The Sharing Choice – Part 1

SPEAKER 01 : 0:02

Hey everyone, it’s so great to have you with us today on Pastor Rick’s Daily Hope. We are going to continue our very encouraging series today called Life’s Healing Choices. And in these lessons, Rick Warren will guide us through a deep biblical exploration of how to overcome the hurts, hang-ups, and habits that really hold us back. So get ready for some practical insights and powerful truths that can lead to lasting change and freedom in your life. And now, here’s Rick with the opening segment of his message called The Sharing Choice.

SPEAKER 02 : 0:39

Because we live on a broken planet, and we’ve talked about this many times, it’s broken by sin. Pain is a part of life. There is no such thing as a pain-free life. Pain is inevitable and pain is universal. And when you begin to follow Jesus, that doesn’t take away all your pain. Jesus does not eliminate all your pain in life. He transforms it. He gives meaning to it. He gives purpose to it. You see the significance of it. But as long as you live here on this planet, you will experience pain. That’s what makes the hope of heaven such a wonderful hope because in heaven, there is no sorrow, no more suffering, no more sickness, no more sadness, no more tears, no more tangles, no more problems of any kind. And that’s heaven, but we’re still on earth. So you will experience pain here on earth. Now the Bible teaches us three great truths about pain in your life. The Bible says that you’re gonna have pain all your life, but it says three things about it. That regardless of the reason for your pain and regardless of the cause of your pain, by the way, stop trying to figure out all the causes. It really doesn’t matter whether you caused the pain or somebody else caused the pain or Satan caused the pain or the environment caused the pain. All you’re gonna do is place blame on a lot of that. Regardless of the cause, you may have brought it on yourself. God says three things about your pain. Number one, he says, if you’ll give it to me, I will use it for your benefit. I will use it for my purposes and I will use it to help other people. God says that when we give our pain to him, he says I will use it for your benefit, I will use it for my purposes, and I will use it to help other people. Now you’ve heard me say many times God never wastes a hurt, never wastes a hurt. Now we do, we waste hurts all the time. Things hurt us and we don’t learn from them so we have to go get hurt again and again and again and again. But if we will give God the pieces of our lives, his purpose can transform our problems and he can bring good out of bad. God specializes in that. If you take the pieces of the pain of your life and you give them to God, God will piece it all back together. He will give you peace of mind and he will make you an agent of peace in the lives of other people. Now, we’ve been looking at these beatitudes, eight beatitudes over the last eight weeks. I wanna go back to the one where Jesus says, blessed are the peacemakers. God wants to make you a peacemaker, not just a keeper, but a peacemaker, that you make peace, you bring peace to other people’s lives, but you can’t do that until there’s peace in your life. The peace of God is in you. And that’s what recovery from the habits and hurts and hangups is all about, finding the peace of God in your heart. Now once you begin to experience recovery, restoration, revival, renewal, once you begin to experience spiritual growth, and you begin to experience the peace of God in your life, God says, I want you to pass it on to other people. In fact, that is the proof of recovery. How do you know when you’re recovered from a hurt or a hangup or a habit? How do you know when you’re really over that big pain in your life, that betrayal, that rejection, that abuse? How do you know when you’re over that hurt from your childhood? that hurt from your marriage. How do you know when you’re past it and you’re recovered? It’s real simple. You begin to help other people in that exact area. You don’t waste the hurt. Now if you’re not helping anybody else with the hurt you’ve been through, you’re not recovered yet. You’ve still got some traveling down that road to do. The proof of recovery is you start to help others. Now, the Bible says this in 2 Corinthians 5. God was in Christ offering peace and forgiveness to the people of this world. That’s where we find our own recovery. Peace with God, peace with others, forgiveness, being forgiven by God, learning to let go of the people who’ve hurt us. God was in Christ offering peace and forgiveness to the people of this world, and he has given us the work of sharing his message about peace. How do you know you’re recovered? You start sharing the areas you’ve been hurt in with others for their healing and their benefit. I want you to circle the word sharing in that verse because we call this step the sharing choice. And the sharing choice is this. I choose to yield myself to God, to be used, to bring the good news to others. both by my example and by my words. So Rick, I couldn’t do that. I got a lot more to go. Yeah, you do. But you don’t have to be perfect for God to use you. If God only used perfect people in the world, nothing would ever get done because there are no perfect people. God only uses broken people because that’s all he’s got to work with. God only uses broken people. He always uses broken people. And to help somebody else, you don’t have to have it all together. You never will here on this side of eternity. All you have to do is be one step ahead of the person you’re helping. Actually, it’s better for you to be just a step ahead rather than 10 steps ahead or a mile or 10 miles ahead of the person you’re trying to help. If you give off the idea that you’ve got it all figured out, you’ve got it all together, you’ve attained perfection, all you are is one big discouragement to everybody else. You see, one of the myths is that you help people through your strengths, you don’t. You help people through your weaknesses. It is through your weaknesses that you best help other people. For instance, if I stood up here and told you all the good things I’m good at, you’d go, well, la-di-da, good for you, Ricky. You know, tra la la la la, fantastic, that’s great. You’re good, I’m not, so what, let’s go home. And when somebody has a strength in an area and you don’t have that strength and you’ve never had it, it’s kind of discouraging. They say, well, look, I’m real neat, you’re messy. Well, what does that do? Just makes you feel bad. I’m organized, you’re disorganized. I’m always on time, why can’t you be like me? And all of the, you don’t learn from the strengths of other people. On the other hand, when I stand up here and I say, like I did last week when I shared how in 1981, the second year of this church, I spent the entire year under a cloud of depression. I was depressed, as I told you last week, for an entire year. Now that’s not a strength, that’s a weakness. And yet when I shared that, some of you are going, whoa, You know, if Rick could make it through a year of depression, maybe I could too. Maybe I could get through the thing I’m going through. Maybe if I hang on, look what happened to him. He’s stunning now. Wow. Wow. And it is our weaknesses that helps other people, not our strengths. And so we call this the sharing choice. I choose to yield myself to God, to be used to bring God’s good news to others, both by my example and my words. Now, a great example of this is the example of Paul, the Apostle Paul in the Bible. And on your outline, 2 Corinthians 1, Paul says that he was at a time in his life where he was so discouraged, he was ready to kick the bucket. He said, I despaired of life itself. I was ready to give up on life. I was ready to just crawl into a corner and die. That’s how down Paul says he was. And he’s probably the greatest Christian who ever lived, except for Jesus. And he says this, I pray that God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ will be kind to you and will bless you with peace, peace of heart, peace of mind. The Father’s a merciful God who always gives us comfort. In other words, when we’re down, when we’re going through the tough time. He comforts us when we’re in trouble so that we can share the same comfort with others in trouble. There’s the key. That’s the sharing step. He comforts us when we’re in trouble so that we can share the same comfort with others in trouble. We share in the terrible sufferings of Christ but also in