Classic Sermon #6056: Free Us from the Past (B)

Romans 12:2, and I hope many of you can even recite it from memory. The word of the Lord says: "...do not conform to this century but transform yourselves through the renewal of your understanding so that you may verify what the good and perfect will of God is..."

The key there is to renew yourselves or transform yourselves through the renewal of your understanding.

We move on to First Corinthians, the next book and there in chapter 13:11 known to all of us as well, it says:

"... When I was a child I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I judged like a child, but when I became a man I left what I was as a child..."

Second Corinthians, chapter 5, verse 17, says:

"... so that if anyone is in Christ a new creature is, the old things have passed away and behold all, all at least in the mind of God, are made new...."

And finally in Philippians, chapter 4, verse 8, one of my favorites, a key to mental health, it says:

“…for the rest, brothers, all that is true, all that is honest, all that is just, all that is pure, all that is lovely, all that is of good name, and there is some virtue, and something worthy of praise in this think….”

Brothers, I was telling you that we stayed at the introduction and on these Sundays we are talking about the importance of the Christian's mental life, we can say it that way, the importance of our mental and emotional life, which I have told you does not sound very spiritual, it doesn't sound like you can constantly say amen, it doesn't sound very stimulating on the surface, but it's one of the key issues, I believe the more I think about these issues, the more convinced I am that God's people have to go to a greater level of depth in terms of our affective life and the mysteries of how God works through his spirit in our life and of that game, that combination, that cooperation that occurs between the human will, the freedom of man and the spirit of God who wants to work in us, on us.

And we were saying that it is important that we become aware of that cooperative relationship between you and the Holy Spirit. Well, sometimes we have the idea that God does everything for us, we simply get on the Gospel train, we go around singing and looking out the window and we forget that God wants us to contribute our part in the conquest of our land. Mentally and emotionally engaged. I am alluding at the same time to that image of Joshua that I have already used with you, in relation to this, I have given you all the land that the sole of your foot can tread on, but see that I command you, says the Lord, that you strive and be brave, alluding there to the importance that there is in man as well, the importance that falls to the individual in his relationship with God. God gives us the victory, God promises us that we have the victory but also asks that we get involved in that fight as the people of Israel had to get involved in the conquest of the promised land.

And last Sunday we talked about the past, and the importance that the past often plays in our spiritual life. I was saying that many of us sometimes live so much in the past that we cannot enjoy the present nor can we correctly interpret the present because our past is coloring it so much, distorting it so much that we hear the voices of the present around us, I said that conscious recording or unaware of past experiences. And then we cannot reach that fullness of life in Christ Jesus, we cannot receive all the blessings that God has for our lives because we are so focused on the past that we cannot see that precious and glorious spiritual present that God has for us.

And as I was saying, many times we want to spiritualize the Gospel too much and we want, as I was saying, to be more Catholic than the Pope, and God is a God who deals with us there in our humanity, God deals with our need, in our reality, and we have We have to be so aware of the importance of our life that we are unaware of things that we are not even aware of. Because? Because I believe that Satan and God, excuse me for using them on a parallel level, but they are the two protagonists in that spiritual drama of the universe. Satan and God see us, not just in terms of what we think we are, nor what we think we feel, but what we really are and feel. And I told them that many times we believe that we are one thing and in reality we are another. Many times the conscious part of our personality is simply a front, it is simply the tip of a very large pyramid, of an immense mountain, and below that tip of our conscious life is all this past and our true feelings. And how easy it is for man, I think man is the most capable being in creation to deceive himself and to believe that he believes something and to believe that what he wants to believe is what it is.

God and the Holy Spirit deal with us in terms of that reality of our life, not in terms of what we have created for ourselves, that sometimes fictitious reality of our being, but in terms of the true reality, what we are feeling. Let me give you an example, resentment. That is one of the things that I believe does the most damage to human beings and that I believe causes the most to stagnate the fluidity, the flow of the Holy Spirit in our lives, and that more effectively prevents the full blessing that God wants us to have. we have in our lives, resentment, grudges.

