Classic Sermon #6056: Freeing Ourselves from the Past (B)

Romans 12:2—and I hope that many of you can even recite it from memory. The Word of the Lord says: “…do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God…”

The key there is: renew yourselves, or be transformed, through the renewing of your mind.

We move on to First Corinthians, the next book, and there in chapter 13:11, which is also familiar to all of us, it says:

“…When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, judged like a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things…”

Second Corinthians, chapter 5, verse 17, says:

“…therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away, and behold, all things—all things, at least in the mind of God—have become new….”

And finally, in Philippians, chapter 4, verse 8—one of my favorites, a key to mental health—it says:

“…finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good report, if there is any virtue and anything worthy of praise, think on these things….”

Brothers and sisters, I was telling you that we left off in the introduction, and during these Sundays we have been talking about the importance of the Christian’s mental life, as we might put it—the importance of our mental and emotional life—which, as I have told you, does not sound very spiritual; it does not sound like something to which one can constantly say amen; it does not sound very stimulating in superficial terms. But it is one of the key subjects. I believe that the more I meditate on these matters, the more convinced I become that the people of God must reach a greater level of depth regarding our emotional life and the mysteries of how God works through His Spirit in our lives, and regarding that interplay, that combination, that cooperation which takes place between the human will, man’s freedom, and the Spirit of God who desires to work in us and upon us.

And we were saying that it is important for us to become aware of that cooperative relationship between you and the Holy Spirit. Sometimes we have the idea that God does everything for us: we simply board the train of the Gospel, travel along singing and looking out the window, and forget that God wants us to contribute our part in the conquest of our mental and emotional promised land. Here I am also referring to that image of Joshua which I have already used with you in connection with this: “I have given you every land upon which the sole of your foot treads”; but take heed that I command you, says the Lord, to be strong and courageous—referring there also to the importance of man’s role, the importance of the part that belongs to the individual in his relationship with God. God gives us the victory; God promises us that we have the victory, but He also asks us to become involved in that struggle, just as the people of Israel had to become involved in the conquest of the Promised Land.

And last Sunday we spoke about the past and the important role the past often plays in our spiritual lives. I said that many of us sometimes live so much in the past that we cannot enjoy the present, nor can we interpret the present correctly, because our past colors it so much and distorts it so much that we hear the voices of the present through, as I said, that conscious or unconscious recording of past experiences. And so we cannot attain that fullness of life in Christ Jesus; we cannot receive all the blessings God has for our lives because we are so focused on the past that we cannot see that precious and glorious spiritual present God has for us.

And as I was saying, many times we want to over-spiritualize the Gospel and, as I said, we want to be more Catholic than the Pope. Yet God is a God who deals with us there in our humanity; God deals with us in our need, in our reality, and we must be very conscious of the importance of our unconscious life, of even those things of which we are unaware. Why? Because I believe that Satan and God—forgive me for placing them on a parallel level, but they are the two protagonists in that spiritual drama of the universe—Satan and God see us not only in terms of what we believe we are or what we believe we feel, but in terms of what we truly are and feel. And I was telling you that many times we believe we are one thing when in reality we are another. Many times the conscious part of our personality is simply a façade; it is merely the tip of a very large pyramid, of an immense mountain, and beneath that tip of our conscious life lies all this past and our true feelings. And how easy it is for man—man, I believe, is the being in all creation most capable of deceiving himself, of believing that he believes one thing, and of believing that whatever he wants to believe is what actually is.

God, the Holy Spirit, deals with us in terms of that reality of our life, not in terms of what we have created for ourselves, that sometimes fictitious reality of our being, but in terms of the true reality, what we are feeling. Let me give you an example: resentment. That is one of the things which, I believe, does the greatest harm to human beings and which, I believe, most causes the fluidity, the flow of the Holy Spirit in our lives, to stagnate, and most effectively prevents the full blessing God wants us to have in our lives: resentment, bitterness.

