SANITY

Principle 2 Earnestly believe that God exists, that I matter to Him, and that He has the power to help me recover.
Step 2 We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
“For it is God who works in you to will and to act according to His good purpose.” Phil 2:13

Last week we were talking about a group of people who in the chains of captivity with no hope until they got word that God was intervening to set them free.  Tonight we are going to continue with that account and see how God began to restore sanity to them.  These folks were powerless to escape the bondage they were in and their enemy held onto them with a death grip.  We’re talking about the nation of Israel in Egypt for 430 years, 400 of which was in slavery.  We’ve seen that they were in DENIAL; denial that the gods of Egypt were a problem to them and would continue to be.  We saw they were POWERLESS, having no way of ending their slavery on their own.  But they have HOPE, once they started to trust in God (although they often struggled with that).  God was going to start by helping learn some SANITY, which is making decisions based on truth as opposed to insanity, which is doing the same things over and over again expecting different results.

Our hurts and habits are hard taskmasters just like the Israelites had back in Egypt.  Their bondage was both physical and spiritual…so are our hurts and habits…

Tonight’s lesson is based on the account of God freeing the Israelites from bondage in the Bible’s Book of Exodus and the CR acronym for SANITY…

Strength –

As our “definition” of SANITY says, truth is critical.  God is Truth, and when He first told Moses that He was going to free Israel from their slavery He stated very clearly that Pharaoh, king of Egypt, was not going to give up easily.   In Exodus 3:19 God says, “But I am sure that the king of Egypt will not let you go, no, not even by a mighty hand.”  The slave master in Egypt was powerful and wouldn’t just let Israel walk out.  But God continued in Exodus 3:20 saying, “So I will stretch out My hand and strike Egypt with all My wonders which I will do in its midst; and after that he will let you go.”  Pharaoh was powerful, but God is the Almighty, Sovereign God and He was going to bring Pharaoh down.

You may have noticed that our hurts and habits are powerful too; the addictions are powerful.  We just spent a month on Step 1 where we learned to Admit they are more powerful than we are.  Instead of “Pharaoh” they are named: alcohol, weed, lust, co-dependency, anger…  But God is still the Almighty and has already brought down the power of those masters; Christ has already won the victory…  So it comes down to a matter of SANITY.  Will we continue to fight a loosing battle on our own…doing the same old things and expecting different results?  Or will we start making decisions based upon Truth?  John 14:6 says, “Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”

Now onto the “A” in SANITY…

Acceptance
God sends Moses and Moses’ brother Aaron down to Egypt to meet with the Israelites and tell them what God is about to do.  In Exodus 4:29-31 we have the account of this meeting, “Then Moses and Aaron went and gathered together all the elders of the children of Israel. ³⁰ And Aaron spoke all the words which the Lord had spoken to Moses. Then he did the signs in the sight of the people. ³¹ So the people believed; and when they heard that the Lord had visited the children of Israel and that He had looked on their affliction, then they bowed their heads and worshiped.”  They knew very well the truth of their situation, that they were hopeless without God and now they were excited, hopeful and full of expectation.  But you know something, their expectations were exactly what God had in mind.  I think they figured Moses and Aaron would walk into Pharaoh’s throne room the next day, say that they were all leaving, and Pharaoh was just going to say, “Okay, it’s been nice knowing you; have nice life.”  That is not at all what was going to happen as we saw from Exodus 3:19-20.  In fact, Pharaoh was going to persecute the Israelites even more after Moses’ and Aaron’s first visit. 

Here is the account of that meeting between Moses, Aaron and Pharaoh from Exodus 5:1-9: “Afterward Moses and Aaron went in and told Pharaoh, “Thus says the LORD God of Israel: ‘Let My people go, that they may hold a feast to Me in the wilderness.’ ”  And Pharaoh said, “Who is the LORD, that I should obey His voice to let Israel go? I do not know the LORD, nor will I let Israel go.”  So they said, “The God of the Hebrews has met with us. Please, let us go three days’ journey into the desert and sacrifice to the LORD our God, lest He fall upon us with pestilence or with the sword.”  Then the king of Egypt said to them, “Moses and Aaron, why do you take the people from their work? Get back to your labor.”  And Pharaoh said, “Look, the people of the land are many now, and you make them rest from their labor!”  So the same day Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people and their officers, saying, “You shall no longer give the people straw to make brick as before. Let them go and gather straw for themselves.  And you shall lay on them the quota of bricks which they made before. You shall not reduce it. For they are idle; therefore they cry out, saying, ‘Let us go and sacrifice to our God.’  Let more work be laid on the men, that they may labor in it, and let them not regard false words.”  At this point, things were not getting easier, they were getting harder!

