October 18-19, 1997 Sermon

October 18-19, 1997

Carolyn Slaughter

How Did I Get Here?
You know all of us want to be big. In some way we want to be big but how many of us really grow up? Do you remember the movie "Big?" One of my very favorite movies. Tom Hanks plays the part of a little guy that was just yearning to be big, and much to his surprise, he woke up and his wish had been granted. There he was, a ten year old trapped in an adult body. Let’s see how that worked.

Scene from the movie "Big" in which Tom Hanks is "caught" by the owner of the toy store he works for while playing laser tag with the other kids in the store.

Most of us feel like kids in adult skin. Did you ever have those times like I do where you kind of blank out, you kind of forget where you are. You start feeling the pressure of the test upcoming or a paper you’ve forgotten to write and all of a sudden you jolt yourself and say, "Thank God I am not in school anymore. I’m an adult." But how did I get here? I have kids now that are in high school and college. What happened?
It went so fast. I still feel like I did when I was 15. Because of that most of us feel really unprepared for a lot of the aspects of adult life. You know it seems like yesterday I was doing the tango around our living room, poised on my Uncle Orville’s feet. Did all of you do that? Did you stand on somebody’s feet and dance? But the scary thing is now, I’m leading the dance. Wow!
You know, it’s a natural process for us to grow physically. Our body just does that. It doesn’t need any help from us. In fact, sometimes it grows in spite of us! I can remember when I was in my twenties and getting ready for work one day. I looked in the mirror and this thing was coming up out of my head! It was wiry and white and I thought, ‘Oh, my first gray hair!" I’m telling you, I got rid of it real quick. It was gone. But the problem was that my body kept producing those gray hairs whether I wanted it to or not, whether I told it to or not.

Ephesians 4:13-15
13: until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ;
14: so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their craftiness in deceitful wiles.
15: Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ,

Growing spiritually and emotionally and mentally should also be a natural process for us. You know what? We’re designed that way. If you have your Bibles with you, would you turn to the book of Ephesians, Chapter 4, in the New Testament, one of the little guys in the back. In verses 13 - 15, God spells out what he wants us to be like. What I’m reading is from "The Message." "We’re all moving rhythmically and easily with each other. Efficient and graceful in response to God’s son, fully mature adults, fully developed within and without, fully alive like Christ. No prolonged infancies among us, please! We’ll not tolerate babes in the woods, small children who are an easy mark for impostors. God wants us to grow up, to know the whole truth, and to tell it in love, like Christ, in everything."
So is it not obvious that God wants us to grow? He spells it out really well. But the difference between natural growth and spiritual growth is that our spiritual growth is up to us. We can either initiate it or we can stop it cold, right in its tracks. We are in the driver’s seat.

I. Getting Stuck
Now when we talk about being trapped in an adult body, sometimes we feel like that spiritually, don’t we? Because somewhere along the line, our growth has been stunted. What happens when we have our growth stunted? We have to recognize that because we live in a screwed up world, not the world God wanted for us, and we live with other flawed people, we’re going to experience some things. We’re going to experience hurt, we’re going to experience disappointment, we’re going to experience loss. We’re also going to experience the lack of guidance that we want. As a result we may choose to shut down in that area and just close ourselves off. In other words, we get stuck as a little kid in that area. Bottom line, none of us are exempt from this. We’re all going to get stuck somewhere at some point in our lives.
I may be hurt by someone, and so I shut down my relationships. I won’t let anybody get close to me, even God. Or, I may be disappointed because I had goals for myself. I know where I wanted to be and what I wanted to do, academically or maybe in sports. That did not happen, so maybe I’m trying to live that out through my kids.
We’ve all seen this, right? We’ve all been there: on a soccer field, watching two teams made up of eleven-year-olds going at it, down to the last minute. It’s tied, a little guy runs across the field, kicks the shot on goal and it goes in. The goal keeper collapses, just dying inside of himself. Everybody clears the field. The little goal keeper is still in the goal; and what happens? We see a man running across the field, and we hope he is going to say, "Son, it’s okay?" No, instead we hear "Son, what did you do? You missed your chance! What happened here? You let down the team! What’s going on?" An emotionally ten-year-old dad coaching an eleven-year-old child. We’ve all been there, we’ve all seen it.
You know, sometimes we don’t have people available to guide us through our childhood. When we reach adulthood we still have some really deep things going on inside of us. Some really deep needs, and in some we’re driven to fill those or we can’t function. So we choose addictive behavior, false things to fill those needs. We all know what we’re talking about. You can choose your poison. But, we fill up in the wrong way.
Or what about if we’ve lost someone we really love, someone so close to us, so we go into adulthood so angry with God and so resentful we’re stuck right there. Just like Peter Pan, deep down inside of us there is a little voice yelling, "I don’t want to grow up. This is too hard." But on the other hand, we have another voice inside of us saying, "I designed you to be." There’s a yearning for us to be everything we were created to be. So we live in tension. When we get stuck, for many of us, life just goes on, and on, and on, going from one day to the next, just living life, just an existence. We work to keep doing what we’ve always done, making the same mistakes all over again because we’re stuck. Sometimes it literally feels like we’re going insane, especially if we define insanity as "doing the same things over and over and over again, but expecting the result to be different."
I say, "We’ve got to stop the insanity." It’s time to grow up! We can all choose to do that.
Last year there was a big thing about Charles Barkley not wanting to be a role model - do you remember that? He was interviewed and asked how he felt about being a role model for American children and he went ballistic. He said "I’m not a role model. I don’t want to be a role model. I will never be a role model. I don’t want to have to live my life by the fact that people are watching me and copying after me." Well, Charles, whether you want it or not, you are a role model. When you’re in the public eye, people watch and they copy.