Those ailments that we have not wanted to get rid of, that so-and-so made us, that the world made us, that friends made us, that life made us, and we are there, with that memory, that memory locked in our hearts, sometimes including the things that our parents did to us or that we believe that they did to us and many times we have not gotten rid of that grudge that is there and we have covered it through the years with pious language and with a series of fictitious images and with a religious formalism, but we have not dealt with it, we have not processed it, we have not confronted it, we have not recognized it for what it is and then what is there, and that by force obscure it and hide it because we do not like the The image that projects us of ourselves, knowing that we have grudges within us, is not compatible with the language of the Gospel, let's say, we hide it and we accumulate dust on it and time passes and we forget about it. that it is there, but that grudge is there and it is affecting our lives, even though we are not aware of it, it is, translating itself in very subtle ways in our dealings with other human beings, in what we expect or do not expect from the church, our I deal with the pastor, our deal with our own children, family, friends, work and that is there, and until you process it and recognize it for what it is and call it by its name, without fear, with total honesty and You say, Lord, truly I have a grudge and there is something there that I have not resolved in my life.

Until you do that, the spirit of God cannot flow with the freedom it wants to flow through the channels of your life, because the spirit of God is energy and we are the conduit of that energy. And when that conduit is obstructed with a knot, be it resentment, be it a poor image of ourselves, be it fear, be it some kind of aggressiveness, or whatever is there, a complex of emotions that are made a knot, that knot is blocking the conduit through which divine energy is supposed to flow and like a pipe that is blocked the water cannot flow smoothly. And then when it comes out, it comes out much weaker than it should and that's why we can't accumulate the power that God has bequeathed to us as his children.

That is why our life is not so blessed, that is why we cannot enjoy those rivers of living water, of which Christ spoke that would flow in all those who believe in him. Because? Because the rivers are there but the pipeline is obstructed, the rivers have nowhere to come out, where to go to the world and bless the world and irrigate humanity and irrigate our own life.

And Satan for his part, he knows there is resentment there, and what does he do? He exploits that resentment, he keeps it stoked continuously, he finds ways through the circumstances of life and our mental and emotional life, and our thoughts raised there, he keeps that resentment alive because he knows that as long as there is resentment in our life, the judgment of God by law, by divine justice has to remain upon us. Or did not Christ say, when you pray forgive those who have offended you. And it says our Father who art in heaven hallowed be your name, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. If I have not forgiven my debtors their debts, the Lord, by law, his word, he respects his word, he cannot forgive mine.

It also says that we forgive so that our prayers are answered. So Satan, seeing the resentment there, is very interested in the resentment remaining and the more hidden it is, the better because then we cannot deal with it. In other words, we have that our spiritual life, the success of our life, the power of our life is largely determined by this analysis that we must continually do, and that is actually what interests me the most about all of this, all aspects of our life.

If I succeed through these sermons that we are preaching, I only plant a concern in you, and that is the only thing that interests me because I believe that these topics are too vast and too complex to hope to cover them in two or three sermons. There are twenty-thousand-year-old schools of psychology and psychoanalysis, of psychiatry, which have specialized in different perspectives of the human personality. I only aspire, brothers, in these sermons to plant a concern in you, that our internal life is much broader and more complicated than what we are used to thinking.

I believe that if you manage to take that restlessness away, I consider that all this that I am preaching has been worth it. If you go home and say, truly I am a more complicated and richer being than I thought, even more treacherous than I thought, and if you begin to see your life in that complex and profound way, From different perspectives I believe that I have already done a great job as a preacher.

I know, again, that many times we want that direct spiritual bread, as I tell you, this type of language does not sound like, but I call it spiritual spinach. This is that food that you need deeper, meditate on it to understand that God is God so deep. Satan, the Lord rebuke him, is also very deep and we are also deep beings. And Satan moves where? In the darkness of our life, in the unrecognized areas of our life. Isn't he the king of darkness? Isn't he the one who moves in those twists and turns, in those hidden places of our existence? Isn't he the one who moves in that fictitious image that we have of ourselves?

Many times when one asks people, or one tells them because their language reveals it and their attitude, brother, sister, I believe that you have to deal with some kind of grudge in your life. Who me? Resentment? No, if I have already forgiven everything, I know what the word says, and they even quote the Our Father and they quote all the verses of the Bible. But when you analyze your life, your behavior, your words and the interweaving of your words, you discover that yes, there is resentment and there are things not forgiven. And there are aspects of life that have been more comfortable, keeping it in the dark, not touching it too much because it causes them too much pain. And so they remain there hostage to the evil force that wants those things to remain.

