Loose Him And Let Him Go

Welcome to Hope for the Caregiver.

This is Peter Rosberg. This is the program for you as a family caregiver. Healthy caregivers make better caregivers.

Hopeforthecaregiver.com. For those of you who are brand new to the program, let me just go back and do a bit of review for the rest of you who are regular listeners. The purpose of this program is to strengthen family caregivers. We don't really get into a lot of caregiving on this program because I can't tell you how to take care of your loved one any more than you can tell me how to take care of mine. What we can do is strengthen one another for the journey. What we do here on this program is we speak to the troubled heart of a family caregiver. The fear, the depression, the despair, the rage, the resentment, the guilt, the obligation, the bone-tired weariness, all of the above.

I help walk fellow caregivers back from the ledge so they can catch their breath, take a knee if they have to, and then develop better strategies for living a healthier life as a caregiver. Now, admittedly for some, the journey is a relatively short one. You know, six months, a year, two years. But for many of us, the journey is rather profound and has lifetime implications for us. That it's not something we just get through and then go on with our life.

This is our life. I realized that while I was in Denver with Gracie. Now, she is home. If you hear me speaking a little quieter, it's because she is upstairs asleep and I don't want to wake her. I'm not in my studio. That's a long story. But suffice it to say, I'm being a little more subdued just so I don't wake her up.

But I don't think I will. Hey, Gracie, you awake? So far, so good.

Oh, y'all, I'm just kidding. I can't be very far from her right now because she needs a lot of extra help. It's going to be a long recovery from this surgery.

Again, for those of you who are new, it was her 86th that I can count. I'm sure she's had more than that and many more smaller procedures, but it's been a journey for her and for me as well. I've been doing this now for almost 40 years. I think it's safe to say that this has affected my life permanently. I mean, I've been doing this since I was really 22. So my entire adult life is framed by this. I was thinking about that when I was in the hospital with her in Denver over the last couple of months when we were doing this and I realized that this is not something I look forward to getting through so that we can get on with our life. One day as I was walking from my hotel room over to the hospital, going through the elevator, the whole thing, I came to understand that this is my life.

It's okay. It's not a bad life. It's a hard life, but it's not a bad life. And there's a freedom that comes with that of accepting that this is my journey. Now for some of you, well, that's not going to be the same. Some of you go to do this for a short term, but there's many in this audience who will not. And if you've got somebody in your life with a severe chronic impairment, you understand what I'm saying.

It doesn't minimize the journey for any of us. What it does is it gives us a little bit of perspective of, okay, for a season, some will do this and then that journey will be over and then they will move on to something else. But for others, our whole life is framed by this. Principles still remain the same, no matter if you're in active caregiving or you're reflecting back on it.

The principles that we talk about on this program are still the same. Healthy caregivers make better caregivers and we can live a calmer, healthier, and dare I say it, more joyful life while doing it. That principle applies towards everything because we're always going to be faced with challenges in this world, whether it's as caregivers, whether it's in our business, whether it's in our marriages, whether it's in our families, whatever.

It doesn't have to involve acute chronic impairments such as disability and so forth. Life hands us very difficult things. How we deal with those things, how we work through those things is what this program is all about. We do it in the arena of being a caregiver.

Okay? So that's just a little bit of preamble to the program. I want to pivot a little bit towards counseling. If you notice that we have a lot of folks struggling with mental illness, there was a time when you didn't talk about it very much and that kept things in the dark and people shut away and that wasn't good. But the pendulum has kind of swung a bit and instead of hiding, we got paraded out.

We literally have parades where mental illness is on full display. We have whole television shows dedicated to this sort of thing where we let people just get out and waller in it, as we would say in South Carolina. Waller, that is a verb. I will waller in it. The term waller is usually applied to hogs and Tommy and Betsy, y'all will agree with that. These are my dear friends who listen to the program and Tommy used to raise pigs years and years ago, Tommy and Betsy did, and I remember one of the first jobs I did with my best friend growing up, Dexter James Winski II. We called him Swoofed.

He's a great American. We would have to clean the pig barn, which was not a lot of fun. And you see the aftermath of wallering. So anyway, we waller in the dysfunction and we're parading it on out. And we may get into that a little later, but right now I want to just talk about the benefits of counseling for us as caregivers and for our loved ones. And there's some people, you can always tell the ones who need counseling because they are very vocal about how much they don't. It's like, I don't need counseling.