II. Growing Up
Well, Church, even though we may sit there and say, ‘I don’t want to grow up. I don’t want to be an adult.’ Guess what? Whether we like it or not, we are adults. We need to face the fact and do what it takes to be successful at that. Growing up begins with a decision. That decision is to cooperate with God. God set in motion a process when we entered into a relationship with Him.

Romans 8:29
29: For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren.

That process was revealed in Romans 8:29. "God knew what He was doing from the very beginning. He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love Him into the likeness of His Son."
So, what is that saying? We’re to grow into the likeness of Christ. We are to become as Jesus is. By the end of our life, we should be able to meet Jesus and greet him, and it would be like a mirror reflection, face to face. That’s scary, isn’t it? That’s overwhelming because none of us feel like we are worthy of that, none of us feel like we can own up to that, and yet that is what God designed for us. That was His original design. It’s scary, it’s overwhelming, and yes, it will take a lifetime. But the good news is, God’s going to work on us. He’s going to refine us and change us to meet His original design so that we have that yearning inside of us met--we are becoming everything he designed us to be.
Here’s more good news. Our responsibility is only to cooperate with God. His responsibility is to be the change agent to do the work in our lives. So we come down to the bottom line. Change is good. Change is to be desired.
So, what does a grown up look like on the inside? We’ve decided now we’re going to change. What’s going to start happening as we mature?

