Own It | Cheat Code Part 2

Hey, if we haven't had a chance to meet yet, my name's Ryan. I have the honor of serving here as lead pastor and just want to say welcome home to those of you that might be here for the first time, kind of kicking the tires, seeing what we're all about. Love and appreciate you so much for being here today. Before we jump in, hey, let's give a quick shout out to our Liberty Directional family that's watching today. Hey, we love you guys, we appreciate you, praying for you. Such a blessing to be able to partner, not just with what God is doing in this community, but also regionally, and what an honor to be able to be in Liberty Correctional every single week. And I had the opportunity to go be a part of one of their services a few weeks back, and it was just, it was amazing. I'm gonna tell you, I'm just gonna be, this isn't even in my notes, I'm just gonna, it was just, it was such a moment that brought me back to why I do what I do. And not on a platform talking, I'm talking about living my life for Jesus and trying to share what Jesus has done in my life with others. And I would, if you're feeling any bit dry in your faith, you need to go be a part of one of those services. I promise you, I promise you, you won't regret it. So you can tap the dot on the C back in front of you and do the Connect card there

and express some interest in that, and we'll follow up with you and get you started along the way. But we are in week two of a series that we've called Cheat Code. And I don't know what your background is with gaming, mine's kinda eh, but whether you are old school gamer, whether you're a new school gamer, or just kinda eh, I'm not sure about gamer, you're probably familiar with the phrase Cheat Code. A Cheat Code is essentially a sequence of things that you kinda punch into your remote that unlocks some levels that you wouldn't normally be able to go to. Sometimes it'll even get you unstuck from levels that you can't get past. You know, a Cheat Code will help you be able to get to the next phase in the game. And here's what I know is that without a Cheat Code, oftentimes we can be stuck in whatever level we find ourself in. And you know, I think that that idea of Cheat Code, the idea of being stuck and kinda walking through the same thing over and over again in our life, it's not just a video game thing, it's a life thing. It's something that you and I oftentimes experience in our life, like we're stepping into a new year and we're thinking, right, different year, but six months from now, it's the same struggle.

Or we're thinking different relationship, but it keeps ending the same way. Or we're thinking different season in our life, but we keep carrying the same issues into every new season. And if you're anything like me, you find those seasons incredibly frustrating. And the reason why they're frustrating is because it's not like you haven't tried to do something different. It's not like you haven't tried to fix the situation. You've probably prayed about it. You've probably promised a lot of people that you would do something different. You've probably even told yourself, like, I'm never going to do this again. And then what happens? You find yourself right back there again. And so it kind of begs the question that this whole series is framed around. And the question is, how do we make sure that next time is different than last time? How do we make sure the next relationship, the next job we take, the next big decision we make, how do we make sure next time is different than last time? And so we've been looking into God's Word because God's Word's got some biblical cheat codes and they're not there to just inspire us. They're there to help us to break the patterns off of our life that continue to repeat and to cycle again and again and again.

Last week, we looked at, as we kicked off the series, we looked at three dangerous assumptions that really all of us can have in our life. And it was the foundation of where we're going over the four weeks of the series. I'd encourage you that if you didn't get a chance to be here last week, to make sure and check out our YouTube channel. You can catch that sermon, you can catch other sermons, but today what I want to do is I want to talk to you about the first of three things that last week I said were non-negotiables. Like if we want next time to be different than last time, then the three things that we're going to talk about over the next three weeks, the three parts of the series are really non-negotiables. Today, the one that I want to talk to you about is one that not many of us are going to like, but it's one that we all need. I want to talk to you about the importance of owning our past, the importance of owning our piece of our past. So if you're taking notes today, I've entitled today's message Own It, and we're going to be looking at Genesis, the book of Genesis today, so you can begin to make your way there. Let's pray. Father, we thank You for the time that we've had together with You so far today, and Lord, now as we step into this moment with Your Word, Father, we pray that You would open our hearts. Father, I pray that any kind of wall that we may try to erect because of past mistakes or hurts or disappointments, Lord, I pray that Your precious Holy Spirit would help us to have just an open mind over the next time, next 30 minutes or so. Lord, speak to us. Lord, help us so that next time doesn't have to be like last time, in Jesus' name, amen. Book of Genesis.

