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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Keala Thompson

Facing the Pain

Tonight is going to start, this is a 3 part of our meetings for this weekend.

And it's focusing on thirsting for intimacy, on emotionally healing for relationship this whole weekend.

So it's going to be building 1 upon the other so tonight's presentation is entitled facing the pain because I felt that in order to experience true healing of the heart and to experience true intimacy we must first face the pain in our lives and so tonight is facing the pain and I invite you to turn your Bibles with me to Matthew chapter 16 verse 21 and 22 is the opening text.

Now most of us have heard of the phrase growing pains, have we not?

And What that means is that whenever there is growth, it means that there is always pain.

Now most of us want to grow whether it's in our profession, our health, our relationships, our spirituality.

Now the truth is that we're not going to grow in any areas of our lives unless we experience some type of suffering.

For a baby who is growing new teeth has pain, right?

An athlete training for a marathon, right, has pain.

Someone moving out of their comfort zone has pain.

We cannot save our money, lose our weight, improve our relationships without denying ourselves and thus experience some level of pain.

And thus in the same way, in order to grow spiritually and to grow emotionally in our lives, we need to experience sorrow.

And oftentimes in order to grow, we need to embrace our past wounds and what we've gone through so that we can then heal.

It was after I spoke at a youth conference and I finished on healing from my past wounds and a lady came up to me and said, now I understand what you're talking about and what I've been experiencing in my own life with my own mom.

She said to me why you were speaking it It really hit me that actually my mom is exactly what you were talking about I just said that My mom has a bad relationship with all my brothers and sisters All of her children cannot get along with her at all.

And then she finally realized that how she's living her life currently is based upon what happened to her in the past.

And then she began to relate to me her story of her mom.

And she told me the story of her mom when her mom was just a little girl.

She said she was in the passenger seat of her mother, which is her grandmother, but her mom was in the passenger seat of her mother, and then a car, and they're driving.

And all of a sudden, they got into a car accident, the car rolled over, and the next thing she knew, there she was, waking up and seeing next to her, her mom, who was dead.

And she saw that experience and it hurt her and she said that that didn't stop there.

She said as she got married, fell in love, got married, had children.

She was born and she had brothers and she had another sister.

And they said that 1 day, her sister was in a backyard on this farm with her brothers and they were shooting the guns.

Something had gone wrong and because of that her sister was accidentally shot and she was killed.

And he said, then I realized, wait a minute my mom, no 1 wants to hang around with her No 1 wants to spend time with her.

My mom is so bitter at life and at her children and everything and at God for everything that had happened.

And then she realized and she said to me that she realized that the sad thing about her mom was that her mom was 90 years old.

Could it be possible that we may be 90 years old and yet living as if our mind was still caught in the past as if we were just 7 years old a 7 year old girl still on a passenger seat of a car next to her dead mother.

29 year old mother, maybe, coming home and seeing the tragedy of your own daughter being shot accidentally by your own sons?

Could it be possible that, you know, as a child, we thought like a child, we acted like a child, and but, it's almost as if the Bible says true love means that, but when I became a man, or when I became mature, that I put away child things.

Could be possible that maybe we have not put away our childhood things.

Maybe we have not healed and maybe we don't even think about it because we want to bury it way in our past because it's too painful to think about.

I felt like in the past I was missing something.

Like, Ellen White says the reason from cause to effect.

And so here am I trying to build the churches and make the churches exciting, have fun things to do and exciting things to do and programs and evangelism and events and call point and Bible work and everything and preaching and this you know medical missionary work and do everything in all these events and programs to build up the church and I finally realized what I mean I'm missing something and dealing with the effects and dealing with the symptoms we must go back and deal with the root causes And as we deal with the root causes, we're going to realize that there's something in all of our lives because we live in a world of sin, do we not?

Because we live in a world of sin, all of us have been, not only have we hurt other people by sinning against them, but we ourselves have also been hurt and wounded by people what they have sinned against us so tonight we begin our series on facing the pain and may God open our eyes as we open His word let's pray, Father help us to understand Your word in Jesus name I ask, Amen.

Matthew 16 verse 21 and 22, what happened when Jesus told his disciples that he was going to Jerusalem to face pain and death?

Matthew 16 verse 21 and 22, notice what the Bible says, the Bible says from that time Jesus began to show to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and what does the Bible say?

Suffer or experience pain many things from the elders and the chief priests and scribes and be killed be raised the third day." So Jesus wanted to go to Jerusalem.

In other words, He had His mind set to go to Jerusalem because His calling at that specific time was to go and face his pain, to face his suffering he must embrace the pain so that was his calling he was headed toward that direction but I want you to notice what happened here verse 22 Peter said, then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.

Rebuked Jesus saying, far be it from you Lord this will not happen to you.

So here you have Jesus, He wants to embrace His pain, He wants to face the pain because He knew He needed to suffer and face it.

But Peter stood up and said, No, I don't want you Jesus.

Do not go to Jerusalem because I don't want you to embrace or to face your pain.

Now how did Jesus respond to Peter's reaction?

The Bible says, but he turned and said to Peter, get behind me.

Satan, you are an offense to me for you're not mindful of the things of what?

God, but the things instead the things of what?

In other words, you are not mindful, you are not thinking about the things of God, but instead you are thinking about the things of man.

You see, in order to truly heal, we need to face our pain.

And as Jesus is our example, we need to go forward and face our pain.

And Satan is going to come with the temptation.

And he is going to say to you, look, it is too hard to face the pain.

Forget about your past, don't think about it, let it go.

But in order to truly move forward in our spiritual walk, our emotional well-being, our relationships, we must face our pain.

We are living in a generation, in a society that is emotionally disconnected from 1 another.

We live in a generation where people are hungering for intimacy like we've never seen before.

We're living in a world today where relationships are shallow, they're not deep, they're weak.

My wife has some friends from high school who they're not Christian and they get together every so often and they started that recently and it was interesting there are all these women and they're all around in a circle and they're all talking about, I guess their marriages and relationships that they had.

And it's interesting that they all say the same thing.

We don't have any intimate conversations with our husbands or our boyfriends at all.

It's like very empty and shallow, no meaningful conversations they're saying.

And the sad thing is that yes they can talk about the news or they can talk about politics or church things or church problems or church doctrines, right?

But they cannot relate on an intimate level.

Do you think God wants to be intimate with us?

If you believe that, let me hear you say Amen.

Do you think God wants to go more deeper than just the intellectual sense of certain teachings and doctrines?

Isn't the 10 Commandments really about relationships?

And the last 6, isn't our relationship with who?

So isn't the 10 Commandments about relationships?

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Facing the Pain

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