What’s Holding You Back — Part 1

SPEAKER 02 : 0:02

Hey everyone, this is Pastor Rick’s Daily Hope, and we are so glad that you’re here today. You know, you can lose your money, your health, and even the people you love, but you can never lose God’s love for you. Stay tuned today as Rick continues his new series called The Key to Hope. So now here’s Rick with part one of a message called What’s Holding You Back?,

SPEAKER 03 : 0:28

I love New Year’s because New Year’s are a time for new beginnings and fresh starts. And obviously God figured out that human beings need a lot of fresh starts and new beginnings because he gives us so many of them. We get one every 365 days. And then we actually get one every about 30 days with a new month. Then we get a new beginning every week, every seven days, and then we even get a new beginning every 24 hours. Now why does God break up life into little bite-sized pieces so we can have new beginnings? Well, because we blow it, that’s why. We blow it a lot, and we need fresh beginnings. Now the Bible often compares life to a marathon race. Now, this is not a race that you’re in a hurry to get through. It’s not to see who can get to the fastest and first at the finish line. It’s an endurance race to see who simply finishes. Do you finish the race of life faithfully? And as we’ve said many times, life is preparation for eternity, and God is watching. Now, serious runners always strip down when they’re running a race. They don’t carry a lot of baggage. They don’t wear a lot of extra clothes. In fact, they wear as little as possible. I was in New York City recently, and in the middle of winter, in the middle of cold, there were these people out in just a pair of jogging shorts and a T-shirt on, running, because they don’t want anything to slow them down or hold them back. And God says, that’s the way I want you to run the race of life, with as few distractions as possible, with as few limitations, as few hesitations, as few hindrances as possible. The Bible says, I want you to lay aside the things that hold you back. Notice this verse in Hebrews chapter 12, verse 1. Let’s read it aloud together. We must get rid of everything that slows us down, especially the sin that won’t let go. And we must be determined to run the race that is ahead of us. He says, get rid of the things that slow us down. Well, today I want us to look at the three most common things that slow us down, things we need to let go of, things the Bible says you need to release as you begin the new year. Number one. The Bible says you must first let go of your worries. Of your worries. Because worry is emotional garbage that hinders your progress to spiritual maturity. It slows you down. The more you worry, the more it slows you down. Proverbs 12, 25 says, worry weighs a person down. Now you know this feeling. Have you ever felt so worried you felt like you weighed more? You know, you get heavy. You just go, oh man, I’ve got so much to do and there’s so many things I’m stressed out about. And you don’t feel light when you feel worried. You feel heavy. You feel pressed down. You feel depressed. Worry weighs a person down. And so God says, I don’t want you walking around like that in life. I don’t want you loaded down with burdens and cares and fears and anxieties and worries. I want you to release those things. Look at the next verse. Psalm 4610, the Bible says, let go, circle that, let go of your concerns. Then you’ll know that I am God and I rule the earth. Now, what’s the correlation between letting go of your worries and knowing that God is God? Well, here’s the correlation. Worry is always playing God. That’s what it is. Anytime you’re worrying, you’re playing God. You’re acting as if God isn’t in control, that God doesn’t care about you, and that God won’t care about you. You’re saying, I better take matters into my own hands, so I better worry about it. I better be uptight about it. I better be stressed out and anxious about it. God says, you’re playing God. He says, let go of your worries. Let go of your concerns. Relax and just let me be God. I’ll take care of the things in your life. Now, why is it so important to let go of your worries? You know all those things you worried about last year that didn’t happen? You need to stop worrying about them now. You know why? You need to let them go because you got some new ones coming up this year. You got a whole new crop of new worries to hold on to. So don’t dare carry worries from last year into this year. You’re going to get new ones. And there are three reasons you need to let your worries go. Look at these verses. First, worry exhausts your energy. David said in Psalm 55, I’m worn out by my worries. Ever felt like that? See, a lot more people are worn out by worry than they are by work because a lot more people worry than work. Worry actually drains energy out of you that you need for work. It’s stewing without doing. And worry never helps you anything. It just takes your energy. It saps your strength. It exhausts you. Second, worry not only exhausts your energy, it exaggerates the problem. The Bible says in Psalm 25, my awful worries keep growing. Now you’ve seen this happen. You start worrying about something and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger in your mind. Somebody says an unkind or critical word to you, pretty soon you start worrying about it and thinking about it, it gets bigger, pretty soon the whole world’s against you. And worry is an irrational, illogical form of thought. What it does is it magnifies, it exaggerates the problem. It makes your problems bigger, not smaller. So don’t worry, because worry doesn’t work. It doesn’t solve problems, it just makes them bigger. It causes them to grow. And then the third reason you ought to not worry, not only exhausts your energy and exaggerates the problem, it wastes your time. Jesus said in Matthew 6, will your worries add a single moment to your life? And of course the answer is no. Worry has never solved any problem in the history of the human race. And so it’s just a worthless waste of energy and thought and emotion. So what does the Bible say? Let go of your worries. Why? Three reasons. It’s unhealthful. It’s unreasonable, and it’s unhelpful. It