broke. Unless there was something that absolutely could not be treated at home, everything was treated at home.

We spent our summer weekends on the Chesapeake Bay—our entire extended family. My brother and I, along with our cousins, spent our time fishing, crabbing, clamming, riding bikes, playing ball, looking for arrowheads on the beach, and playing cowboys and Indians. As you would expect with kids who grew up outside without video games, cuts, scrapes, and other injuries were a normal part of life.

At the bay, the first course of treatment was often swimming. Seriously. For minor cuts and scrapes we would be told to take a dip because the salt water was a good antiseptic. (Of course, we could only take a dip if it had been at least 30 minutes since we’d eaten so we didn’t get cramps. Who remembers that rule?)

If further treatment was needed, mom, my grandmom, and my aunts reached for the peroxide and mercurochrome.  (Who remembers mercurochrome? It might sting going on, but it made the coolest colors!)

That upbringing has followed me to this day. It takes a lot for me to see a doctor. I am still prone to self-doctor at home. I see no sense or need to run to the doctor or emergency room for every little thing. This sometimes ruffles Krista’s feathers.

As I’m getting older, I’m encountering more aches and pains than I’ve ever known. I enjoy most of the activities I’ve always enjoyed, but now I seem to need recovery time. Sometimes, Krista insists I should see a doctor and gets frustrated when I don’t heed her advice.

In the past year, however, I willingly saw a doctor twice. The first time was April of last year. I was sitting at the desk in my office on a Sunday afternoon when suddenly my eyes crossed, and I was looking in two different directions at the same time. I got extremely dizzy and felt that I would have fallen had I not been sitting. I got extremely thirsty, and my left cheek tingled like I’d been to the dentist, and the Novocain was wearing off.

All of those symptoms appeared at once and kind of scared me. Since my son Zach is a paramedic, I called to ask his advice. He told me to go to the hospital. When I said I’d walked to the church and Krista had left with the car, he said he’d be right over to take me.

In December, I had a nasty bout with an upper respiratory infection. For a few days, I treated the symptoms at home, but they didn’t get any better. I called the doctor’s office for advice because of pain I felt when I coughed or breathed in deeply. The nurse told me I needed to be seen by the doctor. After a week on an antibiotic, I started feeling better, although mild symptoms hung on for weeks.

We’ll come back to these stories in a few minutes.

Let remind you that in this series I am not talking about other people. I’m talking about us…and not just all of us collectively, but each of us individually. There isn’t one of us who has the right or the reason to think we have arrived and have it all together. We are sinful, broken, and helplessly lost without our Savior, Jesus Christ, and when we surrender our lives to him, we bring baggage with us that needs to be unpacked and processed.

There are eight choices we can make to deal with the baggage in healthy, productive, and godly ways.

1. Admitting need
2. Getting help
3. Letting go
4. Coming clean
5. Making changes
6. Repairing relationships
7. Maintaining momentum
8. Recycling pain

Last week, we talked about admitting need. Today, we’re talking about getting help. Let’s start with this question: What does it take to move from step #1—admitting need—to step #2—getting help?

Based on my stories of self-doctoring, let me suggest two possible prerequisites for moving from choice #1 to choice #2 – fear and pain. When I was afraid of the symptoms, I went to the hospital. When coughing and breathing caused enough pain, I went to see the doctor.

The same thing is often true in our lives. It’s one thing to admit need; it’s quite another to get the help we need. We often refuse to take that step until the fear or the pain is strong enough to move us out of our complacency and denial.

In The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis wrote that “pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

God allows pain in our lives but that doesn’t mean He causes the pain, and it certainly doesn’t mean He enjoys seeing us in pain. Pain is often a consequence of our poor choices or the poor choices of others. God allows the consequences of those poor choices to play out. He loves us and wants to lead us out of our pain and into His healing. The cool thing is that he can bring good out of our pain by using it to lead us out of our denial and into His comfort.

When the pain or fear gets bad, we often spend time wishing we hadn’t made the choices we made. Such thinking is useless. We cannot change the past. We need to humble ourselves, acknowledge it, own it, and give it to God.

Is it scary? Yes.

Is it risky? Yes.

Is it worth it? Yes

But you can’t learn it’s worth it just by listening to me or anyone else talk about it. You can only know it’s worth it by experience.

