REAL LIFE! – Believe Series: Week Six

Creation & Fall of Man

For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 6:23 (ESV)

“If you want deliverance, you must be willing to look back and understand. As you do this, you begin to get the information you need in order to make things different in your relationships now.”

Caring for People God’s Way

We go into a counseling session seeking change! We desire help and wisdom so that the relationship can be transformed from negative to positive. This takes time…the way we learned to argue, solve problems and share life was learned from the moment we were born until we walked into the counselor’s office.

Therefore, to undo the present in hopes for a better future, we must be willing to look back at the way we learned to do life as a child, teen and young adult.

We may have learned that when you have a disagreement, you need to raise your voice and win the argument at all costs. Some may have learned that when you have a disagreement you should shut down and storm out of the house.

Regardless, we have to be willing to stare these learned behaviors straight in the face.

Now, as believers we need to be willing to look further back than just our childhood. We need to look back all the way to the beginning to figure out why we act the way we do.

You see, Adam and Eve were the first people on the planet. They also were the first people who chose their own desire over what God desires. This is sin, and in doing this, it set the course for our dysfunction as human beings. We desire our own way over God and over others.

James 4:1 shares that this is why we quarrel and fight, because there is a war battling and raging within us (between our flesh and the Holy Spirit).

We are born sinners, no one had to teach us how to lie, we naturally know this behavior. We as human beings are born with a sinful nature and we also learn behavior from those around us, which makes it so extremely difficult to change our behaviors.

But as our memory verse states, the free gift of God is eternal life. Jesus offers a solution to our nature and learned behavior.  

I believe in order to undo the present in hopes for a better future, we must be willing to surrender our life and will over to the care of God. This is the first step in our relationship problems. When this happens it allows us to ask questions like:

• God, how do I need to change?
• God, what are you trying to teach me in this problem/issue?
• God, how can I love my spouse, child, parent, sibling, co-worker, boss, teammate, classmate, neighbor?
• God, why am I so angry?

When we understand that we are sinners by nature and have also learned ways of arguing, then we can hopefully get to a point of surrendering those to Jesus and say, “Your will be done!”

The challenge for this week:

When you find yourself in a disagreement or getting upset, ask yourself the questions stated above.