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Finding Freedom Seminar (FREE) – Saturday, May 6th

http://www.thefellowship.org/resources/events/finding-freedom-seminar/

Saturday, May 6: 8:30 am – 3:30 pm

Find Freedom from problems that won’t go away.

As a Christian, you care called to live a life in abundance, to be set free – but does your life express this reality?

Do you experience situations or feelings of envy, jealousy, sadness, depression, fear, panic, alcoholism, pornography, insomnia, irritation, bitterness, anger, strife, broken relationship, low self esteem?

If so, you have a need for a deeper healing in your soul … and we want to help you with this one day seminar to teach basic concepts of spiritual warfare, deliverance and healing of the soul.

Join us on Saturday, May 6 from 8:30 am – 3:30 pm in The Life Center at The Fellowship.

Seminar topics will include:

-Spiritual Legality: how personal behavior allows access for unclean spirits

-Paternity: how my parental relationship affects one’s life

-Sexual Restoration: how to purge one’s life from sexual sin

-Forgiveness: how to forgive yourself and others

-Spiritual Warfare: how to be effective in personal battles with the devil

FREE registration – but it is required. Optional lunch available for purchase ($6-8).  Childcare is not available for this event.

Click here to register:

MUST REGISTER BY THURSDAY MAY 4TH!

https://thefellowship.brushfireapp.com/events/436222

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Journal Through Recovery Entry 37: How Do I Tell My Story?

I have no interest in giving you an account of my adventures, only the wondrously powerful and transformingly present words and deeds of Christ in me that triggered a believing response among the outsiders. – Romans 15:18 (The Message)

I have been uncomfortable with trying to tell my story. I honestly still have pride and selfishness as character flaws that haven’t gone away. I know these exist in me and therefore add to my hesitancy to tell my story. Basically, I don’t trust my own motivations for telling my story. I don’t want to make it about me. I want it to be like the Bob Marley work of my youth: a “Redemption Song.”

I took this to my counselor and my sponsor to get some guidance on this. My sponsor as I believe I have previously stated has cautioned me about not being willing to share my story. That by not doing so, I am not allowing God to use it for His glory. So I am not sure what to do here. They gave me good advice and straightened out my warped thinking. So here goes.

First, I should tell my story if I need to tell it to get more out of me. Will it benefit me in my own recovery to tell my story in the situation I am in. Is there a purpose for me to share it to aid in where I am in working the steps. Like I did in step five when I shared it with a friend who isn’t in recovery, as an act of admission of my wrong doings. I should consider the situation and see if there is a need for me to share based upon my own recovery.

Second, I should tell my story if the other person will benefit from hearing it. Recently, I had this opportunity come up when speaking with someone new in one of our recovery meetings. I saw that he was struggling in starting to work through the steps and in maintaining any long periods of sobriety. So I prayed about it and really felt the need to share my own difficulties in entering recovery and staying here. I was able to share my experience, strength and hope with him. I was able to talk to him about the need for counseling, accountability, recovery meetings, checking in with other guys, and having a sponsor in my own recovery. I told him to take what you like and leave the rest. And he did.

Finally, my story has to be relevant. In other words, I don’t need to share it just to hear myself talk, to bring attention to myself for no purpose. There has to be a reason and a purpose to share it. In step nine while making amends, I have shared my story with a couple of people who had the right to know my story. It was relevant to me making amends with them. So I did. It was uncomfortable and difficult and definitely relevant. I didn’t share my story to make excuses for my actions and the damage I caused them. I shared my story because my story was relevant in the context of making amends.

Three guidelines to sharing my story:

  1. Do I need to tell it to get more out of me
  2. Will the other person benefit from hearing it
  3. Is it relevant

I can live with those. Otherwise, as my sponsor told me before, anything else is probably wasting my story, my “redemption” story.

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Recovery: Expectations v Reality

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Prayer and Recovery

https://applyingmybeliefs.wordpress.com/2015/05/29/prayer-and-recovery/
by applyingmybeliefs

Most spiritual programs of recovery admonish us to pray.  Some pray to “higher powers”, some to God, as they know Him, and others to Christ who is the one true God.  It seems that non-Christian recovery programs implicitly agree with the Christian perspective that prayer changes things.  So they pray to their higher power and the real God hears and answers their prayers in accordance with His will and purposes.

God almost begs us to pray when He tells us this in His word:

Jas 5:16(b) – The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.

While James 5:16 is a great recovery verse, it actually is not the best verse on prayer and recovery in scripture.  This is:

Mt 26:41 – Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.  (Also recorded in Mk 14:38)

This is Jesus instructing His disciples on prayer as He Himself is going through the agony of knowing He is about to be crucified.  This instruction was not just for Peter, James and John; it was also for us and is every bit as important today as it was in the moment back then.  As Jesus speaks this He is quoting from the prayer Psalm that He gave David close to 900 years beforehand:

Ps 51:12 – Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit.

