Man, isn't it good to be with other God chasers that are saying, man, God, it is great to be here. We got a dear friend. Greg Dempster is in the house today. Give him a big welcome, would you? Let me tell you about Greg. We've been ministering together off and on in Little Rock, Arkansas, Anchorage, Alaska for a number of years. Greg and I have together, we've had the privilege of watching God move in power and seeing his work not only in our lives but in the lives of so many others. It's just a joy to have him here with us today. He's the founder of Christ Life Ministries, and let me tell you what Greg has the privilege of doing. And he's going to use some illustrations about this, so I don't want to steal that thunder. But God has called him to a ministry that's having profound impact on church leaders, some of whom are pastoring churches of 10, 15, 20,000 people or movements of... many hundreds of churches or thousands of churches and greg has not only the privilege of walking people that have gotten stuck in a performance ethic kind of like we do this and this is what we do but some of what he's giving these great men and women of God he is bringing to us today and we're going to have an incredible time. I want to put our track shoes on and get rolling. It's going to be a little bit different today. We're going to sit here and we are going to talk through some of the most essential things of your life to help you change that frankly very rarely get touched on. Let me illustrate it this way. I was telling Greg and some of you about this. We had a bird feeder out in front of our home. Some of you know this. It was so close to the windows and we've got a vaulted ceiling in our living room that I'm sitting there one day and I hear wham! A few seconds go by, bam! Another few seconds go by, bam! And I'm like, that's it, I gotta stop this. So the birds are eating like sunflower seeds and then they're disoriented, intoxicated with sunflower oil or something, but they're flying around and bam, they're hitting it. And so I've got bird juice marks all over the window where they're hitting their face and body and everything and I'm giving them concussions and we gotta get rid of that. So I told my bride, I'm gonna take it to the back common area where we live and so I had a plan to go back there and set up the bird feeder and now it's done but let me tell you what had to happen my goal was to get flagstone that was going to be really nice with pea gravel in between it and have that beautiful bird feeder that's one of the coolest bird feeders ever and have suet feeders there and everything that we need But the problem was is that in order to get that sandstone beautifully placed and on something firm, I had to go back there and I noticed right away, I've got a ton of undergrowth that's gotta be dug up. So I got out a shovel and I started digging on that one day and I thought this was gonna be a ton of work. But with that tool in my hand, I got to peel that up and just reveal a few key vines in that undergrowth and so I took some snips, bang, bang, bang, bang, cleared out the little area And there's a little subplot here in that the tool in your hand and in your life today is the love and the grace and the power of God. But I go on with this metaphor. We got that undergrowth up and then I got out some gravel and I got this big old tamper and bam, bam, bam, packing it down. And then I got a little layer of sand and then I put the flagstone down. Then I got pea gravel distributed in between them. And it came out really nice. A lot of us are trying to build our life in a relationship with god without unearthing some of the stuff that needs to be dealt with there's so many things that we carry into our life and today we're going to be tackling the first part of a three-part series where we're going to be helping you practically this is like discipleship 101 when greg and i were up at the northwest campus last week we were blown away at the response blown away And the amount of work that God did just in a few minutes is tremendous. So I want to pray before we go a step further here. And Father, I pray over my buddy Greg. Give him the words to say. Keep us in step with you. And I pray that we'd all get out the tool that you've given us, your power, your grace in our life, to remove what needs to be dealt with so that we can build our life on a firm foundation. And a lot of the stuff that we battled with for years can be dealt with. And we say to your glory and our joy in Jesus name. Amen. Let's roll, buddy. So good to be here. I feel like this is kind of my Illinois home. You guys are super accommodating and welcoming. So thank you. It's a joy to be here. I think that as we're starting a couple of things, number one is that it's really easy to begin to experience kind of this narrowing perspective, where we get up at the same time in the morning, we get into the same rhythms in the morning, we get into the same car, drive the same route to the same job, and then we just turn it around, head home, watch the same shows at night, and within that echo chamber of our lives, we have a lot of things bouncing around. The sense of disappointment related to what could have been, or... the brokenness that we haven't seemed to be able to work through, or the sin patterns, just our own mistakes, our bad decisions that we feel like we should have been through two days ago, two years ago, 10 years ago. And I just thought, could it be, would