And my only wish is, brothers, that we understand that I can not only settle for what I think I feel, but that I have to go deeper and truly discover what I am feeling and what are the forces that They are controlling my life. And in all this I told you that the past, brothers, plays such an important role.

Remember those three mechanisms that we discussed: the mechanism that we retain everything that happens in our life at a conscious or unconscious level. The mechanism of repression, we tend to hide and relegate to the alleys and the darkest places of our mind, everything that we do not like or that causes us anxiety or that impoverishes our image of ourselves, or that threatens us in the what we think is our quiet world. And thirdly, he spoke of the transference, that we transfer the feelings of past experiences to our present.

And those are three things that I believe make a terrible lesson for Christians. And I thought about this around our childhood, that it is so important that we become important that those events of our childhood, from 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago that we have already relegated to total darkness and mental banishment, They continue to burn, affecting large dimensions of our life and that these dimensions, the word of God recognizes, that is why I read that passage from Moses, when Moses was placed in this cradle and thrown into the river, that the mother had the insight to plot so that she herself could educate her son the first years of his life.

And what happened? That after those first years of Jewish indoctrination, and it seems that Moses' mother did a good job, after decades of Egyptian, pagan indoctrination, they could not erase from Moses' personality that awareness that he was a Jew and that he he served the living God, Jehovah God, not the pagan Egyptian gods. And that is why when the day came when Moses had already become a man, a prince of Israel, perhaps he had never seen his mother again, I don't know, but Moses saw a Hebrew being abused by an Egyptian and that indoctrination , that teaching of the past, I imagine that it was like a water that rose for a moment to the consciousness of Moses and Moses unconsciously perhaps remembered all that indoctrination, you are a Jew, you belong to the living God, your people are the chosen people of God, he filled you with a living zeal for the Lord and he threw himself on the Egyptian and killed him.

We know well that what he did was unfair and that he was leaving God's time, but the fact is that this training, those first years of Moses' childhood were key in determining his future identity. The Lord is very wise and that is why we have to meditate on what the word says, instruct the child in his path because when he is old he will not depart from it.

Brother, sister, the seed that you plant in the hearts of your children, you have to understand, I have to understand that we are sowing there for eternity.

If you teach your children, if you care that your children eat from the word and receive the spiritual bread and you are that example, that will stay there and that will be at least one word that questions them and worry them and confront them even if they go where they go, you have entered, you have programmed the computer and that computer has to recognize that aspect of your personality.

For us to understand the importance of that childhood formation, those early years, there is a whole branch of psychiatry, psychoanalysis is based on the idea that all mental problems of the human being in adulthood come from the first six years. years of existence, what they call that Oedipal relationship of the Oedipus complex. The first 6 years psychologists say, in the first 5 years 85% of the human personality is already determined. The first 5 years. Parents who have children of 5 years and up, and in those first years, 80, 85% of their personality is already defined. What we have left is 15% that life will polish and perfect or finish distorting.

And if we parents understood that instructing the child in his path not only refers to the word of God but also refers to bad examples, bad words, destructive words, excessive criticism, excessive abuse, all these things. We are there programming our children's computer and in future years they consciously or unconsciously will be working according to that program that we have put into them in those first years of life. Psychologists and psychiatrists say that the prenatal child, that is, in the womb of his mother, already has an affective life. And through hypnosis and other things it has been found that even in the mother's womb it is already receiving stimuli from outside. Let's not even talk about when it comes out. We tend to underestimate the importance of those first two or three years. They go further and even say that the child has an erotic, sexual life even in the first months of existence, and I agree with them to a certain extent, if we correctly define what an erotic life is.

