In this episode of Pastor Rick’s Daily Hope, we delve into the metaphoric battleground of our relationships. Pastor Rick Warren leads us through a transformative discussion on the critical role pride plays in sabotaging our connections with others, and how humility serves as the powerful antidote. Through biblical examples and personal anecdotes, Pastor Rick and Pastor Tom offer practical advice on cultivating humility to enrich our small groups and familial relationships.
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 let’s listen in as Rick shares the second part of his message called What Destroys Relationships and What Builds Them.
SPEAKER 02 :
Now, here’s the second thing that destroys relationships. Pride. This is the second big thing that kills relationships. Pride destroys relationships. In Proverbs 13, 10, it says this. Pride leads to arguments. Little history here. That was the first verse that Kay and I memorized on our honeymoon. And we needed it on the honeymoon. Pride leads to arguments. Now pride shows up in a lot of different ways. It shows up first in criticism. If you are critical of other people, if you tend to be judgmental of other people, you tend to look down at other people, you tend to be a picky, picky perfectionist, you have a pride problem. That’s the reason you are critical, is you have a pride problem. If you tend to be competitive and you’re always comparing, oh look at her dress compared to my dress. Or look at his car compared to my car. Or you’re always comparing salaries. Or you’re comparing husbands. Or you’re comparing children. Or you’re comparing titles or jobs. You know what? You have a pride problem. that comparing spirit of always looking at everybody else and comparing and judging, that is a pride problem. If you have a stubbornness, if you find it difficult to say I’m sorry, if you find it difficult, you choke on apologies, you cannot ever admit it when you’re wrong, you have a pride problem. Now you don’t say, well, now if I may have offended you, That’s not an apology. That’s what politicians say. If I may have offended you, puts it back on you and says, well, really, it’s your fault for being offended. That’s not an apology. An apology is, I was wrong, I’m sorry, please forgive me. That’s an apology. Not, if I may have offended you. It is, I was wrong, I’m sorry, please forgive me. If you can’t do that, you have a pride problem. You have a pride problem. If you have shallow relationships, and you keep everything superficial in your life, and you never let anybody get close to you, and you keep them at an arm’s distance, and you may use humor to keep it all shallow, not let it get too deep, and you keep faking it a lot, and you wear a mask, you have a pride problem. You see, when you’re too shallow to care about others, that is pride. Now, what does pride look like in a small group, since we’re all in small groups? Well, one of the ways it looks is when you always have to tell a story that tops the last story. Well, you do that, yeah, but listen to this one, okay? When you are always offering advice and you never ask for it in your group. When you never admit, when you’ve had a tough week, everybody else is saying, yeah, I’ve had a tough week, and you never admit any problem in your life. The problem with pride is it’s self-deceiving. Everybody else can see it, but we can’t. When I’m full of pride, I can’t see it. I can’t see it. Everybody else can see it, but I can’t. When you have a problem with pride, you don’t see it in your own life. It’s self-deceiving. Everybody else can see you’re being prideful, but you can’t see it yourself. And so the Bible says this in Proverbs 16, 18. Pride will destroy a person. A proud attitude leads to ruin. And I love this verse in the message paraphrase. First pride, then the crash. The bigger the ego, the harder the fall. You had a hard fall? Well, that just shows how big your ego was. Now, pride keeps us from apologizing, and that destroys relationships. Pastor Tom is gonna come and teach.