doesn’t work. So what I want you to do right now is I want to think of one of the things you worried about, and I want you to write it down on your outline right now. Okay, this is going to be fun. Go ahead, write it down. Try to think of something that you worried about that you should not worry about. Okay, go ahead and write it down. If you can’t think of what worries you, ask your husband or wife. They will tell you right away. They often know better than you do what you worry about. And so it may be your health. It may be a job. It may be finances. It may be getting married. It may be your stock prices. You know, it could be all kinds. Write down something that you tend to worry about. Now, the reason why I’m asking you to do this, and some of you are going, I’m not doing that. Well, let me tell you why you need to do it. Because you can’t release it until you know what it is, until you understand it, until you identify it. You can’t release it until you recognize it. That’s a principle of life. One of the reasons why you’re stressed out a lot is you just have this vague feeling of something’s wrong, but you don’t know what it is. And if you carry this vague sense of anxiety, general anxiety, it’s not specific, it’s harder to deal with. It’s very easy to deal with a specific worry. For instance, that mouse beneath your chair right there. See, something very specific, you could deal with it. But something that’s general, you don’t know what to deal with. So you write it down. And you say, it would be helpful for you to go home today and say, what are the things I tend to worry about? And just make a list of them and then just kind of cross them off and say, I’m not going to worry about those. I’m going to let it go. Now, some of you had a hard time writing that down because of a fact of life. We rarely recognize all the emotional baggage we’re carrying. We almost never see it in ourselves. We don’t see, other people have to see it in us. And so what we do is we lug around this big garbage bag of worries and fears and memories and bad feelings and all kinds of things from a relationship in the past, and we just keep carrying them along through life. God says, I want you to let it go. Let that garbage go. One time I did a wedding for a couple years ago when I used to do weddings, and about two or three months after they were married, they were having serious marriage problems. So I invited them over for dinner. And the woman said, you know, she said, as I was that beautiful bride walking down that aisle in that white gown, I had no idea that behind me I was dragging along a garbage bag full of emotional garbage, unresolved from previous relationships, and I was carrying that into my marriage. And that’s what’s causing us problems. You see, a lot of the problems you have with your friends, you have with your parents, you have with your husband or your wife, are really caused by previous relationships that you never resolved, you never let go, you never dealt with, and you’re carrying it into this relationship and it’s causing problems. God says, let it go. I want you to drop the garbage, the emotional garbage, the worries and the feelings and the memories and all that other stuff. We don’t realize how much it slows us down. It almost always takes somebody else to point out the junk we’re carrying through life. We almost never see it in ourselves. We don’t realize it. We don’t see the madness, the craziness, the way we hold on to hurts and habits and hangups and guilt and grief and grudges and remorse and resentment. and all these things, we hold onto them and we carry them along through life and it takes somebody else. The second truth is that it usually, almost always, takes a confrontation with somebody else who loves you enough to say to you, this is madness. What are you doing? Let it go. Let it go. Because we don’t see it in ourselves. This is why we need community. This is why we need each other. This is why you need a few, you don’t need a lot, one or two really intimate, godly Christian friends. Do you have anybody in your life who loves you enough to tell you the truth? Do you have anybody in your life who loves you enough to get in your face and say, you need to let it go? You’re blowing it. You need to let it go. This is crazy. If you don’t have anybody like that, I pity you. It’s why we talk about the importance of small groups all the time. You need somebody in your life who loves you enough to see what you don’t see and tell you about it so you can let it go. Because for you, you’ve carried that garbage from relationships in your life so long, you don’t know it’s even there. It feels like your own weight and it’s not. You need to let it go. What does God want you to do? Look at the next verse, Psalm 55. Read it with me. Give your worries to the Lord, and he will take care of you. He says, let it go. Give it to me. I’ll take care of them. Now, how do you do that? How do you let go of your worries? There’s only one way in the entire universe to do this. It is prayer, prayer. You might write that down. It’s the only way you’re ever gonna get rid of worry. You don’t get rid of worry through therapy, through fads, through diets, through pills, through seminars, through conferences. You get rid of worry one way, by praying about it. If you prayed more, you’d worry less. you’d have a lot less to worry about too. The alternatives in your life are prayer or worry. You’re going to do one or the other through life. And the more you worry, the less you’re going to pray. And the more you pray, the less you’re going to worry. Prayer is the way you release your worries. Look at this verse, Philippians 4, 6, and 7. It’s a wonderful verse, and I love it in the message paraphrase. Let’s read it aloud together. Instead of worrying, pray. Let your petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns. Before you know it, a sense of God’s wholeness will come and settle you down. It’s wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life. We’re going to do this right now. Before we waste any more time in this new year, we want to stop and let go of our worries. And so Pastor Tom’s going to come and lead us in a prayer of releasing the things that make us anxious.

