Hot Seat Part 2

Thank you for sending your son Jesus to die on the cross for our sins and to deliver us from our , um , brokenness and our desperateness and our need for life and Holy Spirit is we come tonight and as we think about what it looks like to look into our own lives and understand who we are and understand , um , how to really listen to the Gospel and be healed, I asked for it that you would be honest to do a great work as we contemplate you.

We contemplate Jesus and his deliverance of us and ask all of that in your name. Jesus. Amen. Um , for the clicker. So if you don't know, last week we started a series called the hot seat model. And so if you're new with us , um , don't freak out. Our church is not a church that heats up a seat and makes you sit on it. Um, this model was something that I developed, oh, I don't know, maybe eight, nine years ago. And it's a model of helping you understand yourself.

And a lot of times what we do in our pilgrim groups and our groups are of smaller, you know, gathered men or women, it's one person will be the focus and people will ask them questions about their life and they'll get an opportunity to kind of slow, like down a little bit and think things through and kind of hear what God has to say to them. Um, and so last week we began the process of covering the hot seat model. And as you can see, let me just go over it. It's a little bit of a diagram.

Um , it starts out with a problem and then an event that illustrates that problem. And then you have kind of negative emotions that come off of your event and a false identity. And then you get to this thing called the table of decision where you see you, Jesus and Satan. And that's at the core of what this model is about, is helping you get to a place where you can understand what kind of choices you're making in life and how you are choosing to either follow Jesus or follow the enemy.

Now to kind of give you a, I'm going to do a little bit of review from last week, but I want to start out , um, in Matthew chapter 11 I'm the jump all over the place. If you want to write these down and check them out later, that would be great. You don't need to move around to them.

But I'm going to go to Matthew Chapter 11 Verse 28 and following, it's a , Jesus is speaking in this passage and it kind of illustrates this whole model and helps us understand what we're doing and kind of where we're headed. Um , and so let me read it to you. It says, Matthew 11, verse 28 and following says, come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me. For I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls.

For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Now, as I said last week , um , a burden is actually a teaching of a rabbi. So Jesus here is talking about how burdensome the teachings of the rabbis are to the people. And it's true, the rabbis had many, many laws like 600 and some of them, but they had added to things to kind of control people and it was burdensome. And so what Jesus is saying to the people at the time is that his burden, his teachings are actually light.

They're not something that's going to hold you down. They're not somebody who's going to encumber you. They're actually going to release you. And he goes on beyond that to say that he's gentle, like he offers you his character. Okay. So as I was thinking about this, I thought, you know, there, if Jesus is the ultimate rabbi, then there is also another rabbi, someone offering us teaching.

And that is saying now if you are not a Christian, you may be freaking out here in minute and saying, Whoa, pastor talking about Satan. Yes I am. I believe in him. And if you're here at all in church, then you believe in some kind of darkness. You know? And the Bible says that the ruler over that darkness is Satan and Satan has a teaching and Satan's teaching is burdensome to all of us. It's a burden.

And so what I have found is I have kind of worked through my own life and as I spoken to many of you and work through things in your life is a lot of times we don't realize what we're choosing. We've lost a sense of our choice. And so this whole model is designed to help us get to a place where we can actually own our choices, to know what we're choosing. Okay? So that's kind of where we're going. So last week we covered two things. We covered the first one, which was a problem.

And the second one being the event, there's a little table of decision for you. And so I put this put together this little side. Now obviously I'm not like Daniel, I don't have cool little things. I guess Kelly put those little icons in there to make, you know, make people laugh. But what I did, I put these letters up here because when we talk about problem that you and I might have, the first thing you got to understand is that if you're here at church tonight, then you have a problem.

You understand that you need healing. In fact, the whole village motto is healing the city one person at a time. And I guarantee you that all of you have problems and if you don't, if you think, oh, I don't have problems, and then maybe sometimes they get a little upset at this or that, but basically my life is fine. I don't have any problems then because their children are in here. I won't say what I think about what you think. Okay? Because you do have problems. We all do.

I'm have problems or things that I'm wrestling with a lot of times we're not aware of those. So I've got these letters up here , um, and they represent on what psychologists in the wellness world call wellness, like their categories of wellness.