SPEAKER 03 :
Pride destroys relationships. Humility, that’s the antidote to pride, humility. Humility builds relationships. Listen to these five things that build relationships over in 1 Peter 3, verse 8. The Bible says there, “‘Live in harmony, be sympathetic.'” Love each other, have compassion, and be humble. Those five really are built on the fifth one, the ability to be humble. This is really a pretty good model for small groups. If you take a look at these five things, it’s what we all want to be doing in our families and our groups and our relationships. We want to live in harmony and be sympathetic, love each other. We want to have compassion and be humble. I want you to notice that first one particularly, live in harmony. That’s what God wants in relationships. He doesn’t want this unison where we’re all the same. He wants the harmony of us all being different. Why be in a relationship if you weren’t different from the other people? That’s what we draw from. But this is important. Harmony and humility go together. You have to have them together. In a symphony, the beauty is in all the different instruments. But if you have one flute player who wants to stand on their chair, play louder than everybody else, it ruins the whole thing. If you have one person who’s saying, notice me, and I can’t let other people be noticed, it ruins all the joy of the harmony of life, the deepness, the richness that God wants to give into our lives because of that. Now, let me encourage you to do something in your group this week. You to do something that’ll promote humility and harmony in your group. This week, pair up with a spiritual partner. Someone that you can learn from, they can learn from you. You can be encouraged by, they can be encouraged by you. You can be friends, they can be friends with you. You can support, vice versa, as it works together. Guys, pair up with another guy. Women, with another woman. If you’re just starting to learn the Bible or you don’t know much about Jesus, pair up with somebody who doesn’t know much, who knows more about the Bible, knows more about Jesus, that can encourage you. Now, the point about a spiritual partner is this. Everybody needs a spiritual partner except me. That’s how we tend to think. Oh, this is a good idea. This is a great idea. But about a month ago, one of the guys in my small group called me up and said, hey, can we get together regularly and maybe read through a book together, talk about the impact that it’s making on our lives? It took me a month to get back to him. And you know why? I didn’t really want to meet because I feel like I’m too busy. Can you relate to that? This week, Don’t be too busy to connect with somebody else and say, can we be a spiritual partner? Your life will be the richer for it. And do not be too busy if somebody connects with you and says, hey, could we pair up? Don’t be too busy to say, well, I’ll get back to you on that and then never get back to them on that. If you and I will make this decision, it can change our lives. How are you and I gonna grow in humility? Because that’s a tall order. How does that happen in our lives? It happens by letting Jesus Christ begin to control our thoughts and hearts and attitudes and reactions. He’s gotta be a part of this. The Bible says over in Ephesians 4, 23 and 24, this verse on your screen, let the Spirit change your way of thinking and make you into a new person. How do I become a new person? How do I start to think in a different way? Basic law of relationships is this. I tend to become like the people I spend time with. Spend time with grumpy people, you get more grumpy. Spend time with happy people, you get more happy. You want to have more humility? Spend time with Jesus Christ because he is humble. He wants a relationship with you. He wants you and I to spend time with him in prayer and reading his word and talking to him. He is humble. Look at this next verse in the outline. Philippians 2, 3 and then 5 and 6. Be humble. and give more honor to others than to yourselves, your attitude should be the same as that that Christ Jesus had. Though he was God, he did not demand and cling to his rights as God. No one’s ever done anything more humble than Jesus, coming from heaven to earth to become a man, to live for us, give his life for us, be resurrected for us. And I spend time around him, that enables me to begin to become more humble. And that builds relationships. Now, on the back of your outline, there’s a third struggle we all face. And that is the struggle of insecurity. Insecurity destroys relationships. The Bible talks about this over in Proverbs 29, 25 when it says, the fear of human opinion disables. When I’m so insecure that all I’ve got to think about is your opinion, what you think of me, that disables my life. What’s the problem with that fear? What does that problem cause us to disable in relationships? Well, when I’m afraid, it tends to cause us to try to control each other, and that destroys relationships.