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Prayer is just talking to God. So let’s talk to God about it. Would you bow your heads with me? And just tell Him. Tell God what it is that’s worrying you. What you wrote down earlier or maybe were afraid to write down, tell him right now. And then would you pray something like this? Pray, Father, thank you for understanding and caring about what worries me. As I go into a new year, I don’t want to have this worry burden me one more year with fear and apprehension. And so right here, right now, I give this worry to you. I trust you with it. Help me to see that you’re bigger than any worry Help me to know that nothing can separate me from your love. And help me at the first signs of worry again to be reminded that I need to depend on you and not on myself. I give this worry to you in Jesus’ name. Amen.

SPEAKER 03 : 14:44

Worry is the first thing you’re going to have to let go of if you’re going to live the kind of life God wants you to live in the new year. But there’s a second hindrance, you need to slough off, you need to let go. You let go of your worries, then number two, you need to let go of your wounds. Your wounds. Now I’m not talking about physical wounds, I’m talking about emotional wounds. The way you’ve been hurt in the past year. The way you’ve suffered emotionally. There are a lot of things that wound us in life. Maybe you were wounded because somebody lied to you that you loved this last year. Or maybe a promise was made to you that was broken and that wounded you. Or maybe you were in a conflict with a friend or a family member or some kind of relationship. And in that conflict, some angry words were said this last year and you were deeply wounded. Maybe you were wounded by a betrayal. You can be wounded by rejection. You can be wounded by being misunderstood. You can be wounded by being devalued, overlooked, not valued enough. You can be wounded by being disappointed by somebody. You can be wounded by loneliness. There are a lot of things in life that wound us. And God says, I need you to let go of these things. Get them out of the garbage bag and throw them over the cliff so you don’t have to deal with them anymore. David said this in Psalm 109. He said, my heart is wounded within me. Inside, would you circle the word within? Internal wounds are always more serious than external wounds. Always, physically and emotionally. And emotional wounds always take longer to heal than physical wounds. For instance, you don’t remember the cuts and the scrapes and the bruises physically that you got on the playground as a kid. But I bet you remember the cutting words that were said to you as a child. The emotional bruises you got as a child, things that were said to you by bullies or neighbors or parents in anger or your brothers or sisters or a teacher, and you were labeled and it hurt and you still remember it to this day. Oh yeah, emotional wounds we hold on to a whole lot longer. Why do we remember them? Because we rehearse them in our minds. And we go over and over and over. And we replay the tape. Rewind, replay. Rewind, replay. Rewind, replay. And we think about the hurt over and over and over. Now that’s dumb. Because your past is past. And the people who hurt you in the past no longer can hurt you. unless you choose to let them to. And the way you let them to is by rehearsing it over and over and over in your mind. And every time you rehearse it, you are still allowing somebody in your past to control your present, and that’s stupid. You have a choice. Your past can’t hurt you anymore if you let it go. Now when you rehearse something over and over in your mind, you repeat it and you think about it, holding onto a hurt, there’s a word for that, it’s called resentment. And resentment comes from the word re-sinto. Re-sinto means re means again, and sinto is the word to cut, to cut. Re-sinto means to cut again. And every time you resent something, you cut yourself again. You reopen the wound. You re-administer the pain. Every time you think about that person who wounded you, you re-cut yourself again. You are perpetuating the pain by holding on to the memory. instead of letting it go. Instead of saying, okay, I am no longer gonna think about that hurt again. And every time it pops back up, which it will, I’m gonna just mentally change the channel of