it be okay for us to just start this morning by lifting our eyes up onto the Almighty? onto the God. Psalm 139 says that God is here. That he's not a God that's far off. That there's nowhere we could flee where his presence isn't available. And I think it would just be good. Could we just lift our eyes onto him? The word says he's the eternal God. He calls himself love. He's kind and patient. Forbearing. It's His kindness, by the way, that leads us to turn around. He says He's the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega. He has no beginning. He has no end. John 1 teaches us that Jesus, the Lamb of God, the very Word of God, spoke and everything that's been created was made. A hundred billion galaxies or more. A universe is so expansive that if we traveled from one side to the other, it would take approximately 92 billion years traveling at 186,000 miles a second. And it's the same God in Colossians 1, we learn, is maintaining everything that he made by the sheer nature and power of his being. Well, what does that God say about us? That we're loved. Ephesians 2.10 says that in Greek, that were his poeum, were his best creative work. Created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which were prepared in advance for us to do. It says that we have just this whole future, not only a life in him, but a whole heavenly future moving forward. In fact, Dallas Willard says this, that I am an unceasing, spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God's great universe. You know, the problem that we run into, the problem that I run into with the leaders that I get the chance to serve is that it's easy to take our eyes off of all that God is and all that we are and begin to feel this chasm between what we believe to be true about God and what we're experiencing daily. Anybody have that chasm at one level or another in your life? I do. The renewal process, which is what we're gonna talk about, begin the conversation today on, is a process that actually begins to close the gap. between what we believe to be true about God and what we're experiencing daily, that God's will, hear me say this, it doesn't matter how long you've been struggling or trying to figure things out in your relationship with Jesus. His desire for us to experience this slow closing of that gap until what we're experiencing is more and more and more in line with what he says is true. And that's what we're gonna do today. One thing, I threw this in there last week, and I'm gonna do it again, that there's this old leadership adage, and it's this, that the best predictor of future success is what? Past performance. Yeah, past performance. Now, the problem with that in the Christian life is this, that if we've spent our lives building success on our self-effort or self-dependence, It's really natural for us to continue to lean into independence to try to make the Christian life work. And that's just a total ripoff. So if you're feeling, you don't need to raise your hand, but if you're feeling like total failure related to the Christian life, maybe it could be that simple. Maybe God this morning, maybe even this moment, would have you bow your heart before him and just say, I've got to quit trying, man. I've just been carrying this weight on my own shoulders for too long. I need you, Spirit of the living God, to come and fall afresh on me and changing me and breaking me and drawing me to you, to do the thing in me that I can't do for myself. That's grace, by the way. A biblical definition of grace is God doing something in us that we can't do for ourselves. I need that grace. And that might be a first step for us today. Let's just start. So let's lean into where we're going to go today. Number one, God's commitment to our renewal. Matthew 22 is an amazing passage. And in that passage, we see the great commandment laid out for us. And if you look at the great commandment as it's laid out in both the Old Testament and the New, we see these three components. Number one, God proclaims himself as one. And number two, he invites us to love him with everything that we are, all our hearts, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength. And then finally, he invites us to overflow on the people who are around us, to love them out of the love that we're experiencing in that real relationship with God. Now, we can't interpret Scripture without using Scripture as an interpretive lens. John 15, 5 is... is a passage that I'd like to apply to Matthew 22. And John 15, 5 is a passage that we've probably all memorized at one level or another. And it says that apart from me, apart from God, we can do nothing. So how do we bring these two passages together? It's important to get this, that to whatever level God invites us, he exhorts us forward in life, to whatever level he invites us to love him with everything that we are, we have to understand that the provisioning to pull it off is also included in that invitation. To whatever level he invites us to love him, he's also promising to provide whatever's necessary to pull that off. And today, I just want you to hear me say this. I say this to every leader that we have the opportunity to journey with, that to whatever level you have brokenness or distortion or anything that needs to be transformed in your life, God is willing to do that work in you if you're willing to allow him to do it So again, what should our expectations be? It should be huge. We should have huge expectations