SPEAKER 02 :
I hate you. When people say that in a relationship, it is often a sign that somebody’s trying to control somebody else. And what’s beneath that control? What Tom talked about, fear. Insecurity causes us to try to control others, and insecurity causes us to resist the control of others. And that destroys relationships. You know, it’s an amazing dilemma that as human beings we have. We long to be close. but we also fear being close. We want it, but we don’t want it. We long to have intimacy with others, but we are also scared to death of having intimacy with others. Would you write this down? Insecurity prevents intimacy. Insecurity prevents intimacy. You can’t get close to somebody if there’s fear in the relationship, which is why living together doesn’t work in the long run because you never know when somebody’s gonna walk out. There’s no lifetime commitment, so I’m gonna hold back because what if it doesn’t work? It’s only a situation where I’m saying I’m committed regardless of whether we get along or not. We’re gonna make this thing work. Then the fear vanishes, and then the intimacy, real intimacy, rises. Now, what do we fear in relationships? Well, we fear a couple things. First, we fear exposure. We fear that somebody’s gonna find out what we’re really like. And we fear that, so we hide ourselves, and we don’t want people to know what we’re really like. And this is man’s oldest fear. All the way back with Adam, the first man, in Genesis 3, verse 10, he says… I was afraid because I was naked and so I hid. I was afraid because I was naked so I hid. When we’re afraid, we hide ourselves, we cover up, we wear masks, we pretend to be people that we’re not. Now it’s interesting today, we don’t have this problem anymore with a lot of people. Many people are not afraid at all of their physical nakedness. They walk around half naked. They walk around showing off body parts I don’t wanna see. And so they’re not ashamed of their physical nakedness, but they’re scared to death of their emotional nakedness. That’s what really scared them. I know a lot of people who flaunt their bodies who are extremely insecure. Extremely insecure. And they’re afraid of emotional nakedness. What if somebody understands, finds out my fears, finds out my faults, finds out my dark side, find out the part that I don’t want anybody to know. And you see, fear makes us dishonest and it causes us to build up walls. And the result, nobody ever gets to know you. And you don’t understand one of the things that God put you on earth to do, and that is to be fully known. Everybody deserves to be fully known and to fully know somebody else. Whether you ever get married or not, this has to do with soul to soul intimacy. And God designed the family, the church, to do this, where we get to know each other on a gut level basis. And we fear exposure, but there’s a fear even deeper than that, and it is the fear of rejection. And this may be the greatest fear in human beings, the fear of being rejected. We’ve all been rejected at some point, and we know how much that hurts. And so we fear it, and we close ourselves off and say, I’ll never let anybody hurt me again, and we build up walls. Now maybe you have been hurt by rejection by somebody, a boyfriend, an ex, or somebody. A parent who said you’re never going to mount anything or you’re not good enough. And you felt the sting of rejection by a teacher or a coach or somebody. Maybe you even felt it by a so-called, quote, Christian. Somebody who claimed to be a believer. Or maybe you felt it in a church. Or maybe you felt it in a small group. And if so, I would say to you, I am sorry. I mean, I am really sorry. And God grieved at your rejection. In fact, if anybody understands rejection, it’s Jesus Christ. Remember, they nailed him to a cross. That is the ultimate rejection. So he understands how you felt. But as your pastor, I would beg you, please, please, don’t let that harden your heart. Don’t build up a wall, a crust, put yourself in an eggshell. That’s a self-imposed prison you don’t want to be in. And when you won’t let anybody get close to you, because I’ll never let anybody hurt me again, you’re making a terrible mistake. You’re not living, you’re just existing. And it is my job as your pastor to help you and to encourage you and to say, take the risk. Have the courage to risk love again. Have the courage. Because if you will do and you will open up your life and you will lower the barriers and you will let somebody have the potential to hurt you, you will come alive again in a way you have never, ever experienced. Ask God for the courage to take that risk again, to be open, to be vulnerable. Now let me talk to the guys for a minute, because men, we’re the worst about this. As guys, we hold our cards close to us, and we don’t let our feelings be known. We don’t let people know what we’re really thinking or feeling. And I want to dare you to do a very courageous thing, to be openly honest about what you’re feeling. Now you don’t have to do it with everybody, but you need to do it with one person. You get in a group and share it with a group, or if that’s too hard, get one person. As Tom talked about, I firmly believe in having a spiritual partner in life. One person that you can level with, you can encourage, you can grow, you can support, you can share, and somebody that you tell what you’re really like to, and they tell back, and that’s a spiritual partner. You know, I couldn’t count the number of times out on the patio, after service, somebody’s come up to me in the last 25 years and said, you know, Pastor Rick, I’ve never told this to anybody else, what I’m about to tell you. And when I hear that, there is something that wells up inside of me, a sense of hope and enthusiasm and hope. Joy, because I know that person is about to have a breakthrough. They are about to experience freedom for the first time in their life. They are about to experience a liberation that is unlike anything else because for their entire life they have carried this in their life and they’ve never told anybody. And they’re about to open the door and the boogeyman’s gonna come out and it’s not as big as they thought he was. and they’re about to experience real legitimate freedom and new hope and new joy and new power and the love and the grace and the power of God can flood into their life. You don’t have to share it with everybody, but you need to tell somebody. You were never meant to go through life with secrets. In fact, you are as only sick as your secrets. You’re only sick as your secrets. And if you’re living in fear, you’re not really living. You want to open it up and let it go.