There are two things about our recovery from hurts, habits, and hang-ups that we need to accept.  Both of them are truth and if we are going to have any SANITY, we need to make decisions based upon truth.  The first thing we need to accept is that our hurts, habits, and hang-ups are not going to give us up without a fight.  Alcohol, drugs, lust, anger, and the like will not just suddenly leave us alone.  They will come after us and once we begin to truly forsake them, they come after us all the more.  That is just reality and you probably already know that.

The second thing we need to accept about our recovery from hurts, habits, and hang-ups is the truth that only God can truly set us free and we need to trust Him.  We will have expectations of how our recovery should go, but true recovery seldom goes according to our expectations!  The people of Israel had no idea how God was going to go about freeing them, but when all was said and done, they were free indeed, and God’s intervention for them was far more then they could have ever imagined.  Check out READ Exodus 6:6-7 where God is reassuring Moses after that first meeting with Pharaoh.  Look at everything God said He would do (and did do), “Therefore say to the children of Israel: ‘I am the Lord; I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, I will rescue you from their bondage, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments.  I will take you as My people, and I will be your God. Then you shall know that I am the Lord your God who brings you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians.”  Pharaoh had said when Moses first came to him, “Who is the LORD that I should obey Him?”  Well Pharaoh, you’re about to find out!

Accepting the truth our recovery is not going to be a sudden event, that our old hurts, habits, and hang-ups will come after us, that it will probably not go according to our expectations, all of that is just the start.  Accepting that only God could lead us out of our addictive, compulsive and dysfunctional behaviors and that all along the way we need to trust Him, is how recovery continues. 

Acceptance of the truth.  In John 8:31-32 Jesus said, “If you remain in My word, you are My disciples indeed.  And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

Now for the “N” in SANITY

New Life
In the midst of God’s reassuring Moses and the Israelites, God reminds them of His promise in Exodus 6:8, “And I will bring you into the land which I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; and I will give it to you as a heritage: I am the LORD.”  God would do what He had promised to do.  When did God make that promise?  Hundreds of years before any of this happened!  All the way back in Genesis 15 when God was speaking to Abraham (then called simply, Abram) about the descendants God would give him who would “number as the stars of heaven.”  God told Abraham that they would be enslaved for 400 years in a foreign land and that He would then free them and bring them to the Land God had promised to Abraham (the Promised Land).  Check out Genesis 15:13-14, 18: “Know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and will serve them, and they will afflict them four hundred years.  And also the nation whom they serve I will judge; afterward they shall come out with great possessions…On the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying: ‘To your descendants I have given this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the River Euphrates.’”  The time had come, God was not only going to free them from slavery, but take them to a new life in a good land where they had the freedom to love & serve Him.

Now Christ doesn’t move us to a new location to free us (I’m sure many of us have tried that!).  No, Jesus releases us from the bondage of hurts, habits and hang-ups, taking away our old desires and the insanity that was our old life.  But just like we’ll see of the Israelites, we have to cooperate with God in this process, filling our minds and lives with the Power of His Word and His love…  Through them He gives us new desires and brings sanity – so we make decisions based on Truth.  He gives us new life, not a promise of riches and trouble-free happy days, but a new life free of our addictive, compulsive, dysfunctional behaviors so we can know and love Him instead.  Romans 6:1-4 talks about that new life: “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? 2 Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? 3 Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? 4 Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.”

Next is the “I”

Integrity
This is where you need to read Exodus 7-12.  Those chapters tell of how God starts to unleash His power upon Israel’s taskmasters and upon Pharaoh.  The oppressors are overpowered and systematically dismantled.  Piece by piece God takes down those who had enslaved Israel and Israel watches the whole thing.  What were they doing in the mean time?  They were still dealing with the hardships Pharaoh had imposed upon them in Exodus 5!  They were still dealing with the anger of Pharaoh as he was being defeated.  And still working hard to do the next right thing. 