related to what God wants to do related to renewal or transformation in us. Here's the second passage, Isaiah 61, one through three. It's one of my favorite passages in the Old Testament. It's echoed in the New Testament. It's this moment, if you could be a fly on the wall for this moment in Jesus's ministry life, this might be it for me. This is one of them. He shows up to the tabernacle and And they're doing a weekly reading from the Tanakh, the Old Testament. It just so happens that the day he shows up is the day they're reading Isaiah 61, which happens to be his job description. And so he stands up in the tabernacle and reads this, mind-blowing. The Spirit of the Lord, God, is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. And then there's the mic drop moment where he stops, he looks at all who are gathered, and says, today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. Now, when we're looking at Isaiah 61 and the calling, the ministry of Jesus, we see a couple things in play. We see what he's committed to doing, but in the first verse or two and into the beginning of verse 3, we see all this malady, this brokenness, this people who are impoverished, locked in darkness, imprisoned, and then this passage ends with verse 3b, and they'll be called oaks of righteousness. a planting for the display of God's splendor. Now the question is, who are the oaks of righteousness? All the bunged up, goofed up, damaged people mentioned in the first two verses. If you're sitting in here today and you're thinking, man, you don't know my life, my own poor decisions, my own brokenness. I just want you to know that your brokenness isn't in the way of you encountering Jesus. It's actually the place of meeting. That God wants you to meet him, to encounter him in your brokenness, and you will be strengthened by him. The scripture says that you'll become in your weakness like an oak of righteousness, a planting for the display of God's splendor, his glory. Now, that might be a far way, a long way off from where you feel like you are today. But again, the only people that are left on the sidelines related to Isaiah 61 are the people who pretend that they don't have any issues. That God today wants you to say, that scripture actually represents me. And I need you to come and bring the transformation that I can't bring myself. So what should our expectations be related to transformation from a biblical standpoint? It should be huge. You should be looking forward into the face of the God who made everything that has been made and say, this is small time stuff in my life compared to what you do every day. Can I trust you to do the work that's necessary in my life? Yes. So how do we step forward? This is our first step. Bring that next slide up, would you? So some of you, I don't know when we were taught, like the percentages related to icebergs, somewhere maybe in fourth or fifth grade or whatever. But you know it, that what? Only 10% of the iceberg is in the public eye, can be seen. 90% is below the surface of the water. Now here's the problem. If we're investing the lion's share of our emotional energy on how we're seen, the 10% is leaving very little emotional headroom to focus on what's most important. That God's designed our lives to operate in such a way where we're bringing out of the storehouse, out of the deeper parts of who we are, the things that he wants on display. That really, when we hyper-focus on how we're seen, we're leaving a lot that's beneath the surface that can cause us problems moving forward. You want to share that illustration? I'll do it. So, I lived in Alaska. So you can imagine Carl climbed on icebergs a time or two. And I was, Portage Glacier, just outside of Anchorage, I was standing on an iceberg and I was about 40, 50 feet off shore, but it was a large iceberg and the lake just went straight down. And this old codger's standing on shore and he's looking at me and he's got a mouthful of Copenhagen, I know that because he spit and a long stream of brown stuff came out. And he yelled at me, he said, hey! You know what happens when those things break below the surface, right? I said, what do you mean? He said, what you're standing on could be underwater with one little crack in that little berg because the weight imbalance turns and now what was unseen is seen. And what Greg's talking about here, guys, is this hard reality. When life's greatest fissures and bumps and hard times come, sometimes there becomes a fracture. Something gets stung below the surface, and then the very thing that we've been trying to hide from ourselves, boom, floats to the surface. The good thing is that God wants to go below the surface. He's not a 10% iceberg God. He's the whole person God. That's so good. And that's the world that I live in. I'm working with pastoral leaders that have invested their whole life in how they're seen. Some of them are phenomenal communicators. Some of them are just great leaders. They're known in their region. But in a moment, all of that investment and how they're perceived, how they're known, swings beneath the surface and everything that hasn't been worked on for quite some time is exposed to the world. I think it's what David's getting at in Psalm 51.6 when he says this, Behold, you delight in truth and the inward being, and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart. That God wants to pour in his truth in the areas of our lives that are beneath the surface. He's just