All of us have fantasized about something we want, especially when it comes to romantic relationships. What are the consequences of fantasizing and how can we stop?

<p>All of us have fantasized about something we want, especially when it comes to romantic relationships. What are the consequences of fantasizing and how can we stop?</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Freedom Health Ministries

Christ Method Alone: Love and Relationships

Gabriel Arruda

My Journey of Healing from Heartbreak

Fantasies

It's a privilege to be able to share this message with you again.

And so, you know, we voted last time, but in between last night and today, I was actually really impressed to do 1 of the messages.

And it's a really fascinating topic that I've never really heard a sermon on before but I couldn't believe how relevant it is to our daily life, how relevant it is to our romantic lives, and how relevant it is, get this, to our salvation.

You're gonna see the incredible importance of this topic and it's just kind of I'm not even sure how I started even thinking about this.

So I want to start by going to a Bible verse.

Please turn with me in your Bibles to the book of 2nd Kings chapter 5.

2nd Kings chapter 5 and I want to briefly just look at a detail from the story of the healing of Naaman.

Most of you are familiar with the story of Naaman.

Could anyone within his country heal him?

And so he was told by an Israelite servant girl to go to the prophet in Israel, and that he did.

So Naaman came with his horses and with his chariots and stood at the door of the house of Elisha.

And Elisha sent a message unto him, saying, Go wash in the Jordan 7 times, your flesh will come again to thee, and thou shalt be clean.

And he went away and said, Behold, I thought he shall surely come out unto me and stand and call on the name of the Lord God and strike his hand over the place and recover the leper.

He had a narrative of how he thought it was supposed to go.

Are not Abana and Farfar, I don't know how to pronounce those, rivers in Damascus better than all the waters of Israel?

But Naaman was really upset when he heard the remedy.

It was not according to what he thought it was supposed to be.

We're gonna pause the story, we're gonna come back to this, and we're gonna talk about fantasies.

Now, have you ever heard of the story, the movie, A Christmas Story?

It's that classic Christmas movie, they play it every single year.

There's some channels actually play it 24 hours, the whole 24 hours of Christmas Day.

Just this loop that movie 1 after the other.

I mean there's very few movies that get played like that every single holiday season.

And there's a lot of reasons why that movie is a classic.

There's 1 really unique feature to that movie, however, and that is the main character, Ralphie.

Do you guys remember Ralphie the little blonde boy?

Throughout the movie, they show him having fantasies about his life.

He was not the greatest student, and there's 1 fantasy where he gets the best grade in the whole class, and the teacher says, Ralph, you got an A+, and all the students come, and they lift him up on their shoulders, and they're hoisting him around the class going, yay, Ralphie, oh, Ralphie, and he's fantasizing of this whole scenario and of course he's a poor student it's not reality but it's a very unique feature of just any film in general.

And people obviously really identify with this film.

And 1 of the reasons is it goes deep into the human psyche and it really relates to our personal experiences.

It touches us in ways that we can really identify.

Is because we have a tendency to do something that almost none of us talk about.

We fantasize about lots of different things.

It feels good to do that because in our fantasies, we're the hero.

In our fantasies, it involves us getting what we want, exactly what we want.

And if you think about it, it's really the only place where we are in full control of life.

You don't have full control of the real world, but in your fantasy world, you have total control.

What things look like, what you say, what people say back to you, you control all of it.

And we're obviously here to talk about relationships and romance And so I want to we're going to talk about a spectrum of fantasies, but now we're going to go into how does it affect our romantic lives?

And 1 of the richest soils where fantasies occur is in the area of romance, the area of romance.

You know, we have all, I think it's safe to say we've all been there.

You meet someone that you like or maybe you see someone online that you like and your mind starts drifting.

You start imagining what would it be like to be in a relationship with that person.

And you start imagining dates together with that person.

You start imagining introducing them to your family for the first time and everyone really liking them.

You can, you start imagining the wedding, having kids with this person.

I mean, this is all something that I would bargain to say all of us at 1 point in time have done.

It's a really huge part of the romantic experience.

And I was listening to a dating coach 1 time and I heard 1 of the best pieces of dating advice I had heard in a long time.

The person said, do not fantasize about her.

If you like a girl, absolutely refuse to allow yourself to fantasize about her.

And this, as soon as I heard this, it totally clicked with me because I was in a situation at that time where there was a girl that I liked.

I noticed something about this experience.

When I allowed myself to fantasize about her, I would get more nervous when I was around her physically.

It's like the Holy Spirit opened my understanding to this and I saw it into my own experience.

And the more nervous I felt when I was around her, the less I felt like I could act like myself.

And the less I felt like I could act myself, the less the conversation flowed, the less things felt natural, it felt more contrived.

And also I noticed when I would allow myself to fantasize about her, I also felt very emotionally distraught by the twists and turns of the relationship.

Like my emotions were on a operating on a larger scale that I felt comfortable with.

The things that made me happy made me really happy.

The things that I didn't like, the turns I didn't like, really distraught me, really bothered me.

And when she was talking to me, I was on cloud 9.

When I saw her talking with another guy for a long time, didn't feel so good about that.

And To the extent that my emotions were swinging up and down, I didn't feel comfortable.

It actually reminded me of the life I had when I was using drugs.

It felt similar to my drug life, my drug experience.

And it actually started really interfering with my daily life.

I heard this advice and I immediately stopped fantasizing about her.

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Series

Christ Method Alone: Love and Relationships

Fantasies

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Fall Week of Prayer 2012

The Heartless, the Spineless, and the Nameless

47m

Anticipation

Pt 2-The Holy Spirit and the Cross

1h 13m

Behold, He Comes

50m

Plenary

Wounds of a Whisperer

52m

Plenary Session

Growing Better

54m

Forgiveness

38m

Fill Me with the Spirit

50m

The Cost of Forgiveness

52m

2019: Evening and Sabbath Meetings

The Privilege of Prayer

1h 8m

Freedumb

50m

Teen Girls’ Retreat

The Outward Look

33m

A Dying Critic

40m

Sound Doctrine