And they're actually very helpful in helping you and I understand kind of how we need to approach service on a Sunday evening, how we need to approach pilgrim groups, how we need to approach one on one conversations we have with people, the kinds of things that we need to be thinking through to understand kind of where things are not working in our life . What's not going on. That's good.

Okay. But before we get there, I want to quickly read to you Colassians chapter three and you want , you should write this down because this is a key verse that you're going to want to hang on to the collage eons . Chapter Three Verse 15. In chapter three, Paul has been going through all this stuff about , um, how we need to clove ourselves and with good things and put off bad things. And in verse 15 he says, let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.

Since as members of one body, you're called to peace and be thankful. So these areas that we're going to go through up here, when we think about our problem, the thing that we really, really want is for the peace of God to come rule on these areas. The thing that I need in my life and these areas is God's peace , right? If you think about life and you go look at the news and you think about all just kind of going through life every week, you realize that piece does not exist, right?

Peace is not in your life. This is not always in mallet. We need the rule of peace to come in a lot of areas. So the first letter up here is r and r stands for relationship, right? Relationships are at the core of where we struggle, right? Maybe it's an issue between you and your son. Maybe it's an issue between you and your wife. Maybe it's some things that with people you work with, maybe it's the way you have, you know , issues with your mother.

Or we could go mother in laws or we can go on and on and on and these things we're relationships don't have peace, right? So one of the things that you can think through as you think about the things we wrestle with in life is where am I relationships? Is this piece not exist? And that can begin to help you. When someone says, how are you doing? You can think of , well , I wonder how I'm doing with my mom. What am I doing with my son? Like you can begin that process.

The second one on here is emotions, right? And most of us, we know that there's some level of emotional issue in our life, right? We, we don't have control of our anger or we just feel despaired when we roll out of bed. Like we, we know that our emotions aren't all together. So kind of being able to just identify your emotions, saying sometimes I can't control my anger, or sometimes I'm really frustrated, or sometimes I just feel super, super scared or I have a lot of anxiety.

So you need a rule of peace to be in that area of your life. So when somebody asks you, then you can say, well man, I'm struggling with anger, right? You have a place to begin. Now the second one, the third one is I spiritual now spiritual. You see how these two fun arrows going around because really everything falls under our spiritual life.

And really here is the core issue of everything because spiritual wellness means that you have decided that the god of the universe is going to be the one that you worship and not your money, not your spouse, not your status, not how you feel about yourself, not the toys that you have, not the video games that you play, not the cool sound systems you have, not how fun it is to watch your football teams.

Like, that's not the thing that you're going to organize your life around, but Jesus is the thing that you're going to organize your life around, right? So as you walk into church, one of the things that you can ask yourself for any kind of small groups where Jesus is being talked about is do I really have Jesus on the throne in my life or is there other things that I've organized my life around? And I don't want anyone to take that away from me, right? That would mean that you have a problem.

You have a place to start if you have something else on the throne. Now the next one is another, he is environmental. When I took environmental psychology, it was shocking to me how much people's mood, their , how they feel about themselves are influenced by the environments that they're in, right? This could call from cleanliness to the how bright things are light in places , um, to how , um , whole neighborhoods are structured. Our environments impact us.

One of the reasons that you come into this church and their couches and things are painted and arts on the wall and the flow for the food and the kitchen. It's an environment where we're hoping that you can feel at ease in that will lift your spirit , that you can feel like, oh, this is my home. I could fall asleep here. I don't have to be on, I can just be me and sit in the corner if I need to. Or I can be the funny person or I can cook or I can clean. I could feel at home here. Right.

Environment has a big impact, so when you come in to church, thinking about you should think about, man, I wonder how my environment impacts me. How does it impact how I feel about myself? Might be a place when you talked about stuff. Right? The next one is occupation, meaning your job, right? Things that you do like a lot. A lot of us define ourselves by what we do, right? How often? I mean usually when you meet somebody new it's like, Oh hey, okay.

You figure out their name and then you forget it. Um, and then once you've asked them like three times and you feel real stupid again, your wife to do it, or you have your kid do it or whatever it is to remember their name, then you want to know like where they grew up and what , what do you do for a living? Right? Because living defines us.