waiting for us to be willing to let him do it. Let's talk about transformation for just a second. I think that there could be maybe no better place for us to start the conversation of transformation other than Romans 12, 2. And in Romans 12 too, we have Paul the apostle saying, hey, do you want to get at a changed life? Do you want to get at a life that's no longer beat up and battered by the temptation to live according to the pattern of this world? This is how we do it. We experience metamorphosis or transformation through the renewal of what? The Greek word is nous. And what Paul's getting at is that transformation begins in how we perceive, understand, judge, determine, and interpret. That really is how we see the world that God wants to adjust first. He wants to give us His perspective related to life. So that the fundamental things that shape how we make decisions begin to change. That's where transformation needs to begin to take place in our lives. It's in the mind. And let me just read this. You're going to have this up on the screen. The word nous, it refers not just to our thoughts, but to the entire way we're perceiving, understanding, judging, and deciding. And that no one is born with a fully formed mind. Our thinking and perceptions are shaped over time, primarily through emotionally rich or emotionally intense experiences. especially in the earliest years. When those early experiences go uninterpreted or are misinterpreted, they can lead to distorted beliefs, disruptive emotional patterns, and dysfunctional behaviors. Yeah. Greg and I were talking about this. My first recollection of life ever was the, dating myself here, but the 1964 Great Alaska earthquake. I think it registered 9.3, 9.4 on the Richter scale. It was huge. And I was watching a cartoon. The earth began to shake. It was an animated little cartoon in black and white, obviously. The TV crashed in front of me when a rocket was taken off, and I thought, wow, that is a real television show right there. But the earth was beginning to move, and I ran into the kitchen, and my mom's holding cupboards shut, but she couldn't hold them back, and dishes start flying out. And I saw dishes that were being cleaned in the sink. just start flying around the kitchen. I get tucked under mom's arm, we run outside. My dad is changing the brakes on a Rambler car in the garage, and he scooted out from under before it came off of the lifts. And we stood outside, and I'm just a little guy, and I saw birch trees swinging so far that leaves are hitting the ground over here that are 30, 40 feet tall and then swinging back and leaves touching the ground over here. And I saw our home swing back and forth and then two and a half stories of masonry fireplace just crumbles to the ground. And then the earth splits open right in front of me and it goes down like 10, 12 feet and it's like six inches. But to me, it looks like the earth's gonna swallow me. So after three and a half minutes, three and a half minutes of the earth violently shaking, my first memory of life, it messed me up. So much so that, I didn't share this for a lot of years because it was kind of embarrassing, but it kind of illustrates this point of how we're shaped by early events. Parents, the lack thereof, the way parents behaved, the lack thereof, you name it. Siblings, neighbors, abuse. And I gotta tell you guys, I peed my bed for too long. And I couldn't stop. I'd get freaked out in the middle of the night. And you know, my dad was a great dad. And I remember one night in particular, peed my bed again. Ran in to my dad, to my mom and dad's bedroom and mom had had a full day the day before. So I ran around to the dead side. I said, dad, peed my bed again, man. And he said, oh, that's okay, Carl. And he would come in with me and he would change the sheets and he'd make a game out of it. But it's amazing because all the kids that survived that earthquake of that year, one of the biggest in the history of the world. When an earthquake would happen and we're in high school, all the kids that live through that, the blood ran out of their body. And we just were paralyzed on the floor. You cannot separate what happens in our formative years from how we live our adult lives. And yet, God sees it all. And he loves us still. That's so good. Here's a couple quotes that just nail that down. The first one, Stephen Covey, we're not as objective as we'd like to believe. We don't see the world as it is. We see the world as we are. In other words, we're looking through all our past experiences. It's just how God has hardwired our brains. We learn, we interpret, we have experiences, we interpret, and then we respond. It's why you can drive out to your vacation, your vacation spot, with a smile on your face because last year it was a fantastic time with the family or with your friends. On the other hand, what happens when we have damage, brokenness, or things that we've just shoved down and chosen not to look at? Those things, unresolved issues, don't resolve themselves. We tend to look through those lenses. That's what Paul's getting at in Romans 12 too. He wants us to invite God to make sense of how we perceive and how we interpret life. That could it be that that might be a fundamental thing that needs to shift in all of our lives so that we can begin to grow closer to Christ and experience a greater level of fullness in Christ. And the answer is yes. Here's a second quote. This is Tim Keller. You don't really