Those hurts from which we have not wanted to free ourselves—what so-and-so did to us, what the world did to us, what our friends did to us, what life did to us—and we remain there with that memory, that recollection locked in our hearts, including, at times, the things our parents did to us or that we believe they did to us. Many times we have not let go of that bitterness which is there, and throughout the years we have covered it with pious language, a series of fictitious images, and religious formalism. But we have not dealt with it; we have not processed it; we have not confronted it; we have not acknowledged it for what it is. And so that thing which is there—because we have made such an effort to darken and hide it, since we do not like the image of ourselves that it projects, since knowing that we harbor bitterness within us is not compatible, let us say, with the language of the Gospel—we gradually hide it and allow dust to accumulate over it. Time passes, and we forget that it is there. But that bitterness is there and is affecting our lives, even though we are not conscious of it. It is expressing itself in very subtle ways in our dealings with other human beings, in what we expect or do not expect from the church, in our dealings with the pastor, in our dealings with our own children, relatives, friends, and workplace. It is there, and it will remain there until you process it, acknowledge it for what it is, and call it by its name without fear and with complete honesty, and you say, “Lord, I truly harbor bitterness, and there is something there that I have not resolved in my life.”

Until you do that, the Spirit of God cannot flow with the freedom with which He wants to flow through the channels of your life, because the Spirit of God is energy and we are the conduit of that energy. And when that conduit is obstructed by some knot—whether resentment, a poor self-image, fear, some kind of aggressiveness, or whatever else may be there, a complex of emotions tied into a knot—that knot obstructs the conduit through which divine energy is supposed to flow. And as with a clogged pipe, the water cannot flow completely freely. So when it does come out, it comes out much weaker than it should, and that is why we cannot amass the power God has bequeathed to us as His children.

That is why our lives are not as blessed; that is why we cannot enjoy those rivers of living water which Christ said would flow in all those who believed in Him. Why? Because the rivers are there, but the pipe is obstructed. The rivers have no way to flow out, no way to go forth into the world, bless the world, water humanity, and water our own lives.

And Satan, for his part, knows that resentment is there. And what does he do? He exploits that resentment; he continually keeps it stirred up. Through life’s circumstances, through our mental and emotional life, and through the thoughts planted there, he finds ways to keep that bitterness alive because he knows that as long as bitterness remains in our lives, God’s judgment must, by law, by divine justice, remain upon us. Did Christ not say, “When you pray, forgive those who have offended you”? And the Lord’s Prayer says, “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” If I have not forgiven my debtors their debts, the Lord—by law, by His Word, for He honors His Word—cannot forgive mine.

It also says that we must forgive so that our prayers may be answered. Therefore, when Satan sees bitterness there, he is very interested in having that bitterness remain, and the more hidden it is, the better, because then we cannot deal with it. That is to say, our spiritual life, the success of our life, and the power of our life are determined to a great extent by that examination which we must continually conduct; and of everything in this discussion, what truly interests me most is that examination of every aspect of our lives.

If, through these sermons we are preaching, I manage merely to plant a concern within you, that is the only thing that matters to me, because I believe these subjects are far too vast and too complex for anyone to expect to cover them in two or three sermons. There are school upon school of psychology and psychoanalysis, of psychiatry, of twenty thousand “-ias” and “-ios,” which have specialized in different perspectives on the human personality. Brothers and sisters, my only aspiration in these sermons is to plant a concern within you: that our inner life is far broader and more complicated than we are accustomed to thinking.

I believe that if you manage to take that concern home with you, I will consider everything I have been preaching worthwhile. If you go home and say, “I truly am a more complicated and richer being than I thought, even more treacherous than I thought,” and if you begin to view your life in that complex and profound way, from different perspectives, then I believe I will already have accomplished a great work as a preacher.

Again, I know that many times we want that straightforward spiritual bread. As I tell you, this kind of language does not sound like it, but I call it spiritual spinach. This is the kind of food on which you need to meditate more deeply in order to understand that God is so profound a God. Satan—the Lord rebuke him—is also very profound, and we too are profound beings. And where does Satan operate? In the darkness of our lives, in the unacknowledged areas of our lives. Is he not the king of darkness? Is he not the one who moves through those twists and turns, through those hidden places of our existence? Is he not the one who moves within that fictitious image we have of ourselves?

Many times, when you ask people—or when you tell them, because their language and their attitude reveal it—“Brother, sister, I believe you need to deal with some kind of bitterness in your life,” they say, “Who, me? Bitterness? No, I have already forgiven everything. I know what the Word says.” They even quote the Lord’s Prayer to you and quote every verse in the Bible. But when you analyze their life, their conduct, their words, and the fabric woven by their words, you discover that yes, there is bitterness there and there are unforgiven things there. And there are aspects of life which it has been more comfortable for them to keep in darkness, not touching them very much because they cause them too much pain. And so they remain there, held hostage by the evil force that wants those things to remain.