the wonderful comfort that he gives. I want you to write this down on your outline. Just find a spot. My greatest ministry, write this down, my greatest ministry will flow out of my pain. My greatest ministry in your life will flow out of your pain. Not out of your strengths, not out of your talents, not out of all these things, but out of the painful experiences of your life. Who can be more sympathetic to somebody than somebody who’s already been through what that person’s going through right now? Who can better help the parents of a special needs child than parents who raised a special needs child? Who can better help somebody going through a bankruptcy than somebody who’s just been there, done that? Who can better help somebody experiencing the heartbreak of rejection or divorce than somebody who says, I remember what that felt like. How terrible that felt. Who can better help somebody who’s been abused or molested or raped than somebody who has been through abuse, molestation or rape. Don’t waste your pain. If you hold it in and you hide it and you hold it back, it doesn’t do any good. But if you’re honest to God and if you’re honest to yourself and if you’re honest with other people, God can use the very thing you hate the most in your life, you’re most disappointed by and you reject the most in your life and you wish it never happened. God said, yep, it happened. That ain’t gonna change. But… I can use it for your benefit. And I can use it for my purposes. And I can use it to help other people. If you’ll be willing to share your brokenness. That’s what we’re gonna look at this weekend. How God wants to use what you’ve been through. How God wants to take your brokenness and bless other people with it. Now you may be thinking, well, I can’t think of anything in my life that I could share that would actually be a benefit to other people. Oh, you got a lot to share. So let me suggest you four things today that God wants you to learn to share from your life that can help other people. And it’s not your strengths. Let’s look at these. Number one, the Bible teaches that we need to learn how to share with other people how pain got my attention. how pain got my attention. Proverbs 20 verse 30 in the Good News translation says, sometimes it takes a painful situation to make us change our ways. Does anybody agree with that verse? Would anybody be able to give a story about that verse? Yeah, we do not change when we see the light, we change when we feel the heat. We change when the pain exceeds our fear of change. Why is it that we wait until things get so bad before we finally change? I don’t know, but it is pain that motivates us. Over the last 30 years, I couldn’t tell you how many men have come to me and said, Rick, can you help me understand my wife? And I said, well, what’s… The guy who laughed, he was one of those who asked first. Now, I’ll say, well, so where are you in your marriage situation right now? Well, she’s walked out on me. I’m going, why didn’t you come to me six months ago? Why didn’t you come to me a year ago? Why didn’t you come to me two years ago? Why did you wait until she said, fed up, it’s over, it’s done, my mind’s settled, I’m out of here. I’ve given you one last chance. Why did you wait until that point? to say, I need to understand my wife. Why do we wait until it gets so bad? You see, sometimes we have to hit bottom. We have to be laid out flat on our back before we look up to God. That’s a stupid thing to do. God says, learn from pain quickly Now God uses pain for a lot of different reasons in our lives. He uses pain to inspect us, to correct us, to direct us, to perfect us. God uses pain to inspect us, to see what’s inside of us, and show us, oh look, that’s what’s in me that needs changing. God uses pain to correct us, say no, don’t do that, do it this way. God uses pain to direct us, say this is the path to go on. God uses pain to perfect us, to build character in our lives. But the number one way God uses pain in your life is to get your attention. Pain is God’s megaphone. Pain is God saying, hello. Are you listening? Do you think I made you to just live a little self-centered clot of a life and to ignore me forever? Hello, is anybody there? God whispers to us in our pleasure. He shouts to us in our pain. Pain is a warning light. Pain is the bells going off. Pain is the wake-up call. It’s God’s way of saying something is out of whack. Danger, Will Robinson. This is not the way I want you to go. Pain is a wake-up call. The story of the prodigal son who had everything that he wanted, he took his half of the inheritance and he goes off and he spends it on Sunset Strip in Jerusalem with wine women and song, particularly the women, and he ends up running out of everything and he ends up living in a pig pen, eating the same food that the pigs would eat. Now that’s not exactly where you’re supposed to be if you’re Jewish. because a ham and pork is not a thing you’re supposed to be around. And he hits bottom, and it says then, he came to his senses. Why do we have to wait till it goes completely belly up before we come to our senses? Why can’t we be smart enough to obey God when it hasn’t gotten that bad yet? Why do we have to wait until all of a sudden we need a crisis, we need an intervention in our lives? You see, we rarely change until we get desperate. We postpone difficult decisions. We delay doing things we need to do. We delay counseling until it’s too late. We ignore the problem until it reaches crisis stage. And we just keep procrastinating and procrastinating. A couple months ago, some of you remember that I wrote about the story of Elijah in one of the news and views. And in that I talked about the story of Elijah who was one of God’s favorite guys in the Bible. And God let him take a little vacation at a little bubbling brook called Cherith. And he said, Elijah, I want you to go to this place and I want you to stay there. And Elijah got quite comfortable. It was like a little resort spa for him. It said the birds supernaturally brought food And he didn’t have to go hunt for it. And it said the water was clear and fresh and there were trees to sleep under. And he was having a good old time. And then one of my favorite verses in the Bible, it says, and then the brook dried up. Have you ever had the brook dry up in your life? Yes. when you lose a job, when something you were depending on all of a sudden isn’t there anymore and you were depending on that friend for support or you were depending on that family member who died or you were depending on that job or you had some kind of structure underneath you that you were counting on that deal or whatever, something that you were really depending on for your sustenance and then all of a sudden it just dries up. And that friend’s not there anymore. And they moved away or they died or something. And the brook will often dry up in your life. Now when Elijah was in this situation and the brook dries up, he gets mad at God. And he says, God, don’t you love me? Here you were providing food for me and water and refreshment and trees and I was relaxing and have a great old time and all this. The brook’s not working anymore. Don’t you love me? And God says, of course I love you, Elijah, I love you. I just don’t want you at the brook anymore. I don’t want you at the brook anymore. And as long as it was going, you weren’t gonna go anywhere. I didn’t create you to simply sit by a brook the rest of your life. There are things to do, there are places to go, people to see, jobs to accomplish, missions to fulfill, goals to reach. And I don’t want you staying at the brook your entire life and you aren’t going to move until I finally dried it up. Sometimes God dries the brook up in your life because he doesn’t want you doing what he wanted you doing a year ago. He, God, led Elijah to the brook. And just as soon, Elijah would have stayed there. He got comfortable. And God said, well, that’s not what I want to do forever. So he dries the brook up. Sometimes God has to use pain to get our attention. Now the point is, when you talk about your pain with other people, you’re gonna have a willing ear, particularly if you’re talking about pain they’re going through at that moment. But for God to use the pain that’s happened in your life for the good of other people and for his purposes and for your benefit, you have to be authentic. You have to be honest. You can’t sugarcoat it. You can’t fake it. You can’t pretend about it. You gotta be real and honest about the hurts in your life.