know yourself until you know the one who made you. And you can't know him without coming to terms with who you really are. Warren Bennis, by examining and understanding the past, we can move into the future unencumbered by it. We become free to express ourselves rather than endlessly trying to prove ourselves. So really, we have no alternative. This is John Tyson. He says this, that God cannot heal the person we pretend to be. Boom. Boom. That really what God wants us to do is to not try to take the mask off and figure things out so that we can come to him. What he wants us to do is just to admit it and say, I don't even know. There have been leaders that I've worked with in the middle of a session. They tell me, Greg, I don't even know who I am. I've just always been the person that people have needed me to be. God does not, I want to encourage you, man. My heart just right now is breaking for us in this room. God doesn't want us or expect us to have that figured out. He just expects that we would come to him and say, could you do this in me? Could you bring change to me? Could it be that I could live a life where I'm not constantly on the defensive, constantly reacting, but able to like navigate using my history as a sense of what's happened and how God can change my life and move with confidence forward in life. That's God's will. Last thing that I'm going to read. Therefore, considering how the mind is formed and how transformation takes place, therefore a critical step in our transformation process is to prayerfully explore what has shaped and influenced the formation of our minds. Can I go one more place? Philippians 3 says this, Paul continues this conversation about renewal by saying this, but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on towards the goal of the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. What's Paul saying and what is he not saying? Well, Paul in no way is attempting to communicate. He's not communicating that we should put our memories in lockdown. or try to experience some type of, like seeking God would bring, like erase bad memories. Because we see Paul sharing his greatest gains and his greatest shame all through the New Testament. Acts 22, Acts 26, 1 Timothy 1, Philippians 3 are all places where he just shares his mistakes, shares the things that he's built his life upon. Actually, renewal for Paul is this. He's being set free. It's a process of being set free from being defined, controlled, or distracted by his past. And if you just look at Philippians 3 in the general context, which is finding no confidence in the flesh, you realize that it includes so much more. It also includes not being defined, controlled, or distracted by approval or by your own need to perform. I mean, anybody in here want that to be true for your life? I do. Could it be that God could so settle the realities of our history that we're no longer defined or controlled or distracted by it? That we could interact with each other with nothing to prove and nothing to gain other than what God promises to give us and nothing to lose? That's God's desired end for renewal. Quick question, Greg. Greg and I talked a lot about this, and there's three guys that I love. They wrote a book called The Cure, and in it they talk about wearing masks. We talked about how it seems to be one of the great maladies of the church in the West that We wear masks more than we are known even to God. How does someone here today dare to risk being known by God and even someone else? That's so good. If you haven't read The Cure by John Lynch, it's worth reading. I think that what he says related to masks is what began to change my perspective. He said this, that when you wear a mask, the mask is the only thing that's loved. Think about that for a second. When you're basing your value on performance, your performance will be the only thing that's celebrated. When you're basing your life on the approval of people, their approval and your performance, again, will be the only thing that's celebrated. I think that the way that we begin to break free is by recognizing how much of a rip off it is living life with a mask on. That the way that we take the risk of taking the mask off is by getting into the presence of Jesus and just stripping away everything that we pretended to be and just testing it out with him first. Then all of a sudden when we feel the unconditional love of God, when we experience him not turning tail and running away, We'll begin to grow a little bit more confident that we can let the mask down a little bit with the people around us. It can go lower and lower and lower until we realize that really we have nothing to prove, nothing to gain, nothing to lose. My value doesn't go up or down depending on how you respond to our time. That value is gifted and not earned. It's gifted by God. And all of a sudden, things begin to shift. The opportunities that we have to reach out to people or to speak what God's whispering in our hearts to people becomes less consequential because it's no longer an issue of value or embarrassment or rejection. Because we're already as received and loved and accepted as we're going to get. Let's keep on moving forward, can we? So how in the world... Do we begin to take the first step in this transformation journey? Maybe we could pass out these workbooks. What I wanted to do is I wanted to take the exact experience that we bring pastoral leaders on, and I wanted to just gift it to