So anytime that we're wrestling with the thing that defines as the work that we do, maybe it's being a mom, maybe it's being an engineer, whatever it is that we do or the conflict between those two things. We have a problem, we have something to talk about. We have some, it's affecting us and then I'm going to just put I and p together I is our intellect and p is our physical, what's going on physically with us.

But I think i's really important in that for a lot of us it's very difficult to learn things, right? We have learning disabilities or we have mental like ways that we don't, we're not able to acquire new information or everybody is, you know, I'm always talking and telling you what you need to think and your very kinesthetic and you want to get into it and practice it. Right? And so you have your have some ways of learning differently. Well actually that's a problem.

It's because not everybody learns the same way. And so it could cause conflict. Also, some of us just have issues mentally that are just hard for us to overcome. That's something to talk about. To be honest about the put out there. It's a problem. Right? And the last one is physical. We all know that we're dying, right? We're just like grass. We're blown away. It's all, it's very short life on this little rock, right?

And so that physical illness, like the degeneration of our body, it impacts our soul and how we feel about ourselves. So I wanted to give you a little bit more detail about these problems because I think I want, what I'd like to do is create a grid for you.

When you come on a Sunday or you go to a pilgrim group or a monastic me or you sit with a pastor or somebody in this community who knows Jesus, that you have some places that you can say, Oh yeah, well you know, maybe the relationships aren't going that way. Well maybe my environment is impacting me. I think you have a place to talk about things. Okay, I want, I want that to be there. And that's very, very important.

Um, so the next thing that we have to deal with in life, and I don't know if I put a slide yes, is event, and I'm not going to spend a long time talking this cause they talked about it last week, but one of the key important things in this model is for you and I to identify the events in our life in particular that the tell us or kind of explain in detail or illustrate the problems that we're struggling with. You know, real simple one is, you know, maybe yeah, I'm struggling with my mom.

Well that doesn't tell me anything. Tell me a moment where there was a conflict with mom, right? So giving people a moment, an event, right, where things actually happen . So last week I read to you out of Luke chapter nine just to illustrate that. So then we're going to play with this story. So I'm going to go back to it.

But Luke Chapter Nine , uh , James and John who happened to be called the sons of funder , um, have a little experience in Matthew chapter nine, verse 51, they're going with Jesus and it says this, speaking of Jesus as the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem and he sent messengers on ahead who went into the Samaritan village to get things ready for him. But the people there did not welcome him because he was headed for Jerusalem.

They don't like the Jews, so they didn't want him to go there. One of the disciples, James and John saw this. They asked, Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them? But Jesus turned and rebuked them and they went to another village. Now you could ask James and John after this, how are you doing? And they're like, man , we just kind of feel like nobody likes us. Well, tell me how you know that. Well, we went to this village, they rejected us.

And then when we wanted to blow them all up, Jesus said, no. Like, what's, I don't know if this is like standard convert . I think this is a conversation that happened over and over again. And Jesus had finally just said, we're done. We're not doing the thunder and lightening thing. It's over. Right? So, but they have an event to look at, right? An event that illustrates how they're experiencing things in life.

Um, so now we're going to get to the next experience here, but I want to talk about a couple other events. Um,

Everything else you can forget about because this is the place where I believe the enemy begins to attack you. And this is, if you don't remember or understand anything about this model right now. What I talk about is the most important thing for you to understand. Okay? So in an event you experience negative emotion in an a negative event, okay? Not In, not in a positive event. And these negative emotions come to you very quickly.

So I'm not talking about, you know, you had an argument with mom and then you thought about it for a while and then you got really angry. No, I'm talking about that moment when you had a physiological experience. Mom looked at you and she said something and all of a sudden you felt it inside of your chest. You felt doubt, you felt anxiety, you felt anger. Okay, you have these emotions. Now, some I had assigned you last week to pick a problem and then an event that illustrated it.

So if you have those in your mind, now what I want you to do is think about the negative emotion that you experienced immediately after that, and I want to read to you the verse that I do not want you to forget. First Peter and I talked about last week a little bit, but first Peter Five eight and I'll explain how those all connected. First Peter Five eight starts out this way. Peter's an apostle, he's writing to all the churches and he says, be self control and alert.