Oh ma'am, you're in a Chick-fil-A. So yeah, you probably do. We get people like that and I recommend it. Gracie and I have had a lot of counseling in our life. Now we've been hard on counselors.

I freely admit that. I know of two marriage counselors we went to who got involved with someone else and ended up divorcing their spouses. I know of one priest I think who left the ministry. I know of a couple other counselors.

I think they turned to drugs and alcohol after us. So yeah, we're hard on counselors. We've been raised by a pack of therapists and I recommend it, but there are some things you might want to be cautious of as you approach a counselor. One of them is you're not there to get somebody to just listen to you. You really want to have an active goal of what you want to accomplish for you or in dealing with your loved one. Now your loved one may not want to do this and I've been talking with somebody this week who's going through that.

My brother gave me a pretty good piece of counsel on this. He's a counselor himself and if somebody is an active addiction, he's not going to even waste the time talking to them. If they're drinking or taking drugs, what is the point of going to counseling? Until you have gotten into some kind of recovery program, there's no point in going to counseling.

You're not that interested in changing at this point. Counseling is not just to emote and have somebody listen to you talk about your feelings. It's to learn tools and strategies and work through something with a trained professional to move you further and further away from a destructive lifestyle into a place where you're calmer and healthier. If you have a marriage, for example, and one spouse is actively involved in adultery, you don't go to marriage counseling. That's not going to do anything until they stop that behavior. Otherwise, you just go to a divorce lawyer because until they're willing to stop, no amount of counseling is going to change anything.

You follow me? Counseling in itself is not the answer. Counseling is a tool. I caution listeners on this program regularly, go in with a plan.

Go in with a plan. What is the goal here? Is the goal just to talk about your feelings because you're going to spend a lot of money on that? Or is the goal to get some tools to, again, move you down the road so you can be healthier and deal with the circumstances you deal with better and ultimately be more successful in living your life? It doesn't mean you're going to solve the problems.

It just means you're going to be better equipped to deal with them. You have to have a goal with this. The goal cannot be to change someone else. That's on them.

They may not be capable of change, but even if they are, you're not the one that can do that. I know this is basic stuff. This is the fundamentals, but sometimes you got to go back to the fundamentals. I didn't have anybody lay this out for me very simply when I was young and in the throes of all this. I didn't know what I was doing. I was becoming a full-fledged idiot.

Nobody sat down and said, okay, here's a path. If this seems elementary to you, I beseech your indulgence because there's somebody out there that needs to hear elementary, okay? This is Peter Rosenberg. This is Hope for the Caregiver.

We'll be right back. Take this one heart, dear Lord, and fill it with your love. Take this one life, dear Lord, and fill it with your love. May I honor you above by living faithfully in your love. Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver. This is Peter Rosenberg. This is the program for you as a family caregiver, and I love that voice.

I will ask you this. You lift her up in prayer. Not only is she recovering from all this, but Grace, she is a bit worried that she'll be able to sing again.

You can only have so many tubes shoved down your throat before you start getting some damage. I firmly believe that she will, but she is a bit concerned about it, so I would ask that you would continue just to lift her in prayer. She wants to sing, and I want to hear her sing some more. She's got more songs to sing, but she is a bit worried about it, but that is one of my favorite performances that she's ever done.

That was one of the first songs that we ever performed together, and I just love it. All right, I want to switch gears to something I've been thinking about for some time, and I want to go to the book of John, John chapter 11. I may spread this over a couple of segments, so bear with me. John chapter 11, starting with verse 38 through 44.

I've been stewing on this for a while. I'm reading in the New King James, which just as a piece of trivia in my life, when I was at Columbia Bible College back in the early 80s, I was a freshman I believe in chapel, and this man showed up who was the CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers. His name was Sam Moore, very distinguished fellow, and he was in his 50s at the time, early 50s. I am older than he was when he showed up there, and Thomas Nelson had just finished translating the New Testament into the New King James. It was something that they had commissioned to do, was to soften the King James version without losing the poetry of it, but to soften it so that people in modern day times could understand it a little bit better. I love the poetry of the King James.