SPEAKER 01 : 20:19

Hey, let’s talk about something that we all deal with, hurts, hangups, and habits. And whether it’s caused by others, ourselves, or circumstances, these challenges affect every single one of us. And the real question is, how do we move forward? And that’s where the Life’s Healing Choices video-based Bible study from Pastor Rick Warren comes in. This is a powerful study. It offers a path to freedom from those hurts, hang-ups, and habits through eight healing choices that can lead to true happiness and life transformation. It’s rooted in the Beatitudes of Jesus. And Rick guides you through eight engaging video sessions filled with practical and encouraging Bible teaching. You’re also going to hear real-life stories from people whose lives have been transformed by following these eight choices. Now, this video and workbook Bible study shows you how to make each choice, guiding you on God’s pathway to wholeness, spiritual growth, happiness, and healing. Now today, when you give a gift to support Daily Hope’s mission of sharing the good news of Jesus worldwide, you can simply request this life-changing Bible study. It comes with a workbook and access to the teaching videos. It’s available through streaming or DVD. And it’s our way of saying thank you so much for partnering with us in this ministry. We’ll send you a copy today. Just go to PastorRick.com or text the word HOPE to 800-600-5004. That’s PastorRick.com or text the word HOPE to 800-600-5004. Be sure to join us next time as we look into God’s Word for our daily hope. This program is sponsored by Pastor Rick’s Daily Hope and your generous financial support.