What they did not do was take matters into their own hands, neither did they picket at the brick plant, refusing to work.  No, they just did exactly what God instructed them to do while He did all the heavy lifting.  That is integrity, doing the next right thing, not getting ahead of God, not ignoring Him, not trying to do His job ‘cause we think we know better…just doing the next right thing.

In our recovery, we can’t just throw up our hands and say, “I had it, You’ve got it, God!”  No, we have to do the next right things.  Like submit to God in all things.  Like fulfilling our responsibilities to God, to family, to work, to society, and to ourselves.  We have to be honest…not just pretending to be in recovery.  We do the light work, He does the heavy.  We’re told in 1 Peter 2:1-3, “Therefore, laying aside all malice, all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and all evil speaking, as newborn babes, desire the pure milk of the word, that you may grow thereby, if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is gracious.”  More than anything else, that is our responsibility in our recovery: to do the next right thing, what ever God says to do.

Then comes the “T”

Trust
They were almost free, just a little more to go.  They had seen God do incredible things, for more than they could ever ask or expect.  And so far, they were trusting God even when things didn’t make much sense.  Exodus 12:50-51 says, “Thus all the children of Israel did; as the LORD commanded Moses and Aaron, so they did. 51 And it came to pass, on that very same day, that the LORD brought the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt according to their armies.”  Just after that they are encouraged to continue to trust God once they were freed.  Exodus 13:3, “And Moses said to the people: “Remember this day in which you went out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage; for by strength of hand the LORD brought you out of this place.”  Don’t forget what God did so far…that gives you a reason to trust for the next step…

But Pharaoh wasn’t quite done yet, he still had his chariots and army and when Israel left, he came after them with a vengeance.  Again, this is not what Israel expected.  Would Israel continue to trust God, or give in to fear as the war chariots approached?  Well, Exodus 14:10-12 says, “And when Pharaoh drew near, the children of Israel lifted their eyes, and behold, the Egyptians marched after them. So they were very afraid, and the children of Israel cried out to the Lord.  Then they said to Moses, “Because there were no graves in Egypt, have you taken us away to die in the wilderness? Why have you so dealt with us, to bring us up out of Egypt?  Is this not the word that we told you in Egypt, saying, ‘Let us alone that we may serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than that we should die in the wilderness.”  Looks like they caved to fear, huh?  Not only that, they yelled at Moses saying it would have been better for them to stay in Egypt!

After seeing God dismantle Egypt and strip it bare, they were denying God’s power and ready to surrender to their old slave master!  They saw the enemy coming, heard the thundering hooves, and wished they had never left.  They hadn’t learned to completely trust God yet.  So in Exodus 14:13-14 Moses told them to stand still and that God would fight Pharaoh for you.”  But that isn’t exactly what God wanted them to do.  Exodus 14:15-18, 30-31 tell us, “And the LORD said to Moses, “Why do you cry to Me? Tell the children of Israel to go forward.  But lift up your rod, and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it. And the children of Israel shall go on dry ground through the midst of the sea.  And I indeed will harden the hearts of the Egyptians, and they shall follow them. So I will gain honor over Pharaoh and over all his army, his chariots, and his horsemen.  Then the Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD, when I have gained honor for Myself over Pharaoh, his chariots, and his horsemen…So the LORD saved Israel that day out of the hand of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore.  Thus Israel saw the great work which the LORD had done in Egypt; so the people feared the LORD, and believed the LORD and His servant Moses.”  God said He would rescue them, but don’t just stand there, move forward!  God destroyed Pharaoh’s last strength that day and in the process Israel learned to trust and to make decisions based on Truth…trust God everyday, every hour

All along the way of recovery, you will be threatened by your old hurts, habits, and hang-ups.  Will you make decisions based on fear, old desires, the insanity?  Or will you make decisions based upon God’s Sovereignty and care for you?  Will you fear your hurts and habits, or will you trust God?  Proverbs 3:5-7 says, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will direct your paths.   Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD and depart from evil.”