Some translations say be sober-minded. If you look all these words up in the Greek, in your all fancy. Really all this means is when there's danger. You know, like when you think you see somebody walking in your front yard at nine o'clock at night and you know, especially guys and they're like looking through the window and they run into each window and like, like that tents and they're getting their baseball bat and maybe women are doing that too. I don't know.

Everybody, you know, you know that center like whoever's in my front yard, I'm going to get them. Or you know, that that sense of alertness, that's what he's talking about here. Whatever is about to say you need to be alert about it. This is your enemy, the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Now that word devour means consume.

And I read once, a long time ago from a commentator, he was kind of giving an example of this and what he said was that it's like taking a gigantic, like a kid with a slurpee, you know those bigger straws and he gets that slurpee and he's like, that's what Satan is looking to do. He's prowling around looking to slurp you up and here is the place that he does it.

In your physiological response to a negative event, at the moment of your anxiety, at the moment of your fear, at the moment of your awareness of all of this stuff, the enemy stops prowling, not severe. Like I don't believe in that enemy thing. I'm sorry I do. So you just have to kind of shut that out if you don't believe it. But I believe it and I think he's there. And that emotion, that negative fear, that's where he stops and what, and this is what I want you to know.

If you don't remember anything from the next three weeks that when you have an event, you experience a physiological emotion. You need to know the enemy is about to battle me. I am about to enter in to a battlefield. It's a warning sign. It's the alert thing, it's the sober mindedness. And here's what I want this model to be and how would I work so hard to get it to be is a place where you can be aware of what's happening, what's happening in the spiritual world, what's happening in your world.

Right? So I'm going to give you a couple of examples about how this works , um, from my life and then from Abram's life and uh , from April or I'm from Adam's life. So I will start with Adam and I'll just tell the story really quick . So in the beginning, God created, Adam and Eve told him not to eat from the tree knowledge of good and evil. They said, you know, apples look good. And so they took one, they disobeyed.

Now God goes walking in the garden and it says that Adam heard God walking in the garden. So there is his event, right? If you were to ask Adam about how he's doing after he met up with Jesus or right up with God and you've got, you know , the , all of the curses and punishments, you'd be like, things are not going well, things are bad. Well , could you illustrate that? Well , I heard God walking in the garden and what's the next thing he says?

He was afraid he had a physiological response to it, right? He was afraid. Now I'm going to give you another one in genesis chapter 12 and if you know anything about Abraham and then you know, maybe you know him as Abraham, but he's not Abraham yet in genesis chapter 12 but if you know anything about him, this little scene here defines his life and Abram's wrestling with his negative emotion of fear defines his life and eventually is his greatest victory.

And I'll explain that as we go through the next three weeks. But let's just meet him now. Abraham has been promised that he's going to be the father of many nations. He doesn't have any children at the moment. We start out in verse 10 it says, now there was a famine in the land and Abraham went down to Egypt to live there for a while because the famine was severe as he was about to enter Egypt. He said to his wife, Sarah , I know what a beautiful woman you are.

When they gypsy and see you, they will say this is his wife, then they will kill me. But they will let you live. Say you are my sister so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you. Now you can see the gesture on this scene. They're gonna need a lifetime of counseling. Just all the issues and we can even talk about it . Sarah's issues are Sarah is issues and all of this. What do you mean your sister? Um, but here we are.

We have Abrams coming to the border of Egypt. And what is he really? He's afraid. He's afraid.

Um , you don't need to fix them if you're in the issue cause I'm actually gonna implicate you guys a little bit. I don't need it fixed. Just enjoy the story. Okay. Um, so if you don't know, I used to manage like 14 or 15 units , uh, you know, apartment complexes and star do duplexes. And I have 14 swamp coolers that I had to fix every year. I hate swamp coolers. Okay . I hate them because you have to do them. Wow. For them to last , um, or they don't last. And so there's a lot of work.

There are no , they don't require a lot of brain power, but they require a lot of work. That's just tedious. It's not difficult. Okay. I don't like it. So here's my, here's my story. At the beginning of the summer, if you were to ask me, how are you doing, I might say to you, I don't feel like anybody really cares about me.