But what I wanted to tell you, brothers, let's never underestimate the importance of a word well said or badly said, of a gesture of rejection, of unjustified abuse, in those first months and years of our children's lives. I brought you here a passage that perhaps some of you have heard before. It is a kind of poem or meditation that reminds us, says:

"...Children learn what they live...", some of you may have read it, being a parent is the most complicated thing in the universe, it is an art that requires continuous study and attention and care and energy and investment of time and us so easy that we can neglect this. And we leave it to the schools and the church and the baby sitters to determine the personality of our children. When we have the privilege during those first years of forming them in the light of the word of God and that requires understanding, it requires wisdom, it requires examples, it requires an investment of energy. But let's not underestimate the importance because that past that is now a present will largely govern their future life.

And I can't find any more perfect manual than the word of God to instruct the father on how to be a proper father and that is why we should not underestimate the importance of that word, because through it we are going to seal our children for the rest of his days.

He says: “… if a child lives in an environment of criticism, he will learn to condemn, this is at 50, 60, 70, 80 years of age. If a child lives with hostility, he learns to fight; if a child lives in fear, he will be fearful; if a child lives near complaining people, he will learn to feel self-pity; if a child lives in an environment where other people make fun of him, he will learn to be shy, if a child lives surrounded by jealousy and quarrels he will learn what envy is, if a child lives with ashamed and marginalized people he will learn to feel guilty, if a child lives with encouragement he will learn to be trusting, if a child lives with people tolerant, he will learn to be patient, if a child receives praise he will learn to appreciate values, if a child lives with those who approve he will learn to be satisfied with himself, if a child feels accepted he will learn to love and if a child receives recognition from others he will learn to set a goal, if a child lives with those who share he will learn to be generous, and if a child lives honestly near him he will learn truth and justice, and if a child lives safely he will learn to have faith in himself and in those around him, if a child lives surrounded by friendship he will learn that the world is a beautiful place to live and finally if his child lives with serenity his child will live with peace in his soul.”

That would constitute a series of meditations there only because that is so true, brothers, experience confirms it, the word of God clearly suggests that the environment and the treatment our children receive will determine their future life and therefore the treatment they receive. we have received in our childhood past, in our childhood formation it will determine our life. There you have a good key to begin your exploration of your own affective life. Do an analysis, when you get home, honestly examine your past life, that childhood, and try to establish how there is concatenation, how there is a fit between that past experience and your attitudes, and you will discover how faithfully there is a relationship between these things.

That is one of the elements that most determines our present, our relationship with our parents. I could suggest other things, the general family environment and finally the discipline that we receive from our parents, simply referring to the home environment. But there are 3 things that are decisive and that we can very well think about without fear, because sometimes we say no, when they tell us, examine your parents, an instinctive rejection of that suggestion immediately arises among us. Because? Because our parents are so tied to our personal relationship, to ourselves to our way of seeing ourselves, to the upbringing of the child that when we are asked to examine our parents with a critical eye, that is, with an impartial eye, we have afraid of what we are going to find out because no parent is perfect.

I am not saying this so that you start condemning your parents, because then the parents fall on me, and they say that the pastor is suggesting to the children that they go against their parents. No, I am not saying that, I am saying that we have to examine our parents, I have to examine my mother, I have to remember the memory of my father, and I have to recognize the defects in them in light of the word of God, not to put them down, nor to love them less, but to understand their humanity and to know what I am. And that is so important that we be aware with love, with confidence, with a freedom in Christ that tells us, my self-esteem, my sense of self-identity does not depend on what my parents are, it depends on my relationship with Christ Jesus.

And then when you are grounded in Christ and you know that your life is Christ-centered, you can then freely and freely analyze your environment around you and see the flaws and cracks in your past and through that then you can start a process of spiritual, mental, and emotional strengthening that will make you a better Christian, a better father, a better friend, a better servant of God.

In what ways does our family past distort us? There are so many ways, brothers, I have written down a few because I did not want them to be forgotten. For example, something as essential in the human being as the sexual identity of the human being, how I conceive myself as a man or a woman. God has programmed us in a way, that is, God has given us a masculine or feminine identity and that is why the sexual liberation of our time depends so much on our removing God from the picture. Once you remove God there is no way for you to prove to anyone that man is born with an inherent nature. But once you have God at the center of existence and you believe that you were created by God, you understand that God has given man a sexual identity.