all of you. I wanted us to be able to have a shared experience. experience together so workbook one we're going to pass it out now and we're going to just do a little bit of work together if that's okay so i think they're getting out okay fantastic why don't we go to this next slide it's called the framework for healing this is a template a tool that you can use to begin to make sense, to simplify life, to simplify an understanding, to gain better understanding of how your mind, how noose was formed in your life. There's four categories. The first is this, unprocessed or misprocessed life experiences or uninterpreted or misinterpreted life experiences. When we have emotionally rich, emotionally dense experiences, you know as well as I do, those are the things that stick, right? You might not remember what you had for lunch last Wednesday, but you'll remember the car accident you got in on Thursday. That when we have emotionally intense experiences that have gone misinterpreted or uninterpreted, they'll often form distortions. I begin to look at life incorrectly. And those distortions bear fruit, and that fruit is disruptive emotion. Could it be that the anxiety that you're feeling today is a byproduct of distortion? And could it be that it has its roots in misinterpreted or uninterpreted past experiences? There's a strong possibility that that's true. Disruptive emotion also bears fruit, and that is dysfunctional lifestyle choices. I often find with the leaders that I'm working with, many of them are struggling with pornography addiction, that really their recovery comes as a result of looking at the disruptive emotion that precedes them acting out and then getting at the distortion and then beginning to bring that distortion to the only one who can heal them, to Jesus the healer. That's where we want to go together. So again, how does this framework help us? You're going to see the next time we're together, which is two weeks from now, isn't it? Yeah, two weeks from now. There's a quick comment I'm going to make here, and we're just going as the Spirit of God leads us here, but there's a counseling maxim that is so true, and that is the presenting issue is rarely the issue. That's so true. explain that why it's so important for us to go below even some of the issues we face like a man that lacks initiative to pursue a woman A man that will not, he'll work hard at work, but he won't serve his wife well. A girl that feels like, I don't know if I could take a risk on love again. Those are issues, but they're presenting issues. And oftentimes, if we're just dealing with those, we're just dealing with the top 10%. God wants us to see all the way down, doesn't he? That's exactly right. So I bought this Honda Accord, this is years ago. And I have the most amazing mother and father-in-law going. And my father-in-law, who was in Ohio, said, hey, I'll go take a look at this thing for you. So I said, great. He drove, I think, two hours each way, bless his heart, to go take a look at this car. He said, Greg, it's great. It looks fantastic. Paint's perfect. Well, we bring it back to Grand Rapids, and within about 10 minutes, I saw that it had been in a severe rear end accident. The doors were all, like, not matching. I mean, it was just really bad. Now, in life, what we often do, what do we find ourselves praying about? We find ourselves praying about how we're feeling, disruptive emotion, and also emotions. more often than not, the bad decisions that we're making in life. God, here I am again. I did it again. How am I going to break this addiction pattern in my life? If anyone knew me, they'd reject me. And then all the disruptive emotion. We could talk this way here because I talk this way with Alaska men's men all the time. People... who have issues, like if you had brake issues, what would you do? You would take your car to Midas or wherever you go around here and you'd have somebody fix it. That's what we're talking about here. If you have all sorts of disruptive, a cacophony of disruptive emotion in your life and leading to bad behavioral patterns, what Carl is saying is the route to freedom is getting beneath the surface and looking at why. What is it that's creating all of these weird overreactions or severe underreactions in my life? And could it be that that's what Paul's getting at in Romans 12, 2 and Philippians 3? He's saying this is where transformation takes place, my friends, that if you're willing to do the work to get underneath the hood and find out how your mind, how noose was formed in you, then you have a bullseye to aim at instead of just shooting bullets around the woods. Yeah. You have a bull's eye to aim at. And I'm telling you right now because I see it hundreds of times, I've seen it hundreds of times in my office, that when a leader finally comes to grips with why, what's behind their brokenness, And they, through prayer, begin to get into a rhythm of bringing that to a living God and experience his counseling work. Everything changes. Tell about the one pastor, the mega church dude, who had that encounter twice with his dad. Yeah. So there's this guy named Ken. It's not what his real name is, but I can't say his real name. Ken, I worked with Ken years ago. And we were beginning to do the work that you guys are going to do as your first step. And Ken's just like, I really don't remember my past all that well. But a couple memories this last week came to mind. Number one is this. I'm wrestling