Embrace Your Experience
First of all, a grown up learns to embrace every experience as part of our growth process. That means that we are going to enjoy the moment, savor the moment, fully participate in the experience. Within that, we’re going to look for God’s presence there, because God is there, in the midst of everything that goes on in our lives. And we also need to say, "God, what are you trying to teach us through this?" So, what I need to say is: this concept applies not only to experiences that we define as positives. Sometimes, we have experiences that we would define as negatives. I went through a whole litany of those. Somewhere God is in them, and He wants us to learn from everything that happens in our lives. What we need to do is agree that we’re going to participate in that experience with Him. Too often we try and just get through the experience. It’s like, if I grit my teeth, I’ll get through this and I’ll get on to the next thing. However, we totally miss what God has for us there. Or, if it is what we would define as a negative experience, we say we don’t want to deal with this, we shut down and we get stuck right there.
I talked about bringing baggage into our adult life, things from our childhood. So that means that sometimes we need to deal with those past experiences. If we’re stuck, we need to deal with where we’re stuck and get on with it. If we shut off the past and don’t deal with it, we’re going to keep doing the same things over and over again, and the past will control us. Whatever we’ve been set up to do by our past, that’s going to determine what our future is. In other words, we’ve gotten ourselves hooked and we can’t lift ourselves off that hook. So we tend to use the past as a crutch or as an excuse, like, "Well, that’s just the way I am." And we fall into the same addictive behaviors. When we choose to deal with the past we’re going to break it’s control over us, and we’re going to be able to enter into what God has planned for us in the future. He has all kinds of new possibilities. We need to see them so we don’t have to do the same things over and over again. Let’s do some of the new things.
What does this mean, to embrace your past experiences? It means to go back and revisit that experience; however, with one big exception. We revisit it with God. We take Him along with us, and we ask Him as we’re revisiting that experience to show us, "What did you intend for me in this situation? What did you want from me? What did you want to teach me from it?" Because I don’t want to keep dealing with the same things. I want to get on.
Well, one experience I remember is being a young teen and being very unsure of myself. I was a very insecure teen. I never really knew that I was good stuff. At one point, I had a question in my mind that I needed resolved. I looked around and chose a male relative to ask because I thought, "He’ll tell me the truth because he loves me." Well, I got a little bit more truth from him than I wanted. My question for him was, "Am I pretty?" His answer to me was "Yea, pretty ugly, and pretty apt to stay that way." I thought, ooh. Well, you can imagine the shame, the embarrassment, the humiliation that I went through, and I made a decision about myself at that point.
When I began my adult life, I couldn’t believe that anybody would really think that I was good stuff. I shut Michael and our relationship down. And when I was forced by this wonderful husband of mine to do Bible studies because he saw my spiritual gifts, how I would die. I would just die standing in front of people, because I was the object of attention and I knew people were making judgments on me. So, for years after I was done teaching I would have to call somebody and they’d have to pull me up, build me back up because of the shame I was experiencing after the teaching. It came to a point where I was just not going to use my spiritual gifts at all. It was just too painful. How my life was impacted by what I chose to believe about myself based on one comment.
Well, you know, God is good. God doesn’t like for us to be stuck, so He works with us and shows us things. When He said it was time to deal with my issues, He said, "You know where all this junk is coming from?" And he pointed at my memory, at that experience, and he said, "Come on, come on, we’ll go back and I’ll be there with you." And when I allowed Him to help me revisit that time, I started seeing the experience through His eyes.
What I saw was a wounded little boy trapped in an adult body. A wounded little boy that had never gotten affirmation for himself while growing up. He didn’t know what to do with this lack of affirmation, so his solution was to just joke his way out of it. For him, his response to me was a joke, never realizing the impact on my life. When I saw it through his eyes, I could say, "I forgive you. I understand. It’s okay." Then I let go of that experience, giving it to God. And do you know what? I made another decision about myself at that point, not based on what I was hearing from anybody but God and I became free to do what God called me to do.
So, as grown ups we have to choose honesty. We have to choose vulnerability. We have to choose being real about who we are and we need safe space to do that. Each of us does. The only way we’re going to get unstuck is to be honest and face ourselves, but we need people standing around us who will go through it with us. That can be a spouse, that can be a friend, it can be a small group. Our small group has been wonderful, foundational in our growth. It can be a counselor--but somewhere we have to get to that point where we are honest and vulnerable enough that we can start developing real relationships. That’s when the support system starts flowing. That’s where the guilt and the shame that many of us carry from our childhood can be given up and released. By letting go of the past, giving it to God and realizing it’s okay now, that past no longer has control. Think about the words of the song that the band just did. "Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow. Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone."
That doesn’t mean the past didn’t happen. It happened. But, the effects are no longer holding me. Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow because it will soon be here. Don’t let tomorrow pass us by, because we’re stuck. We choose to enter God’s future. We get rid of the effects of the past and we choose to enter God’s future and all He has for us.

Take Responsibility
So, as adults, not only do we embrace our experiences but we learn to take responsibility for ourselves. For me, that is probably the primary characteristic of a grown up person. I take responsibility for my decisions, my behavior. So often, we make excuses, we rationalize, "Well, I’ll change when my spouse changes. I’ll change when my job situation improves. I’ll change when my health improves. I’ll change when the Bengals win the Super Bowl." Now there’s a guarantee for never changing, right?
As an adult, we have responsibility for doing the hard stuff. We can’t skirt around things or have somebody do something for us like we do for kids. We get unstuck by doing what it takes to grow versus living in apathy. Just same old same old. This is an area where we operate out of the "want to." Remember last week? We want to. Not because it feels good. This is an area where we operate out of obedience to God, regardless if it’s convenient.
This is called "character." Remember the definition from last week? Character is the ability to carry out my decision long after the mood in which it was made is over. Change and growth don’t just happen like gray hair. They begin with a decision.
You know what? I wasted years waiting on someone else to step in and make it better. Years. My wake up call was when Michael and I basically had bottomed out. Our relationship was basically non-existent. It got to the point where it was impacting everything, including our physical health.