SPEAKER 03 :
Insecurity destroys relationships. What builds them? We all know the answer to this, love. Love builds relationships. The Bible says in 1 John 4, 18, love has no fear because perfect love expels all fear. If we’re afraid, it shows that his love has not been perfected in us. How does that work? How does love expel all fear? Here’s what it does. It takes the focus off of you and it puts the focus on them. That’s how it makes a difference. People ask me a lot of times, you ever get nervous when you’re talking to a lot of people at Saddleback? And the answer is, of course. It’s a lot of people. You know what makes the difference? Take the focus off me and focus on you. If I was standing here thinking of what you thought of my hairstyle, I should have something to be afraid of, right? Right? But the minute I start thinking about how much I love you and how much we want to love God together, all of a sudden the fear just goes out the back door. In any relationship, any place you feel nervous and insecure, when you focus on the other person, it has the power to throw fear out of your life. How do we find that power to focus on other people? Realize how much God loves you. Realize that He loves you more than you could ever imagine. The moment you begin to realize how much God loves you, I don’t have to prove myself anymore. I don’t have to spend my life trying to impress other people because I already know God loves me. Do you know how freeing that is? Do you know how enjoyable it is to live life that way? All of a sudden, my identity, my self-worth, they’re not caught up in what you might think of me that day. You might be just having a bad day. They’re caught up in my relationship to Christ. I’m not pressured by everybody else’s expectations anymore. All of us, I think, we think, I want that. I want to live with that kind of confidence. Where do you get it? The Bible tells us. The Bible says in 1 John 4, 15 to 17, all who proclaim that Jesus is the Son of God have God living in them. We know how much God loves us and we put our trust in Him. God is love. And would you read this last part with me? As we live in God, our love grows more and more perfect, so we will not be afraid. And you might circle the word This grows. This is a lifelong process. This is a journey. This is a little bit every day. If I try to have this confidence all at once, I’m going to have to fake it. That’s the only way you can do it quickly. It’s something that grows little by little every day. If you expect complete confidence tomorrow, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. But you can grow in this. I can grow in this little by little. Can’t defeat insecurity overnight. Doesn’t happen for any of us. But you can take the first step right now. And that is beginning a relationship with Jesus Christ. Or strengthening your relationship with Jesus Christ. When you say yes to Jesus Christ, you’re saying yes to a kind of love that can throw fear out the back door of your life.
SPEAKER 02 :
Now the fourth enemy of community is resentment. And this one’s the other big one. These four things destroy relationships. Resentment destroys relationships. Job 5 verse 2 in the Bible says this. To worry yourself to death with resentment is a foolish, senseless thing to do. Now everybody blows it. We all make mistakes. We all, what the Bible calls, sin. I sin, you sin, the Pope sins, everybody does. We are all sinners. That means I don’t, I’m not perfect. I don’t bat a thousand, okay? I don’t measure up to God’s standard. I don’t even measure up to my own standards. I disappoint myself a lot of the times. So because we’re all imperfect, you’re gonna hurt other people. And other people are gonna hurt you in life, intentionally and unintentionally. So you’re gonna be hurt. You’re going to be hurt in life. That’s a fact. What’s more important is what do you do with that hurt? What you do with it is more important than the hurt. Are you gonna allow it to make you better, or are you gonna allow it to make you bitter, resentful, and carry a grudge?
SPEAKER 01 :
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.