Finally we have the “Y”

Your Higher Power
Exodus 15:1-11 is a praise song to God for freeing them.  The same God who delivered His people Israel out of bondage in Egypt can deliver you too.  The alternative is more of the same old stuff, expecting recovery but finding only insanity.  How about a little SANITY: make a decision based upon Truth…

 “Now therefore, fear the Lord, serve Him in sincerity and in truth, and put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the River and in Egypt. Serve the Lord!  And if it seems evil to you to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:14-15).

HOPE

Principle 2 Earnestly believe that God exists, that I matter to Him, and that He has the power to help me recover.
Step 2 We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

There is a story about people who probably felt they had no hope because they were caught in the chains of captivity.  We find that account at the beginning of the Book of Exodus.  The nation of Israel was in Egypt for over 400 years.  They were powerless to change that, much like we are powerless to free ourselves of the bondage to our hurt or habit.  Their bondage was physical and spiritual, so is ours.  We’ll follow that account as we move through today’s lesson and into the next several weeks.  It begins tonight with the message of HOPE.

H.O.P.E. for the Hopeless
Higher Power
The One True Higher Power, the God of the Bible, knew all about their suffering and enslavement and He was going to intervene.  Exodus 3:6-8 tells us, “I am the God of your father—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look upon God.  And the Lord said: “I have surely seen the oppression of My people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters, for I know their sorrows.  So I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from that land to a good and large land, to a land flowing with milk and honey…”

This was a message of hope, God was going to deliver them from their slavery.  God did the same thing for us, delivering us from our slavery to sin (Romans 6).  He broke the power sin has over us by sending Jesus to the Cross to take the punishment we deserve.  In 1 Corinthians 15:3-7, 59 we are told, “For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that He was seen by Cephas, then by the twelve. 6 After that He was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep. 7 After that He was seen by James, then by all the apostles…Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.”

Openness

But God doesn’t force us to accept His rescue, He simply offers it to those who believe.  God sent Moses, and Moses’ brother Aaron, to tell the Israelites what God was going to do and they were glad to hear that God was going to answer their cry for help.  Exodus 4:28-31 says, “So Moses told Aaron all the words of the Lord who had sent him, and all the signs which He had commanded him.  Then Moses and Aaron went and gathered together all the elders of the children of Israel.  And Aaron spoke all the words which the Lord had spoken to Moses. Then he did the signs in the sight of the people.  So the people believed; and when they heard that the Lord had visited the children of Israel and that He had looked on their affliction, then they bowed their heads and worshiped.”  The Israelites were open and receptive to the news that God wanted to set them free. 

Acknowledging that He is your only Hope is a critical step of your recovery.  Like I said, God doesn’t force you to believe Him or follow Him; that’s up to you.  That you might find out is that when you do submit to God, things will start happening, but it might not go as you thought it was going to go.  That’s because God’s ways are higher than our ways; He knows better than we do.  But it you are like the Israelites in Egypt, you might not think that what God is doing is the right thing.  Their “belief” and trust of God soon started to falter because God was not doing things the way they expected. 

Seriously, they had no idea what was coming…how it was going to happen.  Things would actually get harder before they got better and we’ll talk more about that next week.  The truth is, they couldn’t have handled God just “snapping His finger” to free them.  This freedom was meant to be life changing and to last for their lifetimes, no going back!  In order for that to happen, they needed to learn to trust God because the enemy (in this case, Pharaoh) was going to come after them. 

We also need to be open to the Truth of Christ and to whatever He is going to do.  Sometimes it will not go as we expected because we can’t see the future; we don’t know everything like God does!  Our freedom from hurts and habits is meant to be life changing and to last for our entire lifetimes, no going back!  In order for that to happen, we need to learn to trust God because the enemy (our hurt or habit) is going to come after us. 

Power to Change
The people in slavery had no power to change anything, and they knew it.  When Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh the first time, Pharaoh got pretty angry and said, “Who is God that I should obey Him.”  Well, pal, you’re about to find out the hard way!  In the mean time, Pharaoh decided to make life even more miserable for the Israelites which made them question what God was doing.  They probably thought their freedom would be immediate, but looking at the whole picture now, we can easily see that they wouldn’t have learned much that way.  Instead, God was going to bring down Pharaoh’s stronghold piece by piece until there was nothing left.  All along the way, He was demonstrating His power over all things so that the Israelites could understand that God was the Almighty and they could trust Him completely. 