Freely Serve Others
One fall, the church decided to send us to Florida for some R & R (Rest and Relaxation). I was grasping at anything, anything that would solve this problem. One afternoon, while Michael was taking a nap, I sat down, just kind of vegging out in front of the TV. When I turned the TV on, it was on a Christian station and it was on a show that I choose usually not to watch. But, before I could surf onto another channel, the female host captivated me. It was like eye-to-eye contact. Not only her eyes caught me, it was like she was broadcasting to no one else. No one else. I was the only one in the world. Her words captivated me, challenged me. Do you know what her words were? "So, is this the way you want to live the rest of your life? Then do something about it!" Those were the words. Well, I chose to do something about it. I chose to take the steps it takes to grow.
Only we can choose to love God, to allow Him to transform us, to change us. It is up to us. I’m going to say something to you, to those of you sitting here who are stuck. "So, is this the way you want to live the rest of your life? Then do something about it."

III. The Yes Prayer
What can we do? It all starts with the word "yes." "Yes" sets God’s motion in process, that process that He designed from the beginning of time--that we would look like Jesus. Yes. God wants to hear that word because He’s not going to strong arm us. He’ll let us go along in apathy as long as we want to. He’s not going to wrestle us to the ground.

Deuteronomy 7:21-24
21: You shall not be in dread of them; for the Lord your God is in the midst of you, a great and terrible God.
22: The Lord your God will clear away these nations before you little by little; you may not make an end of them at once, lest the wild beasts grow too numerous for you.
23: But the Lord your God will give them over to you, and throw them into great confusion, until they are destroyed.
24: And he will give their kings into your hand, and you shall make their name perish from under heaven; not a man shall be able to stand against you, until you have destroyed them.

In Deuteronomy 7:21-24 we have God talking to his people. He’s telling them what’s going to happen when they enter into this land that He promised to give them. What he says is that you’re going to have enemies. Those enemies will try and overpower you and they will try and stop you, but I will conquer your enemies. But, one thing you need to know is, I’m not going to conquer them all at once. No, God knew His children needed the learning process, to have everything take hold.
So, one by one, He would conquer those kings that they would be facing, and eventually they would have the entire promised land. Well, God says to his children today, "I have a promised land for you. I have a design for you that will fit because that’s the way you were created. It’s the only way you’re going to be satisfied and fulfilled. There will be enemies that come up against you that try and stop that. There will be times when you get hurt (that’s an enemy) and you tend to get stuck. You shut down." What God is saying is, "I could transform you in a minute, like that, and make you in the image of Jesus; but kid, you need the learning process. So, one by one, I will conquer your enemies, to the point where you will be living in your promised land"--and, it starts with the word yes.
There is no instant spiritual maturity. Spiritual maturity is not our goal. Our goal is transformation, changed lives, through an intimate relationship with God through Jesus Christ. That means seeking him. That means living in his presence. That means allowing Him to be with you in every experience. Spiritual maturity is the by-product of that. It’ll happen, but only when we’re living in the presence of God. So we work with God, one step at a time. Isn’t that reassuring to know that (1) we don’t have to do it, and (2) we take it one step at a time?

Philippians 1:6
6: And I am sure that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.

And then, we’ll look back and see the transformation of what God’s done in our lives. Sometimes when I feel real stuck and I get discouraged and I think I’m not going anywhere, God will hit me over the head with something from his word. Philippians 1:6 is one of those scriptures for me. "You know, there has never been the slightest doubt in my mind, that the God who started this great work in you would keep at it and he would bring it to a flourishing finish on the very day Christ Jesus appears." When we come face to face with Jesus, if we have allowed God to do His work in our lives, if we’ve made the hard decisions, if we’ve faced what we need to face, we will look at Jesus like we’re looking in a mirror.
God’s going to do it in us, but the process begins and continues with saying yes to God. It’s how we "do something about it." I want you to close your eyes and get in touch with an area where you’re stuck, where you know you need to move forward, but you’re just kind of on hold. If you’re in touch with where you’re stuck, I’m going to ask you again: "So, is this the way you want to live the rest of your life?" If you want to do something about it, I’d like for you to bow your head and pray this prayer along with me. I’ll say it for you, but in your heart, agree with it.
"Yes, Lord. This is who I am. I’m making no attempt to deny it, God. This is where I’m stuck. Yes, Lord, I recognize who you are and your rightful place in my life. God, I need you to enter my stuck places in order to free me. Only you, and you alone, have the power to shape my life into the likeness of Jesus. I cannot do it myself. Yes, Lord, do as you will. I give you permission to do your work, and I will cooperate with you in changing me." Amen.