And my only desire, brothers and sisters, is for us to understand that I cannot merely settle for what I think I feel; rather, I must go deeper and truly discover what I am feeling and which forces are controlling my life. And in all of this, as I was telling you, the past, brothers and sisters, plays such an important role.

Do you remember those three mechanisms we discussed? The mechanism by which we retain everything that happens in our lives at a conscious or unconscious level. The mechanism of repression: we tend to hide and relegate to the alleys and darkest places of our minds everything we dislike, everything that causes us anxiety, everything that diminishes our image of ourselves, or everything that threatens what we believe to be our peaceful world. And thirdly, I spoke about transference: we transfer the feelings associated with past experiences to our present.

And those are three things that I believe do terrible damage to Christians. And I was thinking about this in connection with our childhood, about how important it is for us to become aware that those events from our childhood, from 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago, which we have already relegated to total darkness and mental exile, remain red-hot, affecting major dimensions of our lives, and that the Word of God recognizes those dimensions. That is why I read that passage about Moses, when Moses was placed in that little basket and cast into the river, and his mother had the insight to devise a plan so that she herself could raise her son during the first years of his life.

And what happened? After those first years of Jewish indoctrination—and it seems that Moses’ mother did a good job—decades of Egyptian, pagan indoctrination could not erase from Moses’ personality the awareness that he was Jewish and that he served the living God, Jehovah God, not the pagan Egyptian gods. And that is why, when the day came when Moses, now a grown man, a prince of Israel, perhaps never having seen his mother again—I do not know—saw a Hebrew being abused by an Egyptian, that indoctrination, that teaching from the past, I imagine, was like water that suddenly rose into Moses’ consciousness, and Moses perhaps unconsciously remembered all that indoctrination: You are Jewish; you belong to the living God; your people are God’s chosen people. It filled him with living zeal for the Lord, and he threw himself upon the Egyptian and killed him.

We know very well that what he did was wrong and that he was moving outside God’s timing, but the fact remains that this training, those first years of Moses’ childhood, were key in determining his future identity. The Lord is very wise, and that is why we must meditate on what the Word says: Train up a child in the way he should go, because when he is old, he will not depart from it.

Brother, sister, you must understand—and I must understand—that the seed you plant in the hearts of your children is being sown there for eternity.

If you teach your children, if you make sure that your children feed on the Word and receive spiritual bread, and if you are that example, it will remain there. It will at least be a word that questions them, unsettles them, and confronts them no matter where they go. You have put it into them; you have programmed the computer, and that computer must recognize that aspect of their personality.

To help us understand the importance of childhood formation, of those first years, there is an entire branch of psychiatry—psychoanalysis—which is based on the idea that all the mental problems human beings experience in adulthood come from the first six years of life, from what they call the Oedipal relationship of the Oedipus complex. Psychologists say that during the first six years—indeed, by the first five years—85 percent of the human personality has already been determined. The first five years. Those of us who are parents of children aged five and older must realize that, during those first years, 80 or 85 percent of their personality has already been defined. What remains is 15 percent that life will polish and perfect—or finish distorting.

And if we parents understood that “train up a child in the way he should go” refers not only to the Word of God, but also to bad examples, hurtful words, destructive words, excessive criticism, excessive abuse, and all these things! We are programming our children’s computers, and in future years, consciously or unconsciously, they will function according to the program we put into them during those first years of life. Psychologists and psychiatrists say that even prenatally—that is, in the mother’s womb—a child already has an emotional life. Through hypnosis and other things, it has been found that even in the mother’s womb, the child is already receiving stimuli from the outside. And that is without even mentioning what happens after birth. We tend to underestimate the importance of those first two or three years. They go further and even say that the child has an erotic, sexual life during the first months of existence, and to a certain extent I agree with them, if we correctly define what an erotic life is.