We memorized a lot of verses to that growing up, but the New King James helps make it a little bit more understandable and read a little bit more contemporary without losing that, and the scholarship is wonderful on it, and he gave out these New Testaments to every student there. Sam had gone to Columbia Bible College back in the 50s. Well, flash forward to when we moved to Nashville, and that's the headquarters of Thomas Nelson at the time, and I met Gracie. Well, it turns out that Gracie's father and Sam were suite mates at Columbia Bible College back in the old days when they were there, and they had remained friends, and so I got to know Sam and, of course, made the connection there, all of us being at Columbia Bible College.

Now it's called Columbia International University, and I got to be very close friends with Sam. I spent a lot of time with he and his family, and as Sam passed away about five years ago, I played at his funeral, and Gracie sang, and I helped his wife plan some of the funeral. When I stood at his grave, I had that little New Testament he had given me as a freshman so many years ago when I didn't even know the connection, and Gracie's grandfather and her father and a lot of her extended family were all very close with Sam, and Sam had a lot of fondness for Gracie's grandfather. He called him the judge.

Gracie's grandfather was a state's attorney in Florida. Sam had a lot of respect for him, and we were able to introduce Sam to our oldest grandchild when he was born, so Sam got to engage with five generations of the same family, and I thought that was quite remarkable. In this day and age, you just don't see a lot of that, and I've always been very fond of the family, and so anyway, I'm reading out of the New King James, this little piece of trivia that probably means nothing to anybody else, but it's always pointed to me when I see that. Verse 38, then Jesus, again groaning in himself, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay against it. Jesus said, take away the stone. Martha, the sister of him who was dead, said to him, Lord, by this time there is a stench, for he has been dead four days. Jesus said to her, did I not say to you that if you would believe, you would see the glory of God? Then they took away the stone from the place where the dead man was lying, and Jesus lifted his eyes and said, Father, I thank you that you have heard me, and I know that you always hear me, but because of the people who are standing by, I said this, that they may believe that you sent me. Now when he had said these things, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he who had died came out bound hand and foot with grave clothes, and his face was wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, loose him and let him go. Now we all know this passage. We've heard it over and over, some of us since we were children. But there's something I want to lock in.

A couple of things I want to lock in. Number one, it's interesting that Jesus did not plead with Lazarus. Hey Lazarus, do you want to come forth? Hey Lazarus, would you like to live again? Hey Lazarus, would you like to be raised from the dead? This wasn't an invitation. It was a summons.

It was a command. This is our salvation. I'm bewildered by people who think that God, in heaven above, the high king of heaven, who before time began, the whole plan of redemption was in his mind, in the mind of the trinity.

And the sun came to earth. God became flesh through the sun, lived a perfect life so that his righteousness could be imputed by faith to us, paid the penalty for our sin on the cross, was risen from the dead for our justification. As Paul says in Romans 4.25, and now that same God, people somehow think that he's in heaven hoping we're going to make the right decision.

Hoping we're going to get it right. You know, I'm bewildered by that. He commanded Lazarus to come forth. He raised him from the dead. He infused life into Lazarus. Jesus says he is the way, the truth, and the life. That's what he said to Mary and Martha.

I am the resurrection. He imputed that life into Lazarus and summoned him forth. And Lazarus came forth. He gave Lazarus the ability to be willing to walk out of the tomb, but he did not have the ability.

He didn't have anything. He was dead. Just as we were in our sins. And he summoned us forth. Come forth.

We love him because he first loved us. And he comes forth. So anyway, that's sad, but the thing I want to lock in on this is that Lazarus walked out of that tomb covered in grave clothes. Now why am I saying this?

Go back to what Martha said. Lord, don't open this tomb. He's been in there four days. He stinks. It's going to be a smell.

It's horrific. It's going to smell like death. But I say to you, everything that I see in scriptures communicates to me that when Lazarus was raised from the dead, when life was imputed to him, Lazarus no longer stunk. He was alive. Who Lazarus was did not stink, but his grave clothes did. His grave clothes did. And sometimes we get the smells confused.

Who has been raised in Christ is a new creature, is a new creation. But we still have a lot of grave clothes on us, don't we? Some of us have more than others. Some of us stink more than others.