Instead of denying our pain, we must allow it to motivate us to get help, to start making healing choices. We rarely change when life is comfortable. We change when we feel the heat. We don’t usually change until our fear of change is overcome by our pain.

Jesus offered a beautiful invitation that is recorded in Matthew 11:28-30 (NIV, page 689) – Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

That invitation, offered by Jesus over 2,000 years ago, is still good today. Maybe it’s time. You will never find healing from your hurts, habits, and hang-ups until you confront your pain. How bad does the hurt, relationship, pain, situation, or memory have to get before you admit you can’t handle it yourself? If you could have handled it on your own, it wouldn’t still be a problem.

Trinity’s vision is to be a welcoming place of love and acceptance where people can find grace and healing as they are reunited with God and his family.

We learn a lot about God from that statement. (What is God like?)

First, we learn that God is welcoming.

1. Open arms are a more accurate picture of God than a pointing finger is.
2. Many folks are somewhat familiar with John 3:16 (even if you’ve only seen the sign at sporting events).
   1. John 3:16 (NKJV) – For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.
   2. John 3:17 (The Message) – God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help…
3. I don’t know about your experience with church or your spiritual journey.
4. Perhaps it’s a journey where you’ve always pictured God pointing an accusing finger at you. If so, your picture of God is wrong.
5. In Scripture, the people Christ would have pointed his finger at were religious know-it-alls, bullies who demanded everything be done their way.
6. God is a welcoming God.

Second, we learn that God is loving.

1. Love is a big word in Scripture.
2. Love in Scripture, as it applies to God, is not a love based on what we earn or deserve.
3. It is an all-encompassing love that is present no matter what.
4. God doesn’t fall in and out of love with us.

Third, we learn that God accepts us as we are.

1. Does this mean God views us as perfect and therefore nothing in our lives needs to change?
2. Of, course not. We all know we’re not perfect.
3. What it does mean is that God is not waiting for us to conform our lives to some external standard before we are acceptable to him.
4. We are acceptable because he created us and loves us.
5. We must be careful not to confuse acceptance with approval.
6. God accepted Adam with his drug problem but would have liked to see things change for Adam’s good.
7. The same is true for the rest of us, God accepts us no matter what, even though he may not approve of things that ultimately harm us.

Fourth, we learn that God offers us grace.

1. Grace means not being treated the way we deserve to be treated.
2. Someone once defined grace as getting ice cream when you deserve a spanking.
3. In his book, What’s So Amazing About Grace? author Philip Yancey defines it by saying grace means there’s nothing you can ever do to make God love your more and there’s nothing you can ever do to make God love you less.
4. God is a God of grace.

Finally, we learn that God heals.

1. He wants to fix what is broken inside of us.
2. That broken part is sin, and God abhors sin the same way you and I abhor cancer, other diseases, and drugs.
3. God doesn’t abhor sinners. If he did, he’d hate every one of us.
4. He doesn’t.
5. Just as a parent who cradles a child and wants to be able to make it all better. God wants to cradle us and fix what’s broken so that we can be whole again.

          If you don’t see God as a welcoming, loving, accepting, gracious healer, then your view of God needs to be adjusted.

The writer of Hebrews tells us that without faith it is impossible to please God because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him, (Hebrews 11:6, NIV).

God is not bound by time or space as we are. He is everywhere. That means wherever you find yourself today, he is there. He loves you. He knows your situation. He knows the fear. He knows the pain. And he is waiting for you to accept his offer.

          You might be tempted to look at your situation and conclude that you’re beyond help. Maybe you’ve tried before and couldn’t get it right and so you’re inclined to think that there’s no hope for you. That is a lie from the pit of hell.

          Listen again to Jesus’ words we read a while ago: Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

          Jesus wants to give you rest. He wants to take the lead. That’s what it means when he says, “take my yoke upon you and learn from me.” Are you ready to do that today? If so, stand where you are and pray this prayer with me.

          God, I need your help. I can’t do this on my own. I cannot make life go the way I want it to go. I cannot keep doing what I’ve been doing because it’s not working. Please, help me surrender to you and let you lead me in the right direction. I give up my attempts to control life and choose to follow wherever you want to lead me. I don’t know exactly what the future holds, and that’s a little scary. Please take that fear and replace it with hope. Please take my pain and use it in whatever way you see fit to bring something good and godly out of my experiences. In Jesus name, amen.