But what I wanted to tell you, brothers and sisters, is that we must never underestimate the importance of a well-spoken or badly spoken word, a gesture of rejection, or unjustified abuse during those first months and years of our children’s lives. I brought you a passage that some of you may have heard before. It is a kind of poem or meditation that reminds us; it says:

“…Children learn what they live…” Some of you may have read it. Being a parent is the most complicated thing in the universe; it is an art that requires continual study, attention, care, energy, and an investment of time, yet we can so easily neglect it. And we leave it to the schools, the church, and the babysitters to determine our children’s personalities, when during those first years we have the privilege of gradually shaping them in the light of the Word of God. And that requires understanding; it requires wisdom; it requires examples; it requires an investment of energy. But let us not underestimate its importance, because that past, which is now a present, will largely govern their future lives.

And I find no manual more perfect than the Word of God for instructing parents on how to be good parents. That is why we must not underestimate the importance of that Word, because through it we will leave our mark on our children for the rest of their days.

It says: “…If a child lives in an atmosphere of criticism, he will learn to condemn—and this applies when he is 50, 60, 70, or 80 years old. If a child lives with hostility, he learns to fight; if a child lives with fear, he will be fearful; if a child lives around people who constantly complain, he will learn to feel self-pity; if a child lives in an atmosphere where other people ridicule him, he will learn to be shy; if a child lives surrounded by jealousy and quarrels, he will learn what envy is; if a child lives among ashamed and marginalized people, he will learn to feel guilty; if a child lives with encouragement, he will learn to be confident; if a child lives with tolerant people, he will learn to be patient; if a child receives praise, he will learn to appreciate values; if a child lives among those who approve of him, he will learn to be satisfied with himself; if a child feels accepted, he will learn to love; and if a child receives recognition from others, he will learn to set a goal for himself; if a child lives among those who share, he will learn to be generous; and if a child lives with honesty around him, he will learn truth and justice; and if a child lives with security, he will learn to have faith in himself and in those around him; if a child lives surrounded by friendship, he will learn that the world is a beautiful place in which to live; and finally, if your child lives with serenity, your child will live with peace in his soul.”

That alone could constitute a whole series of meditations, because it is so true, brothers and sisters. Experience confirms it, and the Word of God clearly suggests that the environment and treatment our children receive will determine their future lives. Therefore, the treatment we received during our childhood, during our childhood formation, will determine our lives. There you have a good key for beginning to explore your own emotional life. Conduct an analysis: when you get home, honestly examine your past life, that childhood, and try to establish how things are linked together, how that past experience fits together with your attitudes, and you will discover how faithfully these things are related.

That is one of the elements that most determines our present: our relationship with our parents. I could suggest other things to you—the general family environment and, finally, the discipline we received from our parents—and that is merely with reference to the home environment. But these are three determining things that we can readily think about without fear, because sometimes we say no. When we are told, “Examine your parents,” an instinctive rejection of that suggestion immediately arises within us. Why? Because our parents are so closely tied to our personal relationship with ourselves, to the way we see ourselves, because of the child’s formation, that when we are asked to examine our parents with a critical eye—that is, with an impartial eye—we are afraid of what we will discover, because no parent is perfect.

I am not saying this so that you will begin to condemn your parents, because then all the parents will come down on me and say that the pastor is suggesting that children turn against their parents. No, I am not saying that. I am saying that we must examine our parents. I must examine my mother; I must recall the memory of my father; and I must acknowledge the flaws in them in the light of the Word of God—not to look down on them or love them any less, but to understand their humanity and to know what I am. And it is so important for us to be aware of this with love, with confidence, and with a freedom in Christ that tells us, “My self-esteem, my sense of personal identity, does not depend on what my parents are; it depends on my relationship with Christ Jesus.”

And then, when you are grounded in Christ and know that your life is centered on Christ, you can freely and confidently analyze the environment around you and see the flaws and cracks in your past. Through that, you can then begin a process of spiritual, mental, and emotional strengthening that will make you a better Christian, a better parent, a better friend, and a better servant of God.

In what ways does our family past distort us? There are so many ways, brothers and sisters. I wrote a few of them down because I did not want to forget them. For example, there is something as essential to the human being as a person’s sexual identity: how I conceive of myself as a man or as a woman. God has programmed us in a certain way; that is, God has given us a masculine or feminine identity. That is why the sexual liberation of our time depends so heavily on removing God from the picture. Once you remove God, there is no way to prove to anyone that a human being is born with an inherent nature. But once you place God at the center of existence and believe that you were created by God, you understand that God has given human beings a sexual identity.

