GYC WEST 2019: Let These Stand

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GYC West

Dee Casper

Do you Want to be Made Well?

God in heaven, I thank you for this privilege to pray.

I thank you that you are the faithful God who is there for us in our hardest moments and that you see us through and that you get glory out of those scenarios.

And so Lord, I pray, as we discussed this morning, something that's a big burden on my own heart, the topic of mental health.

Lord, I pray that you would condescend into this room and that you would minister to the brokenness of everyone here.

I'm asking that healing rain would fall from heaven in this place.

And that you would do something in this room in this moment that none of us would soon forget.

This is based largely upon a relationship that has grown with someone who's now a mentor and friend of mine.

He's a licensed family and marriage therapist and is also a pastor.

And so anyway, this book has changed my life, really, really helped me to get a better understanding of who I am, why I did a lot of the things that I did, and how to find healing in Christ, in a suffering Messiah.

It's called the hidden half of the gospel, how his suffering can heal yours.

And so I'll be covering some of that this morning.

Many of us can find ourselves in the midst of this sin and forgiveness cycle.

We find ourselves doing things we ought not to do and when we do so we find ourselves in an experience of shame.

Before they sinned they were naked and felt no shame.

But when they did sin, shame entered the human experience.

And what do we do to get rid of the shame?

Many times we go back to the pain-numbing agents of the sin of our lives.

And then we feel shame for doing that, and we just keep going 1 after the other after the other.

We feel shame, so we go back to the thing to numb our pain, but then we feel shame for numbing our pain, and it just keeps going.

But I believe an answer is found in an encounter with the living Christ and coming to understand who we truly are.

Satan has an agenda, and we've actually been hearing that through the course of this morning's messages, the morning messages throughout the week.

He sets us up to be hurt so that he can whisper his lies in first-person language that I'm not good enough, I'm stupid, I'm a loser, I'm worthless, I'm not pretty, so forth.

And these lies create negative feelings, leading us to self-medicate those feelings in damaging ways.

We don't like the things we think about ourselves and so we run to something to feel better about ourselves.

And then he leads us to view ourselves as nothing more than our negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

I'm nothing but an adulterer, whatever the situation may be.

What he does is he causes us to define ourselves based upon what we do.

That points us to Jesus, the very person who can save us from our wrongdoing and who died for our wrongdoing.

It's me defining myself based upon what I've done.

And so he sets us up to define ourselves as nothing but our negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

So in short, he sets us up to be hurt and then he sets us up to hurt ourselves.

Right, he kind of winds the machine and just lets us terrorize ourselves many times and just keeps feeding the fire as we go.

I can testify to this on my own experience.

My parents were divorced when I was about 3 or 4, and so that was the first trauma.

And for a few reasons, 1 of them is the fact that my great-grandfather had Alzheimer's.

I was a newborn in this situation, so being newlyweds and having a small child in a home with someone with Alzheimer's is incredibly stressful.

When you're living with someone that you love with all of your heart who's losing their mind, it is beyond devastating.

To watch someone who is a hero of your life just fall apart at the seams is not...

And so anyway, that's a difficult thing, but there's other issues going on that caused the divorce.

She'd been married a first time, had a son, they got divorced, the dad got custody, which is very rare in the 80s, but The dad got custody and they moved to Florida.

So mom basically lost her son is how she felt.

And then my mom and dad, they have me before they get married.

It looked like somebody stuffed a watermelon under her wedding dress.

So she was mad pregnant whenever they got married and I came immediately afterwards.

But then my parents get divorced and my dad gets custody.

Again, something that's very rare in the 80s for the dad to get custody, but both dads did And my mom would tell you this day that she's so grateful that that's what happened.

It was hard on her, but her life just spiraled.

The guy she marries after dad ends up beating her up really, really bad.

My grandfather lived in a nice neighborhood in the same town.

She lived in the projects down the road a little bit.

We were supposed to have a visitation, so my grandfather dropped me off at mom's house or her apartment there in the projects.

When she opens the door, she's purple, she's blue, she's swollen.

She told me she fell down the stairs, but as a five-year-old even I knew something wasn't right.

He goes home, he calls the cops, and they throw that guy in prison for 10 years.

Then my mom remarries and remarries and remarries.

He understands this isn't safe, this isn't healthy, but what do you do?

She's going to bring him to court If she's not giving visitations, but dad knows it's not good for me.

At this stage, dad isn't going to church.

He's not really like deeply, deeply rooted in the Christian experience, though he has to have a Christian worldview.

And this leads to a whole lot of problems in my life because there's 2 massive traumas that I'm dealing with as a child.

I start stealing and lying immediately at the age of 5 because it was some means of me feeling safe and being in control because if I lie I can create my own reality and feel safe in that reality.

I was stealing just as some means of feeling in control because I felt so powerless based upon what happened to my mom.

So you have a divorce, you have this domestic violence situation, and I was just a mess going forward in life.

What I do know is my brain was messed up and I was doing whatever came into my head and there was no 1 to stop me because dad gets custody but dad has to work and so I have all this time.

I ride the bus for like an hour with a bunch of not good kids, to school and back every day, on school days obviously, and then I'm home with no supervision and I'm just doing what comes into my mind.

Judges 17, 26, in those days there was no king in Israel and everyone did what was right in their own eyes.

So I start developing these patterns, these habits, and other things that are destructive, that are horrible, and there's nothing to check it, and I do not know Jesus.

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Do you Want to be Made Well?

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