around in the backseat with my brother. We're going on vacation. We're in this old, like, wood-paneled-sided station wagon. No one here even can imagine what that would look like. No. It wasn't a Tesla. And... We're goofing around. My dad yells at us, and he said, all of a sudden, going from 55 or 60 miles an hour to nothing, my dad slams on the brake, station wagon sideways, pulls off into the turnoff area on the freeway. He slams open both doors, and he's just like, get out. kicks his wife out, kicks his kids out alongside of the freeway, closes the doors, slams the pedal down, takes off, and of course he's thinking, I'm just going to go to the next off-ramp, turn back around and pick them up, and I'll teach them a lesson. But of course, Ken, as you can imagine, a five-year-old dropped off on the side of the freeway, is freaking out. Second memory that he had was this. They're on vacation again, and they're goofing. He's goofing around. I guess he goofed around a lot with his brother in the backseat. They're goofing around in the backseat. His dad, without any warning, jackslaps Ken's brother and didn't realize that with the ring on his finger that he was going to just open up his brother's cheek. Blood everywhere. Kids are freaking out. And it was in that moment that Ken, he says, I can remember this like it was yesterday, Greg. I thought, I got nobody with me. if i'm going to make it in life i'm carrying it all it's all on my shoulders now fast forward 30 years this guy's leading a really large church conservative church and and this is now after a lot of time just seeking god's face together and and ken experiencing tremendous freedom he's driving into that church service And he's just like, I just felt like God spoke to me and said, Ken, I just want you to pull off. You've been carrying the weight too long. This is mine to carry. Are you willing to allow me to carry it for you? And Ken said, I pulled over. I had a Starbucks in one hand. He's just like, I'm freaking out. I'm thinking that people driving past me are going to think I'm crazy. He's got hands raised. He's meeting with a Savior and he's saying, I don't have a clue what it looks like to give you control of my life. But I'm bowing my heart and my head before you now, your present Jesus. Would you take the load that I've been carrying all on my own this whole time? He said, that's not the end of the story. He said, I got into this service. We have thousands attending each service at this guy's church. He got to the end of his message. He said, Greg, I'm a great communicator, and I've built this ministry around my communication gifts. But he said, I got to the end of that message, and again I heard God whispering to me, Ken, I just want you to open up the altar. And he's just like, we don't open up the altar. We've never had an altar call in the history of this church. And he said, God said, I want you to just open up the altar for anybody who's broken, who needs to commit their lives to Christ for the first time, needs to return to the Lord. He said, okay, I'll do it. This is your weight to carry. He opens it up and he said, Greg, I'll never forget it. We were three, massive auditorium, three deep. People coming and kneeling before the Lord at the end of that service. God just chose in that moment when Ken decided to no longer carry the weight of his life on his own shoulders. God decided to show up and do something that would be impossible outside of him doing it. You see, not all of us have experiences like Ken. Some of them are really good experiences that were left uninterpreted. Like the NFL quarterback I worked with who literally still has all the passing records in his D1 college, won a national championship, living with the reality that when the game is on the line, the ball needs to be in my hands. Trust me, it was ruining his life. Jesus is saying to us today, I want you to understand these governing ideas that drive you, that affect how you perceive and how you interpret life. And I want you to just at least ask the question, am I willing to bring those into God's presence and experience the beginnings of transformation? Because I guarantee you that's what Paul's talking about in Romans 12 too. Feel prompted. that in this moment as the Lord guides my words that there are some of you that had love withheld, threats over you, spiritual abuse, hyper-controlling or hyper-absent parenting styles. And by the way, I want you to know something. Those of you that are parents that might even have kids Let me tell you what I've done with our own children. I did a preemptive strike. I said, look, I want to tell you right now, your mom and I did our best to be great parents to you, but we screwed up some things and you need to know I understand if you want to do some things differently, it's okay. But we live in a broken and fallen world. And a lot of you are living lives today have taken a job or not taken a job because of some flawed perceptions of who you are or who you aren't. And I want you to know today our God wants to heal you up. Everything that's below that 10% waterline. That's so good. Where does this whole thing go? I just realized we're good. Okay. Where does this whole thing go? Bring up the slide that's all about the three phases of healing, would you? So as God heals, as he transforms, as he renews our lives, we've got to understand that just becoming aware of where we're broken... there's more to this journey than just that. This