But that's there as a germ within us, and life and relationship with parents and other things are supposed to develop this and strengthen it and bring it into our awareness. And that then the teaching of our parents and other things strengthen that sexual image that God has placed in us, in a way, in code. But when that relationship with our parents has been distorted in a specific way, that affects our sexual sense. Who am I as a man? Who am I as a woman? And I think that it is definitely not a total coincidence of the fact that as man has been industrializing in developed countries and as the importance of that family formation has been lost or simply according to family circumstances that do not allow parents certain things of teaching and relationship patterns between their children, in the 20th century this liberation has been developing, in quotes, I think more like enslavement of the human being. And there we see homosexuality, lesbianism, all these things that are part of a certain distortion of that identity that God has placed in us.

That is part of the sin. I believe that the human being is affected in others, we are all distorted beings and that is simply one of the manifestations of sin in this world, in our lives, but it is one of them. And we have to understand the importance of this, even how we feel as sexual beings depends in part on our past, our relationship with our parents and other things that are there as well.

Our attitudes toward marriage depend on those relationships as well. If our parties fought continuously and were constantly breaking dishes over each other's heads and we as children saw that, my image of the marriage will be affected in the future by that, and my expectations of what my husband is going to do, or my wife, and how I'm going to treat him and all that stuff, is being programmed by what I see there.

Our attitudes toward authority figures. How many young people live with resentment against the police, against parents, against teachers and live a life of crime and rebellion and all these things, why? Because there in his past his relationship with his parents, who are the highest figure of authority on the human level and in training, was negative. They resent anything that reminds them of authority. And then that can also distort the personality. It doesn't just have to be manifested in grotesque terms of crime, etc. but still as I suggested in our relationship with our superiors at work, in the church, and all these things are determined in part by that past of ours.

Our relationship with God, because if my father was an authoritarian man who repressed my human development and who was constantly there giving me, you are worthless, you are useless, you will never do anything, the child, his image of God begins through your image of your parents, and in particular your dad, because God is your Father and you are telling him, ok, as is my father then… because children are instinctive mathematicians. If God is my father, then my father looks like God and God looks like my father, etc. and there it begins. So if my dad is a scoundrel, then God is also a scoundrel. And then our image of God as an authoritarian being, who always has the whip in his hand, and who is going to cut it off any time I raise my head, often comes from that authoritarian father who did not allow me to develop an image positive of what man is.

Many women have problems giving themselves to their husbands, either sexually or emotionally, because their relationship with their fathers is so distorted that they have forged a destructive image of what the male sex is. And they are already 30, 40 years old and they have problems in their physical relationship with their husbands and in their affective relationship with them, they have to hold back, they are afraid of opening up and confiding their fragility to another human being because they are afraid, because they remember what what happened to them there, what dad did to mom, what dad did to her. And then dad translates into that masculine figure of the husband and they have a hard time. There are many husbands whose relationship with their wives is undermined by their relationship with their mothers. And if your mother was a hoarder and burdened them and stifled them in the development of their masculinity and their independence then they are afraid. Every time his wife comes to hug him or they feel a growing affection with a sense that they need their wife, that memory of mom there suffocating them and covering them makes them feel that way with their tie, they open it and separate, they lie down to On the one hand, they distance themselves, because they are afraid of what that relationship with another woman of love and approach means. And unconsciously they develop a defense as to that.

So, our marriage relationship, our relationship with God, there are attitudes, for example, depression, we know that in some cases, I believe, I am not convinced by the evidence, many times depression can be something physical, some lack of some chemical substance, even there I say, I am not totally convinced of this. But the fact is that depression is due to something affective, many times the depressive attitude of a human being can trace you to a deficient past with the parents, to some parents who killed the self-esteem of that child, who made him feel like that if they did not have their approval, the approval of their parents was worthless and then over the years, when their parents have left the movie, they find themselves alone, they have no orientation, they have no value in themselves.

They were not taught, you are worth it because you are a child of God, you are worth it because you are a divine creature, you are worth it in itself even though your father and your mother left you, Jehovah will pick you up with everything, and you have been taught, no, you you are worth as a projection of us. And then when the parents disappear, or simply when their life changes and they have to become independent and they find themselves like ships without a rudder, like leaves swayed by the wind, they have no sense of direction because they are not grounded in themselves and in God.