Why don't you ask somebody to help you? Right ? It's a good thing. Well, I would say, well honestly, I don't think anybody would do it because I don't feel like anybody, like I'm worth it. Right ? I don't feel like I offer enough to ask anybody to give something to me. So really then my emotion, I'll tell you my emotion when I walked in this in the sanctuary and it was hot, was despair. And for me it's really interesting. And here's the important thing about this model is for despair.

There is a false belief, which we'll get to that's attached to my emotion. But if you were just to find out, you asked me how I was doing, I would tell you I walked in here, I have to fix the swamp coolers . My emotion is despair, like I'm just like, I want to do this, right? We all have these. We have these tiny little events. We have major events like Abrams and Adams . We have simple swamp cooling events, but these events produce negative emotions in our lives, okay?

That's very important because that is where the enemy is going to begin to work on you, right? So let me show you how this works. We will move to the next thing. False belief out of your negative emotion in life. You form a false belief. Now for me, the false belief that I developed was I despair. False belief I have is nobody. I'm not important enough for anyone to help me with the swamp coolers, which totally stupid, but it's true in the sense of that's what I believe to be true.

It's connected to that despair. Well, now let's go back to James and John. They want to destroy this town. This is serious anger. It rejected us. What do people who are rejected feel? They feel like they're not valuable, they're not worth it. Maybe they're feeling like they're stupid because the rabbi that they followed is being rejected, right? They have this feeling of rejection and what's their response?

It's anger, but really it's a belief that , hey, maybe what we're not, what we're doing and what we're about, what we've given our life to is really that valuable. Maybe we made a stupid choice. Maybe we're fools, and then they have Jesus tell us to be quiet emphasizes that a little bit more, right? So they have a belief that's not true about themselves and about others, right? You go to Abraham , he's sitting there and his wife, he's like, man, you're beautiful.

And if we go into Egypt, they're going to kill me if you're not my sister, right? Well, what is he? What is he believing what God told him? You're going to be a father of many nations. You can't be a father if you're dead, right? It's really hard. I don't know if any of you've tried that, but so, so, so what is, what is his belief? Well , his belief goes beyond himself. He's like, well, maybe God's not trustworthy.

Like maybe I'm really, I was just smoking the wrong thing when he talked to me and I'm not so sure that God is trustworthy, right? He has a false belief. So, and this is, if you know Abram's story, this is what he does over and over again, gets overwhelming. He gets afraid and he takes charge and makes a massive everything except for one time, right ? The most of the time he chooses to take control because it makes God's not got it together. I'm the one who needs to fix it.

I'm the one who needs to do things. Right? How about Adam? He's sitting there. He has that fear response. Well , what is he afraid of? He's afraid of being seen as naked. He's afraid of being exposed. He's afraid of God seeing him in the way that he is. Right? So when Adam experiences that fear, he's afraid of exposure.

I want you to pick an event that demonstrates that that rule isn't there, that the peace of Christ isn't ruling in that area of your life. And in that event, I want you to pinpoint your first physiological experience.

One is from society and one is from yourself. Society. As soon as you have that fear, society says, oh no, you better protect yourself. Oh No. You know those people are just judging you. Oh, this is, this is what it really looks like to be beautiful. You're not beautiful. This is what it means to be a woman. You're not a woman. This is what it means to be a man. You're not a man. This is what you can go on and on, right?

There's a society tells you, and as soon as we have those emotions, we have society telling us what we should believe. But then also inside of us, we've developed a whole dialogue ,

And next week we're going to talk about how Satan dialogues with you, how the burden of Rabbi Satan begins to dialogue with you. And then the next week we'll talk about the gospel and how Jesus can overpower that. All right, let's pray because we have limited time. I'd be open for questions next time, but we had Daniel's little talk. So now the time for questions today, let's pray. Father in heaven, thank you so much , um, for this community.

Thank you for the opportunity to begin processing through our life together. Oh , I asked you that to give us courage as we look inside of us, as we are willing to pick apart events in our life, as we're willing to be vulnerable and say, Hey, I need healing in these areas of my life. I need the peace of Christ the rule .