But that is present within us like a seed, and life, our relationship with our parents, and other things are supposed to develop it, strengthen it, and bring it into our consciousness. Then the teaching of our parents and other things are to strengthen that sexual image which God has placed within us, encoded in a certain form. But when that relationship with our parents has been distorted in a particular way, it affects our sexual identity. Who am I as a man? Who am I as a woman? And I believe it is definitely not entirely coincidental that, as societies in developed countries have become industrialized, and as the importance of that family formation has been lost—or simply as family circumstances have kept parents from providing certain kinds of teaching and patterns of relationships among their children—this “liberation,” in quotation marks, has developed during the twentieth century, although I believe it is actually the enslavement of the human being. And there we see homosexuality, lesbianism, and all these things, which are part of a certain distortion of the identity that God has placed within us.

That is part of sin. I believe that the human being is affected in other areas; we are all distorted beings, and this is simply one of the manifestations of sin in this world, in our lives, but it is one of them. And we must understand the importance of this. Even how we feel as sexual beings depends partly on our past, our relationship with our parents, and other things that are also there.

Our attitudes toward marriage depend on those relationships as well. If our parents were constantly fighting and continually smashing plates over each other’s heads, and we saw that as children, my image of marriage will be affected by it in the future. My expectations concerning what my husband or wife will do, how I will treat him or her, and all those things are being programmed by what I see there.

Our attitudes toward authority figures are affected as well. How many young people live with resentment toward the police, their parents, and their teachers, and live lives of crime and rebellion and all these things? Why? Because in their past, their relationship with their parents—who during their formation are the highest figures of authority on the human level—was negative. They resent everything that reminds them of authority. And that, too, can distort the personality. It does not have to manifest itself only in grotesque forms such as crime and so forth, but even, as I was suggesting, in our relationships with our superiors at work, in the church, and in all these things, which are determined in part by our past.

Our relationship with God, because if my father was an authoritarian man who repressed my human development and was continually there telling me, “You are worthless, you are good for nothing, you will never accomplish anything,” the child’s image of God begins through his image of his parents, and particularly of his father, because God is your Father, and you are saying, “Okay, if that is what my father is like, then…” because children are instinctive mathematicians. If God is my father, then my father resembles God and God resembles my father, and so on, and that is where it begins. So if my dad is a scoundrel, then God is also a scoundrel. And so our image of God as an authoritarian being who always has a whip in his hand and who, the moment I raise my head, is going to cut it off, very often comes from that authoritarian father who did not allow me to develop a positive image of what a man is.

Many women have problems giving themselves to their husbands, whether sexually or emotionally, because their relationship with their fathers is so distorted that they formed a destructive image of what the male sex is. And they are already 30 or 40 years old and have problems in their physical relationship with their husbands and in their emotional relationship with them; they hold back and are afraid to open up and entrust their vulnerability to another human being because they are afraid, because they remember what happened to them back there, what Dad used to do to Mom, what Dad did to them. And so Dad is translated into that male figure of the husband, and they have difficulty. There are many husbands whose relationship with their wives is distorted by their relationship with their mothers. And if your mother was possessive and burdened and smothered you in the development of your masculinity and independence, then you are afraid. Every time your wife comes to embrace you, or you feel a growing affection along with a sense that you need your wife, that memory of Mom there smothering and covering you makes you feel as though your tie is too tight; you loosen it and pull away, move to one side, distance yourself, because you are afraid of what that relationship of love and closeness with another woman may mean. And unconsciously, you develop a defense against it.

So, in our marital relationship and our relationship with God, there are attitudes—for example, depression. We know that in some cases, I believe—I am not convinced by the evidence—depression can often be something physical, some deficiency of some chemical substance; even there, I say, I am not completely convinced of this. But the fact is that depression is due to something emotional; many times, a human being’s depressive attitude can be traced back to a deficient past with their parents, to parents who killed that child’s self-esteem, who made the child feel that without their approval—the parents’ approval—they were worth nothing. And then, over the years, when their parents are no longer in the picture, they find themselves alone; they have no direction and no sense of worth in themselves.

They were not taught, “You have worth because you are a child of God; you have worth because you are a divine creature; you have worth in yourself—even if your father and your mother forsake you, the Lord will nevertheless take you in.” Instead, they were taught, “No, you have worth as a projection of us.” And so, when the parents disappear, or simply when their life changes and they have to become independent, they find themselves like rudderless ships, like leaves tossed by the wind; they have no sense of direction because they are not grounded in themselves and in God.