I believe the greatest privilege we have is discipling others. And the mandate we have, by the way, in Matthew 28, but the privilege and the mandate is to help others understand what it means to be regenerated by the power of the Holy Spirit. To be summoned out of the grave. We will still have the stench of grave clothes, but we are not emanating that stench, because again, behold, if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature.

We're not emanating that stench. We are alive, but we are covered up with things that give the appearance of death. And those things have to be unraveled in our lives. And so Jesus looked at the people around Lazarus and said, loose him and let him go. He didn't say, Lazarus, loose yourself. He said to the others, loose him and let him go.

He was bound in this. And some of us are bound with things that are extremely painful and toxic and smell of death. There's a great book I would really recommend you reading, but get a lot of highlighters. Okay.

Because you're going to run through highlighters on this. It's Dr. Diane Langberg's, it's called Suffering in the Heart of God. And she's been on this program, just a wonderful, wonderful lady. Amazing insights into what trauma does to people. Some listening in this audience have undergone such trauma and you smell of death.

But if you're in Christ, you're not emanating that smell. That's the trauma that has bound you up. That is the sin that bound you up.

But now it's time to be loosed from this. And there are people in your life who can help you do this. There are godly people around you who could help you do this, who will not say you are death.

They will help get the death cloth off of you. Do you understand the difference? One of the things that pleases God, in fact, the thing that pleases God is taking him at his word. Without faith, it's impossible to believe God. And faith is taking him at his word.

Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him as righteousness. So I'm going to ask you point blank, do you believe this? Do you believe this? Do you believe that you're a new creation? That you have a heart of flesh, not of stone?

If so, what are the implications of that belief? Lazarus was no longer dead. Lazarus no longer invented stench.

But the grave clothes did and they need to come off. And so do yours and mine. This is Peter Rosenberg and we'll be right back. That is, again, my wife. I love her voice and I love her singing that song.

My life is in your hands and that's something we have to live out every day. Listen, I want to go back to what we were talking about in the last block. You know, he summoned Lazarus forth. And his sisters were so worried, you know, about the smell and this and that and so forth. And do you think they were worried about the smell as they were unraveling those grave clothes to loose him and let him go? Or do you think they were rejoicing that their brother was alive? How many of us in our church culture in this country get worked up about the smell rather than spend time rejoicing that someone else is alive? Maybe because I'm older I look at these things a bit differently, but when I see people going through painful things in their lives that are uncomfortable for a lot of people.

And I certainly saw this when I was in Denver. I would get on the elevator with folks and strike up a conversation. Because again, as I said in the first block, this is my life. My life is not to rush through this so that I could go off and do something I want to do.

This is my life. And I believe that God is going to bring people in my path who I have the privilege of being able to talk to and maybe take off a few grave clothes along the way, just like people have done for me. And I could see it on people that were struggling under tremendous things and it was painful.

Some of it was quite frankly gross. But we have the mandate and the privilege of sharing the gospel and making disciples. But what is the gospel? Well the gospel is He's risen from the dead and therefore we identify with that and are also raised from our death. That we have been summoned forth. And who are we to shun others because their grave clothes stink.

Let's help get them off. One of the greatest passages in scripture to me personally that Jesus modeled this Himself was when He told, on the day of His resurrection, when He told Mary to go back and tell His disciples and then He said, and tell Peter. He knew that Peter was drowning in the stench of his failure.

And Jesus specifically called him out by name and tell Peter. For those of us who have smelled the stench of death on us, see it doesn't bother us when we're dead, but it bothers us a lot when we're alive. We need help getting that off. And that's what people have done for me.

And that's what I hope to do through this program is to help loose my fellow caregivers. To recognize you have been made a new creation in Christ. And yes there is the stench of death and failure. But understand it is not coming from who Christ resurrected. It is coming from what was put on you in that death. And I would imagine that Lazarus had a pretty difficult time walking out of that grave. He was bound up.

And it took compassionate, excited, wonderful people like his sisters and others to loosen and rejoice what God has done. Do you feel bound up? Do you feel overwhelmed by the stench of the grave clothes that you're wearing? The guilt, the shame, the anger, the rage, the frustration, the despair, all of the above. Fear.