Book of Genesis, first book of the Bible, and I want to show you, I want to kind of let you off the hook just a little bit this morning that as we step into this idea of owning it, the struggle that all of us have to own our piece of the past, it's not a modern problem. Like, it's not something that social media has created. It's not something that has happened in our lives because of something our parents did or because of an ex or anything like that. It's a human problem. The challenge to own our piece of the past is a human problem, and it started from the beginning of time. And that's why the book of Genesis is so important for us to look at and pay attention to because it doesn't just tell us how the world began, but it explains why we keep doing the same things over and over again in our life. See, the book of Genesis chapter 1 starts off and God is creating the heavens and the earth, creating all things. One of the things that He creates is Adam and Eve, and He blesses them, is what the Bible says. He blesses them and He puts them in charge of everything that they could possibly see, and He gives them one command. He gives them one command, and that one command, it doesn't matter if you've been in church, haven't been in church. It doesn't matter if you believe in God, you don't believe in God. It's the one command in all of Scripture that nobody has any problem following. It's the command of be fruitful and multiply. Nobody's got a problem with that. I mean, and so think about the gig that Adam and Eve have here. They're in charge of everything, right? All they got to do is be fruitful and multiply, and God gives them one rule. He's like, listen, you can have all of this stuff, like it's going to be great, it's going to be amazing, just one thing, one rule, and we see in Genesis chapter 2 what they do with

the only rule that was given to them. In Genesis chapter 2 verse 15, it says that the Lord God placed the man in the garden of Eden to tend and to watch over it. Verse 16 says, but the Lord God warned them, you may freely eat the fruit of every tree in the garden except the tree of knowledge of good and evil. If you eat its fruit, you're sure to die. I mean, think about this for just a second, like they had everything at their fingertips. They could do whatever they wanted to do, and God's saying, all I'm asking is just don't eat the fruit off of that one tree that's right over there. And what I'm asking is just don't eat the fruit off of that one tree that's right over Adam and Eve do. They do the same thing we do. They do the exact opposite of the one thing that they were told not to do. And think about this. God had everything structured and built the way that he wanted. He gave one rule to Adam and Eve and they broke it. And when they broke it, what ended up happening is sin enters the world. And as sin enters the world, something gets messed up, not just in Adam, but it gets messed up in us. And I think what we're gonna notice and what we're gonna see over our time together today is that the sin that entered the world didn't just change what humans did, but it also began to change how humans saw. You see, as we skip forward to Genesis chapter three, we see what happens. It says in verse eight,

that when the cool evening breezes were blowing, that the man and his wife heard the Lord God walking about in the garden, and so they hid from the Lord among the trees. Again, why are they hiding? Because they broke the one rule. They disobeyed and the very next thing that they do after they disobey is they hide. Now, you and I, we do the same thing when we sin. Our guilt, the shame that we feel, the fear of being found out, all of that causes us, it leads us to hide, to withdraw. We hide from, we're not hiding behind trees like Adam and Eve in the garden, but we hide behind some other things. Like one of the things that we hide from is God. And when we make mistakes, when we fall short, when we sin, we begin to pull back. All right, here's how we hide from God. We begin to pull back from church. We begin to pull back from being a part of our small group. We begin to pull back from serving. We also begin to hide from people, the ones that care about us the most. We begin to hide from our spouse. We begin to hide from our kids. We begin to hide from our parents. We begin to hide from our friends, the ones that want the best for us. We begin to hide from even parts of our story,

the parts of our story that we're the most ashamed of. And how do we hide? We just begin to dismiss the parts of the story that we played a part in. We began to create excuses for the reason why we did what we did, and what happens is, is when we finally get caught, we say, I'm sorry. But deep down, we all know that the apology that we give, that it's not an apology about ownership, of owning what we've done wrong, it's all about exposure. And what we've got to see this morning is that this pattern that it didn't start with us, that it started with Adam and Eve, but it certainly shows up in all of us. And so God goes on, and in verse nine, it says that then the Lord God called to the man. He's like, where are you? And I think that's kind of funny, because it's not like God needed the Life 360 app in order to be able to find Adam and Eve. I mean, my man's all knowing, like he knows exactly where they're at. And he's like, where are you? And I think it's important for us to recognize in this verse that God's not trying to locate where Adam and Eve are, he's trying to liberate them. He's trying to pull them out of the shame and the guilt that is causing them to hide in their life. Now, I want to stop here, and I want to point something out that could be easy for us to miss.