is just the first step. That God doesn't want us to be hyper-focused on ourselves. He wants to actually set us free from the preoccupation that we naturally have on ourselves. Like C.S. Lewis used to say, he doesn't want us beside ourselves, constantly critiquing how we're doing, how we're speaking, how we're being received. He wants us to be set free from that type of life so that we can truly live. That awareness leads to, number two, the counseling work of God himself. John 16, 13 promises that the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, will be a counselor and a guide. And he'll lead us into truth about all things. Last time I checked, all includes everything. That I need to become aware and then I need to bring what I discover before the Lord and invite him to speak and bring the change that only God can bring. But that's also not where it ends. It ends, actually culminates in John 15 abiding relationship. That God wants us to make him our home. To value him above every other thing that we value. That's easy when we see him clearly, right? That God's intent for healing is that he would develop dynamic, far-reaching relationship with him that would bring all sorts of wholeness and renewal that we'd be bringing out of this relationship with him regularly, things that bring change to the people who are in our sphere of influence. It's been said that, what is it? Pain that's not transformed is transferred to those who are closest to us. We don't want to live that way. What we're offering today is something, what the Bible is offering, what God is offering us today is a route of escape. And we're just going to walk every step with you. Here are a couple pieces that are important. These are... These last quotes, you guys. That God doesn't heal us so that we can perform more effectively. He heals us so that we're set free from every need to perform. Second quote, that the end of all healing is not an empowered or a healed self, but it's a surrendered life. There's reasons why you don't want to surrender. Man, there certainly have been many reasons why I wouldn't choose to surrender. God wants to be invited to make his way into all those reasons, reveal them for what they are, and bring wholeness to bring a sense of life unlike anything that we've experienced, and in doing so, close the gap, close the chasm between what we believe to be true about God and what we're experiencing daily. This is going to be an incredible exercise. Greg estimates, and my bride and I have gone through this journey, not once, but a couple of times, and we're going through it again. It is one of the greatest discoveries ever. The Western church has become professional knowledge brokers and very poor at life changing. We know a lot of stuff that hasn't worked its way out. in the undergrowth of our life. Or the church has become this place that's inundated with secular psychology. Yeah. Where all we do is we navel gaze and look and just look at things and never experience transformation. God's not in the business of giving us a better sense of wellness or whatever. He's in to bringing transformation to whatever needs to be changed in our lives. I'm not knocking Christian counseling at all. I'm just saying it needs to have God's end, which is a changed life. This resource right here is a gift that we want you to utilize. Two weeks we're going to be back here with part two. We're going to go even deeper still. You're walking through some content that I have personally seen God unlock massive things in my life. You know what, I get up every morning early. Every morning I get up for two years now And I sit honestly before the Lord. There is nothing hidden between me and God. And I can say this with absolute integrity because I did it this morning. He knows the darkest parts of Carl. He knows my desires. He knows my thoughts. And I just hang them out before God because you know what? I'm growing to trust him more and more every day. And I want that for you. So we want you to not just take this. We want you to fight through the spiritual battle and work this. It'll take you an hour and a half to two hours. And we want you to be back next week and the next week. I love what Shannon said earlier. Give us three weeks. This is the three weeks we want you to give us. This week, next week, and the following. And see, taste and see that God is good. Can I say something? Yeah. If you have... really difficult stuff in your history. If you've been sexually abused, first of all, I'm really sorry that that happened to you. I just don't want you to feel like you've got to race through this thing and... it might take some of you some time and that's okay. For some of you who have massive trauma in your life, it would be good to engage this process and maybe engage somebody who's a professional counselor to help you walk through those things together. Again, you'd know it, you'll know it if you've got a massive amount of disruptive emotion that is exploding in you as you're going back and looking at some of these events. God can handle that easily, but sometimes that's best done with a trusted person by your side. Maybe it's just a couple friends that just know you and are willing to support you and pray for you, but I just want you to take your time and not treat this as a program as much as exactly what Paul's getting at in Romans 12, a way to discover how my ability to perceive and interpret life was formed so that I can experience change.