And that is why one of the most important things that you as a parent, and I as a parent, must do with our children is tell them, “You have worth because you are a child of God; you have worth because Christ dwells within you; you have worth because the Spirit of the Creator of the universe is within you; you have worth because God gave his life for you on the cross of Calvary. And even if I die, and even if I disappear, and even if I turn into a monster tomorrow, keep believing that you have worth because you are a child of God.”

And then nothing will be able to separate them from that security; they are grounded in Christ. How many women live with the insecurity that, without their husband, they will no longer be able to do anything, and they endure every kind of abuse and oppression and keep making themselves smaller so that the other person can keep making himself bigger, because they have never learned that they have worth in themselves and have always seen themselves as needing to be married, with a man at their side, in order to be complete. Brothers and sisters, I believe in marriage; I believe in the importance and holiness of marriage—and who could speak more about the importance of marriage than I?—but what I want to tell you is that a marital relationship must be based on two people who are complete in the Lord, secure in themselves because Christ dwells in them, coming together and being there out of love and by an act of their will, not out of dependence, not because, if the other half, in quotation marks, disappears, then there we are, incomplete, gulping water and trying to stay afloat. No, you are complete because Christ gave his life for you. Woman, man, you have worth because the Lord has shared his life with you and because the power of the Spirit moves within you.

Low self-esteem, the feeling that I have no worth, that I am nobody. I remember a woman—those words always have an impact on me—who said to me, “Brother,” and this is a woman who has known the Lord for many years, “brother, there are times when I feel as though I have no worth at all in God.” I tell her, “Sister, never repeat those words, because first of all you are dishonoring the Lord; you are denying what God has said: ‘You are precious to me; I have engraved you on the palm of my hand,’ says the Lord. ‘Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?’ ‘I am with you always, even to the end of the age.’ ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.’”

And when you say, “I am worth nothing,” and you have a poor image of yourself, you are contradicting the very essence of the Gospel. And many times that low self-esteem comes from parents and from a past that taught us, “I am worth nothing; I am merely a projection of my circumstances. If people love me, then I have worth; if they do not love me, I have no worth.” And so we are continually seeking the world’s approval.

You see that there are people who never dare to take a firm stand on their beliefs, and it is as though their yes is not yes and their no is not no. It is because they are not grounded in a secure esteem of themselves, and so their self-esteem depends on what so-and-so says. “If they love me, then I have worth; if they do not love me, I am worth nothing, and I will kill myself.” Yet it is so important for you to say, “No, even if the world is against me, I am going to believe the Word of God; I am going to take my stand here,” as Martin Luther said when the entire Roman Empire bore down upon him. He said, “I have believed this, and I cannot believe anything else,” and there he stood, and he changed the history of the world.

The men and women who make an impact on their surroundings are those who are grounded in the assurance that they have worth in themselves. Your worth does not come from what others say about you, or from what others think about you, or from what your parents did or did not do in your life. You have worth because Christ is your rock; Christ is the foundation of your life, and you have to tell yourself that 24 hours a day.

That is why it is so important: “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good report—if there is any virtue and if there is anything worthy of praise—think on these things.” That is to say, when you tend to feel depressed and sad and as though you are worth nothing and the world is against you, counteract that with a positive dose of the Word of God, of the divine promise. And when the world and the devil want to tell you, “You are worth nothing if not even your parents loved you,” you tell them, “Well, perhaps when I was in the world that was true, but the Word of God says, ‘If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.’ Now I have worth because Christ has actualized his life within me, and I no longer depend on what the world or my parents may or may not have done; instead, my life is grounded in Jesus Christ.”

The summary of all this is this: let us make Christ Jesus the center of our lives. Let us be clear that our life is grounded in him, that my worth as a human being does not have to be governed by my past, does not have to be governed by what others have done to me, and does not have to be governed by what the world does to me. Let us not be victims of circumstances. Let us not be like those leaves tossed about by the circumstances of our lives. Our anchor is Jesus; our anchor is the Word of God. My own identity depends not on what the world tells me I am, but on what the Word of God tells me I am.

And may the Lord move our hearts so that, if there is any sense of sadness there, or any sense of resentment, or something unresolved in our lives—brothers and sisters, I ask you today, why not begin right where you are, looking inward for a moment and saying, “Lord, I acknowledge that, yes, there are areas I have to deal with.”