Think about this, like Adam and Eve, they didn't just lie. They didn't just cheat. I mean, the sin that they committed messed up the rest of humankind for all the days until Jesus comes back. Like, I mean, it was a pretty big deal. And yet, what does God do? God goes looking for them. He's not looking for them to punish them. He's not looking to them to try to bring guilt or condemnation. He's looking for them to liberate them from the results of the decision that they made. And I just want to point out to somebody today that I don't know what you did last night. You may have come into this place and you're still hung over from what happened last night. And if so, awesome. Awesome. Like, awesome. Maybe today you're struggling with decisions that you made last week. Maybe this week you're struggling with decisions that you've made that you have not been able to get out of the cycle. And you're fully aware of all the pain and all the hurt that it is creating in the circle of those that care about you the most. And that guilt and that shame is causing you to continually retreat and retreat and retreat. And here's what I want to say to you today.

There is nothing that you can possibly do that would be any worse than what Adam and Eve did. And if God was willing to go and to walk up on them in the garden while they were hiding behind trees, he's certainly willing to walk up on you in the middle of your mess and your hurt and your shame, not to punish you, but to bring love and to liberate you. Watch how Adam responds. Watch how Adam responds at verse 10. So God's asking the question, right? He's asking the question, where are you? He said, I heard you walking in the garden and here's Adam talking to God, so I hid. I was afraid because I was naked. So he's hiding instead of owning, right? In verse 11, God says, who told you you were naked? The Lord God said, have you eaten from the tree whose fruit I commanded you not to eat? Again, God already knows the answer to that. He already knows. And then look at this, this is so moving. Look at what Adam says in verse 12. He says, yes, I did. And I take full responsibility for my actions. Do with me as you will, but leave Eve out of it. She's innocent. Some of you are like, why is everybody laughing at the scripture? Because that ain't scripture. That's the PRV version, the Pastor Ryan version right there.

Totally bogus. I mean, Adam did not say that, although he probably should have. He didn't say that. Here's what really happened. In the real verse 12, here's what really happened. Adam replied, it was the woman. The woman that you gave me who gave me the fruit and I ate it. Who does Adam blame here? He blames Eve, but have you ever noticed that's not all Adam blames? He blames Eve, but he also blames God. He's like, you're the one that gave this woman to me. Like, what am I supposed to do, right? He's blaming the woman and he's blaming God. What's interesting about what we're seeing here in the text is that it was true. It just wasn't entirely true. Like, what Adam was saying was true, but it just wasn't entirely true. And so, what Adam was saying was true, and isn't that what we do? That when things fall apart in our lives, when we make decisions or something happens to us and it just, things begin to fall apart, whatever it is, that what we tend to do is we tend to tell a story that is mostly true. It's just not entirely true. Eve does the same thing, verse 13, the Lord God asked the woman, like, what have you done?

The serpent deceived me, right, blaming the serpent. That's why I ate the fruit. It was true, but it wasn't entirely true. See right here in these first few pages of the Bible, we see something that really still defines us, it still plagues us today, that sin didn't just break our relationship with God, but it also broke our willingness to take responsibility for our part. Listen, this is super important, super important for you and for me. If we want next time to be different than last time, we have to understand that we cannot blame our way into a better future. We can blame our way into the future, but we can't blame our way into a better future. And here's the reason why, is blame smuggles our old issues into new seasons. What does smuggling mean? It means that we're carrying something into a place that it doesn't belong. And when something happens to us, we have a tendency to blame everybody else that was involved but ourselves. And when we do that, that blaming causes us to smuggle the same patterns and the same cycles in our life from one season to the next season. So what ends up happening is we end up carrying the same bad habits from one season into another season. We start carrying the same bad attitudes, the same assumptions that we have, right? It's called the victim mentality where there's never a part of it that we own. It's always somebody else and what somebody has done to us. We end up bringing the same dysfunction from one season to another, the same poor relationship decisions into another, the same poor decision-making, the same pride, the same unresolved mommy and daddy issues we bring from one season into another season. And we just continually take all of these old issues in our life into new seasons hoping that things will be different. A friend of next time has any chance of being different than last time, then we have to stop and we have to ask the question that all of us, including myself, try to avoid. The question is, what was my part?