my mind and choose to think about something else. I’m not replaying that tape one more time. That’s a worn out tape. And never again am I gonna replay that hurt because when I do it, it doesn’t hurt them, it hurts me again. So why in the world would I be so masochistic as to keep remembering how I was hurt? I distinctly remember forgetting that. That’s what you need to say. I’m letting it go. I’m not gonna hold on. I’m not gonna recut myself again and again. This is what the Bible tells you to do. It’s what God tells you to do with your wounds. Psalm 37, verse eight. Would you read it with me? Let go of anger and leave your rage behind. Do not be preoccupied. It only leads to evil. Circle the word preoccupied. What’s he talking about there? Resentment, bitterness, holding onto your hurt, being preoccupied, thinking about how you’ve been hurt over and over and over and over and over. He said, don’t do that. He says, don’t let your mind repeatedly return to the scene of the crime. Because when you do it, you just reinforce the pain. You reinvent the hurt. You experience it all over again. Don’t become preoccupied. Now why is this so important that you not only let go of your worries, but you let go of your wounds? Because you can’t relate to the future if you’re always rehearsing and rehashing and reacting to the past. It’s impossible. Bitterness and resentment is like driving a car looking in the rear view mirror all the time. You’re gonna crash. You cannot relate to the future if you’re always resenting the past. You’ve got to let go. Let go of your wounds. I mean, don’t you think you’ve heard enough? Isn’t it time to stop the pain? To stop going over and over and over in your mind? You got to let go of your wounds.

SPEAKER 02 : 21:10

Hey, thanks so much for listening to Pastor Rick’s Daily Hope. I hope you were as blessed as I was from today’s show. And now here’s Rick to tell you about today’s offer.

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One of the things that God wants us to do, and he says it over and over in scripture, is to practice gratitude. Did you know that gratitude is good for us? The Bible tells us in 1 Thessalonians 5, 18, give thanks in all circumstances for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. You wanna know what God’s will is for you right now? It is that you learn gratitude in all circumstances. There’s always something you can be thankful for. In fact, I’ve discovered and I’ve read many reports that experts have told us that gratitude is the healthiest human emotion. Did you know that gratitude makes you more resistant to stress? Did you know that gratitude makes you less susceptible to illness? Did you know that gratitude increases your overall happiness and satisfaction? That gratitude gives your life more meaning and significance? I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed that the more grateful a person is, the happier they are. That’s the power of gratitude. So I want you to live with the attitude of gratitude, the attitude of thankfulness. Now I’ve put together a brand new Bible study called The Power of Gratitude. And in it, you’ll find scriptures and teaching and exercises that’ll help you develop the habit, cultivate the habit of gratitude. You’ll discover how to stay in God’s will, how to defeat discouragement, how to conquer complaining, how to reduce stress, and how to experience God’s blessing through gratitude. Friends, I wanna help you develop a deep and a profound attitude of gratitude. The world is craving people like this, and you will be able to experience all that God has for you. So today, When you partner with me by giving a gift, a financial gift to Daily Hope to help us take the certain hope of Jesus to people all around the world, I’m gonna have my team send you the Power of Gratitude Bible Study. I just wanna say thanks to you. I wanna be grateful for you. You know, your support is essential for us taking the Daily Hope message of Jesus all around the world.

SPEAKER 02 : 23:40

Just go to PastorRick.com to get your copy of this great resource. That’s PastorRick.com or you can just text the word HOPE to 70309. Again, that’s the word HOPE to 70309. And thank you so much for your support. Your gift to Daily Hope helps us share the hope of Christ with people everywhere. 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.