And that is why one of the most important things that you as a father, I as a father, must do with our children is tell them, you are worth because you are a child of God, you are worth because Christ dwells within you, you are worth because the spirit of the creator of the universe is within you, you are worth it because God gave his life for you on the cross of Calvary. And even if I die, and even if I disappear, and even if I turn into a monster tomorrow, keep believing that you are worth it because you are a child of God.

And then nothing will be able to separate them from that security, they are founded on Christ. How many women live insecure that if their husbands are no longer going to be able to do anything, and they put up with all kinds of abuse and oppression and shrink so that that other being grows bigger because they have never learned that they have value in themselves and always They have seen that to be complete they have to be married to a man next door. Brothers, I believe in marriage, I believe in the importance and sanctity of marriage and who can speak more about the importance of marriage than me, but what I want to tell you is that a marriage relationship has to be based on the fact that two beings complete in the Lord, sure of themselves because Christ dwells in them, they unite and are there out of love and by an act of his will, not out of dependence, not because if the other half disappears, in quotes, well then, we are incomplete, we are drinking water and trying to stay afloat. No, you are complete because Christ gave his life for you, you are worth a woman, a man, because the Lord has shared his life with you, and because the power of the spirit moves within you.

Low self-esteem, feeling that I am worthless, that I am nobody. I remember a lady, those words always impact me, she told me, brother, and this is a woman who has known the Lord for many years, brother, there are times when I feel like I am worthless in God. I tell you, sister, never repeat those words because first you are dishonoring the Lord, you are denying what God has said, that you are worth to me, I have you carved in the palm of my hand, says the Lord, who it will separate us from the love of Christ. I am with you every day until the end of the world. Jehovah is my shepherd I shall not want.

And when you say I'm worthless, and you have a poor self-image, you are contradicting the very essence of the Gospel. And many times that low self-esteem comes from parents and from a past that taught us, I am worthless, I am simply a projection of circumstances. If people love me, then I'm worth it, if they don't love me, I'm not worth it. And we are continually seeking the approval of the world.

You see that there are people who never dare to take a firm position in their beliefs, and who are like, their yes is not yes and their no is no. It is because they are not grounded in a secure self-esteem and so their self-esteem depends on what so-and-so says. If they love me, then I'm worth it, if they don't love me I'm worth nothing and I commit suicide. When it is so important that you say, no, even if the world is against me, I am going to believe the word of God, I am going to stand here as Martin Luther said, when the entire Roman empire pounced on him. He said, I have believed this and I cannot believe anything else, and it remained there and changed the history of the world.

The men and women who impact their environment are those who are grounded in a certainty that they are worth themselves. You are not worth what others say about you, nor what others think of you, nor what your parents did or did not do in your life. You are worth it because Christ is your rock, Christ is the foundation of your life and you have to tell yourself that 24 hours a day.

That is why it is so important, for the rest, brothers, everything that is true, everything honest, everything just, everything pure, everything kind, everything that is of a good name, if there is any virtue, if something worthy of praise on this think. That is, when you tend to feel depressed and sad and that you are worthless and that the world is against you, you counteract that with a positive dose of the word of God, of the divine promise. And when the world and the devil want to say to you, you are worthless if your parents didn't even love you, you tell them, well, maybe, when I was in the world that was true, but the word of God says, yes someone is in Christ a new creature is. Old things have passed away, behold, all are made new. Now I am worth it because Christ has updated his life within me and I no longer depend on what the world, my parents, have done or not done, but my life is founded on Jesus Christ.

The summary of all this is that, let us make Christ Jesus the center of our life. Let us be clear that our life is founded on it, that my value as a human being does not have to be governed by my past, it does not have to be governed by what others have done to me, it does not have to be governed by what the world makes me Let's not be victims of circumstances. Let's not be like those leaves rocked by the circumstances of our life. Our anchor is Jesus, our anchor is the word of God. My own identity depends not on what the world tells me that I am, but on what the word of God tells me that I am.

And may the Lord move our hearts that if there is any sense of sadness or any sense of resentment or something that is not resolved in our life, brothers I ask you on this day, why don't you start where you are, looking towards inside for a second and saying Lord, I acknowledge that yes, there are areas that I have to address.