Exodus 6:1-2, 6-7 says, “Then the LORD said to Moses, ‘Now you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh. For with a strong hand he will let them go, and with a strong hand he will drive them out of his land.’  And God spoke to Moses and said to him, ‘I am the LORD… Therefore say to the children of Israel: I am the LORD; I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, I will rescue you from their bondage, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments.  I will take you as My people, and I will be your God. Then you shall know that I am the LORD your God who brings you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians.’”

We can’t change anyone else, or our situation, or ourselves for the most part, but Almighty God can!  Maybe you don’t quite believe that because you’ve not seen it.  Well my friend, what if the reason nothing has changed is NOT a lack of God’s power, but a lack of your openness to God and your own expectations getting in the way?  Matthew 13:58 tells us, “Now He (Jesus) did not do many mighty works there because of their unbelief.”  The people in Jesus’ home town didn’t experience the power of God because they didn’t believe.

Expect Change
The Israelites expected change in Exodus 4:31, but not after Pharaoh made their lives harder in Exodus 5:20-21.  As soon as it didn’t go like they expected…they lost hope; they stopped trusting God! 

Your recovery from hurts and habits will not be easy, immediate, or automatic.  BUT God will lead you through, and He’ll do the heavy lifting.  You’ve simply got to trust Him.  I think the best way to put this all together is to let God have the last word; so from Romans 5:1-5…

“Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.  And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope.  Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”

Blessed are the poor in spirit

Step 1 / Principle 1 Application

·        We admitted that we were powerless over our addictions and compulsive behaviors, that our lives had become unmanageable.  “For I know that nothing good lives in me, this is, in my sinful nature.  For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.”  Rom 7:18

·        Realize I am not God.  I admit that I am powerless to control my tendency to do the wrong thing and that my life is unmanageable.  “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”  Matthew 5:3

Blessed are the Poor in Spirit
What are the beatitudes? 
They are the beginning of Jesus’ most famous sermon as recorded in Matthew 5-7.  At that time God was making a major change (God never changes who He is, but He has changed how we approach Him).  Soon the Temple would go away – no more animal sacrifices for sin, soon Jesus would make the final, once-for-all sacrifice for sin so that now we have direct access to God, through our High Priest, Jesus.  Soon there would be no more Laws written on stone tablets because now God writes His instructions on the tablet of our heart and gives us His Holy Spirit to understand and embrace them.  The Holy Spirit guides us into Truth thru His Word, comforts, encourages, and strengthens us because trouble does come.

The sermon on the mount introduces much of this and people were amazed by what Jesus taught…and still are for that matter.  He said, there is no way we can meet God’s standard or have peace with God on our own.  He redefined murder as hating your brother, redefined adultery as just looking with lust, and redefined the expectation of love to include even your enemies.  There's no way we can meet these standards on our own.

The Beatitudes are the intro to Jesus’ amazing teaching and they have been paired up with our Eight Principles.

What is “poor in spirit”?
Poor in spirit sounds like a bad thing doesn’t it?  Why would God not what us to be very spiritual?  Well, “poor” is not a reference to how spiritual we are, but to how much of our spirituality is focused on self.  Thus “poor in spirit” simply means recognizing our own spiritual poverty; we have no good spirituality of our own.  Again, why is that bad; God explains it better than I do...

1 Cor 2:9-14
But as it is written: "Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him.”  But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God.  For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God.  Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God.  These things we also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.  But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

That is saying that any spiritualty we have on our own is not worth anything becuase it is human spirituality and not godly.  It cannot understand the things of God and so it is not only useless but counterproductive.  The human spirit that we have in us does not lead us to God nor does it know Him.  Being poor in spirit means recognizing that our spirit is deprived, weak, broken…given to seeking addiction.

John 3:6 says, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit."  We have no ability on our own to fight the spiritual battle of addiction because it is primarily a spiritual battle not a physical one, and our spirit is depirved, weak, and broken.

Ephesians 6:12 For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.  Our main battle is NOT against, alcohol, drugs, lust, relationships, hurts, habits, etc...it is a spiritual battle that requires God's help.

We must humble our spirit and admit, “I am not God, and I am powerless to control my tendency to do the wrong thing, my life is unmanageable.”  That's when we will be “Blessed (meaning 'favored by God') are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 5:3).