What was my part? And then as we ask that question, then we got to own it. Whatever our part was, we have to own it. Now before I show you how we own it, I want to, I want to tell you why owning it matters so much. You see, when you and I own our piece of the past, what it begins to do is it begins to drop the emotional temperature in our life. I mean, think about it. When you don't own it and you're constantly blaming, then the temperature rises, right? You're always kind of like running hot and that temperature shows up different for different people. Like some people, they're agitated, they're aggressive, there's anger, there's bitterness. For some people, they just shut down, they harden their heart, they withdraw. It shows up differently for different people, but it is a result of the emotional temperature in our life being high because everything about our life where we're constantly blaming other people in order to give ourselves excuses for the decisions we've made. decisions that we've gotten ourself into. And all of us know this to be true, including myself. All of us know this to be true, that we make really bad decisions when we're running hot. We don't make good decisions running hot. We make bad decisions. And so as long as we're hiding, as long as we're blaming other people, as long as we're smuggling parts of our story into our future, what it ends up doing is it ends up causing our vision, our vision for God, our vision for the future, our vision for the decisions that we have to make, it begins to make our vision foggy. And this is the reason why it's so important. If you're married in the room, hear me. If you ever want to be married, hear me. As a spouse, your responsibility when your spouse is going through a difficult season that somebody else had something to do with, your responsibility is not to jump on the

blame bandwagon. Your responsibility is to be an offset to the emotions that they're feeling at the time. The most, the most pain and dysfunction and bitterness and all of that that I've seen as a pastor in 26 years when it comes to relationships has always generated out of a married family us two spouses that keep carrying each other's offenses everywhere that they go. Like your job is to offset. When I'm running hot, Andrea's like, well, babe, maybe that's not what they meant, right? You have no idea what they went through, no idea, like, like none of that stuff. She helps offset that. She takes when I'm running hot and I'm not able to make good decisions and she helps me to be able to see it beyond what I'm seeing it. And friends, if you want to be a good friend, if you want to be a friend that's going to help the person that you care about, like really thrive in life, you're not going to jump on the bandwagon of blame. You're going to be a friend that helps them see outside of the narrow perspective that their blame and their pain is creating in the moment. That's why Jesus says this in Matthew chapter 5 verse 8. He says, God blesses those whose hearts are pure. The result of the blessing on our life when our hearts are pure is that we will see God. In other words, what Jesus is saying here is that there is a direct connection between purity and clarity. The more, the more honest we are about our past and the part that we play in our past, the clearer we begin to see things for the future. Which means when, when we're not owning our part, when we're constantly kind of, kind of, there's something, you know, there, things that we don't own, like, like something that we're protecting, something that we're excusing in our life, something that we're constantly blaming somebody else for, we don't just lose peace when we do that. We lose perspective. We lose our ability to be able to see clearly. And friend, without clarity, without the ability to be able to see clear, next time