If you recall, Psalm 51 was penned after David was confronted by Nathan over his sexual indiscretion with Bathsheba, another man’s wife, and his subsequent murder to try to cover up the sin.  David was tempted, and his flesh was weak.

In Christian recovery we often talk about putting on the armor of God, as listed in Ephesians 6.  What we sometimes forget is what Paul said right before and right after.  Before he says our enemies are not flesh and blood, immediately after listing the armor he says to pray.

So when Jesus is instructing us to watch out and pray because our flesh is weak, He is speaking of personal spiritual warfare; our inner unsanctified person and our temptation versus the Spirit of God inside us.

All of this suggests that one of our greatest tools in recovery is that of earnest prayer, the kind of prayer mention in James 5:16.  It also implies that those who don’t pray might struggle more than those who do.  Interestingly there is research that suggests that this is true (Carter 1998, The Effects of Spiritual Practices on Recovery From Substance Abuse)

What is your experience of prayer in your recovery?  Have you decided to be like David, called by God, “A man after God’s own heart (Acts 13:22)”, and pray over your own weaknesses?

 

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How To Heal Any Marriage

Colossians 3:12-14 –“Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.”

I (Dr. Cloud) was leading a seminar, and I asked the audience of married couples to stop for a moment and think of their spouse. I told them to think of all of the wonderful things that they love about their spouse and to concentrate on how awesome that person is and how much they love him or her. “Think of the wonderful qualities that you admire and that attracted you to that person. Let those feelings fill you,” I told them.

Then, after they were feeling all giddy and in love again, I asked each person to turn to their spouse who was idealizing them at that moment and to repeat after me, “Honey, I am a sinner. I will fail you, and I will hurt you.”

You could feel the sense of discombobulation in the room. In one moment, they were shaken from the ideal to the real. Some began to laugh as they got it. Some felt even closer to each other. Some looked up confused as if they did not know what to do with my invitation.

But that is reality. The person you love the most and have committed your life to is an imperfect being. This person is guaranteed to hurt you and fail you in many ways, some serious and some not. You can expect the failures to come. As the Bible says in Ecclesiastes 7:20, “There is not a righteous man on earth who does what is right and never sins.” We can expect failure from even the best people in our lives.

So the question becomes, “What then?” What do you do when your spouse fails you in some way or is less than you wish for him to be? What happens when she has a weakness or a failure? How about an inability to do something? What about an unresolved childhood hurt that he brings to the relationship?

Other than denial, there are only a couple of options. You can beat him up for his imperfections, or you can love him out of them. The Bible says, “Love covers over a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8). Nothing in a relationship has to permanently destroy that relationship if forgiveness is in the picture. No failure is larger than grace. No hurt exists that love cannot heal. But, for all of these miracles to take place, there must be compassion and tenderheartedness.

What does that mean? I like how the Bible describes God’s compassion: “to bend or stoop in kindness to an inferior” (Strong’s Hebrew and Greek Dictionary). For God to have compassion on our brokenness or sin is certainly to stoop to an inferior. But we need the same attitude toward an equal spouse for two reasons:

First, you forgive what is inferior to the ideal standard. You humble yourself to identify with your loved one, who is experiencing life in a way that is less than you or even he would want. You give up all demands for your spouse to be something he isn’t at that moment.

Second, if your spouse is hurting or failing, you are not morally superior, but you are in the stronger position at that moment to be able to help. God never uses the stronger position to hurt, but always to help. As Paul puts it in Colossians 3:12-14, “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.”

What a picture that is! “Clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.” What if you “wore” these qualities every time your spouse failed or was hurting? I think we would see a lot more healed marriages.

But that is not the human way. The human way is to harden our hearts when we are hurt or offended.

I was talking to a friend the other day who had offended his wife in a relatively minor way. But to her it was not minor at all. As a result, she did not speak to him for several days. Finally he asked her when she might forgive him. “Will it be before next month? Before Christmas? Just let me know so I can get ready.” She finally broke and started laughing, and things were fine again. She saw how unnecessary her “hardness of heart” was to the offense.

Hardness of heart, much more than failure, is the true relationship killer. Jesus said in Matthew 19:8 that failure is not the cause of divorce, but hardness of heart is. This is why the Bible places such a high value on tenderheartedness.

Today’s content is drawn from Boundaries In Marriage by Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend. Copyright 2014 by Zondervan; all rights reserved. Visit BoundariesBooks.com for more information.