starts to look a lot like last time. And so, I want to, I want to show you how we do this real quick. And I want to give you an exercise for you to, for you to take and you to do at home this week, an exercise that will help give you kind of some handles on, on how you take a message like this and begin to walk it out in your life. And so, what I want you to do is I want you to, at home, I want you to take a piece of paper and I want you to draw a circle. And it would be a circle kind of like what you'll see up here on the screen. And I call this kind of the circle of blame. So whatever the issue is in our life, whatever we're navigating in, in our life, this circle of blame represents everything that has contributed toward. that thing. Now there are a few situations that some of you may have walked through that you have absolutely nothing to do with and I'm gonna I'm gonna talk more about what you do with that in the upcoming weeks but I want to I want to unpack real quick what we do with it when there's something that we have contributed we there's some part that we have played in it you see if we want next time to be different then we've got to we got to kind of own our part and so you're gonna draw a circle and and so you know there's there's the the the cases where the circle kind of looks like this next one here it's it's you know half of it is their fault half of it is our fault I'll be honest like nobody does this like nobody says like it was half my fault half their fault and the reason why there's no story there like when we tell our story we typically want people to come on to our bandwagon right and they want to carry our offense and oh you were justified to make that decision and this this does not create that like at all and so so maybe maybe it's not 50-50 you know some of us might do this one where it's like okay it's 25% me 75 you know percent them like I'll own the 25% but if you really think about it like we rarely ever even do that right it it always kind of if we're gonna own anything it always kind of looks like like the next one it's like it's like all of the oranges everything that they have it's it's my boss's fault the teachers fault

my parents fault X's fault like they did this they did that right you know they they kept promising raises and never gave me one you know they fired me they talked about me behind my back like it's it's all of these things and and but there might be just like a little a little bitty bitty sliver of what we say would be our part and and whether it's small or whether it's a little bit bigger here's here's what we have to realize is that the only way for you to make peace with your past is by owning your piece of the past the only way for you to make peace with your past is by owning your piece of the past and here here's here's what I've learned is that the more painful the story is in our life the more painful all that orange is of what somebody else has done though the more extreme the story the more emotions that are connected to the story the less likely you and I are to own our part the less likely we are to come to grips with with what we did what our response was and so I want to share with you a few examples just to help give you some handles on what this might look like in our life when it comes to a relationship maybe you are in a relationship and maybe this kind of comes close to your story there were there were moments that felt off I had friends that would ask gentle questions and I just brushed them off deep down I knew that something wasn't right but I wanted it to work so I kept going anyway so we got to own our our part maybe you lost a job and maybe your story is kind of like this when I lost a job it felt unfair I wasn't doing anything crazy or extreme just checking my phone and social media here and there everyone does it but I knew that it was happening more than I admitted and I justified it instead of addressing it. That was my part. I gotta own it. Maybe addiction related, like it started small, just a way to cope. I set limits, I told myself I'm in control, but over time I loosened those boundaries.

And I loosened them because I didn't want to face what I was feeling on the inside. So I kept choosing relief over honesty. That was our part, we gotta own it. Maybe some of you have walked through divorce. And maybe this is kind of your story, the distance didn't happen overnight, it grew quietly. Postponed conversations, counseling that we talked about, but never scheduled. I told myself things would get better, but I avoided the hard conversations because I didn't want conflict. We have to own our part. There's a church one. I didn't walk away from church or God all at once, I just pulled back a little bit, started serving less, started showing up less, praying shorter prayers. Yes, people checked in on me, but I just kept telling them that I was busy. But really, I was avoiding the conversation that God was trying to have with me. And none of this is saying that it's your fault for whatever happened, but it's the reality of owning our peace, the past. Because friend, if we don't make peace with our past, then we're gonna end up dragging it into our future. Now here's what I know about when we own our part, is that it's embarrassing. It's emotional, it's difficult,

and the reason why is because it begins to drain the energy and the interest out of our story. Like people aren't as quick to jump on the blame bandwagon when we begin to recognize that these are the parts of the situation that I gotta own, that I could've, that I should've done differently. But what it will end up doing as it begins to reduce the energy and the interest in the story is that it'll also begin to reduce the emotional temperature in our life. And as that temperature decreases, the fogginess begins to dissipate, and we begin to gain clarity about our future again. Friend, if next time is gonna be any different than the last time, then you and I have to be willing to own our piece of our past. Thank you so much for tuning in with us. If you enjoyed today's message, go ahead and subscribe because there's content like this every single week. And if it spoke to you in any way, make sure you share it with a friend because you never know whose life you can change with just one simple share. Listen, we hope to see your face in the place this Sunday. Go ahead and check out our website for our service times at transformtlh.com, and we hope to see you soon.