That's what this program is for is to help unwind some of that so that you can see the life that God has raised from the dead. That's you by the way. That's me. We don't have to wear these things. And we don't have to identify as this.

That's why I hate that term so much being used in our culture. I identify as this. There are people out there that say I identify as a gay Christian.

Really? That's grave clothes. You're identifying with grave clothes? Is that what you want to identify as? How much longer do we have somebody who says I identify as a pedophile Christian? I'm not practicing, but I identify as a pedophile Christian. Can I watch your nursery?

I mean, how much longer? I identify as a stealing Christian. I like to steal, but I'm not doing it. Can I take up your offering? I mean, how absurd can we be? I do not want to identify as anything that has to do with death. We identify with Christ. That's the whole point.

And it's our responsibility to help loose others as they loose us from these things. I don't want to put perfume on rotting cloth that smells of death. You don't mask it up. Do you ever hear the stories back in the old days in Parliament and in our Congress and so forth when they didn't have a lot of showers and everybody wore all this cologne?

They all stunk, but they just kept putting on dousing themselves with perfumes and colognes to cover up the stench. That is the antithesis of what Christ does. He does not cover up the stench. He raises us from what is creating that. And then as believers, that's how we minister to one another.

We help loose people and let them go. If you want to identify as somebody who is in whatever, all you're doing is identifying with death. And I don't wish to do that. And I don't want you to do it. I can't stop you.

But that's not the gospel. We don't put perfume on death. We loose people and we let them go so that they are freed from these things. So when you go to counselors, like I said in the first block here of this program, the goal is not to go there and have somebody else help you put perfume on grave clothes. The goal is to be loosed from this. You're bound up. You're twisted in knots with something that is just putrid. Let's loose them.

Let them go. Who you are in Christ, who you've been resurrected to be is not that. And I don't want to identify with it.

And why would anybody else want to? I don't care what proclivities you think you have, does it line up with scripture? And if it doesn't, it's death. For the wages of sin is death.

I mean, do you see how absurd it is? And I'll probably get letters. Oh Peter, you don't understand. Okay. Send the letters.

You can email me at Peter at the internet dot google. But I see nowhere in scripture where it says for us to identify with the sin and death of this world. The only death I want to identify with is Christ. His death so that I can be resurrected in Christ.

That's it. And He doesn't give us grave clothes that are putrid. He gives us His righteousness. Clothed in fine garments of His righteousness. All our righteousness as Isaiah says in Isaiah 64 is filthy rags.

It's Lazarus grave clothes. That's the best we could hope for is the stench of death with our righteousness. That's why when somebody says, well look, I identify as this. I identify as a gay Christian. Well how do you know you're gay? Somebody says I identify as an adulterer Christian, a fornicating Christian, a murdering Christian. Where does it stop? How much longer do we want to identify with grave clothes?

Now why am I telling you this as a caregiver? Because so many of us become bound up in the stench of death and we get it all mashed together thinking that that's who we are. By faith we accept what Christ has done. Somebody said well I don't feel that. It doesn't matter what you feel.

It matters what you know and what scripture teaches more importantly. It's not about feeling better. It's about being better. It's about us understanding the truth of the gospel so that it gets into our bloodstream. That we have been justified by him. He is sanctifying us. Sanctification doesn't come before justification. Justification comes before sanctification.

And he justified. He summoned Lazarus forth. Sanctification has taken off the grave clothes and that may be a lifetime process for some.

It seems to be for me. But so many of our churches are filled with vats of perfume that we pour on other people's grave clothes. When they should be filled with scissors and things to cut this stuff off of us and throw it away and burn it. And rejoice that our brother and that our sister is alive. And so I look at you my fellow caregivers. I rejoice that you're alive and my passion is to help you shed these stinky putrid grave clothes that have the overpowering smell of death on them. Which is all the things that keep you in bondage. And to cast those away into the fire where they belong.

So that you can live freely. I am not in the business of putting perfume on stinky grave clothes. I hope you're not either. And if you go to a church that is. If your pastor is doing that.

Looks like you got a decision to make. Because that is not a healthy place. Jesus did not want Lazarus to continue walking around in grave clothes. And you know those grave clothes stunk. But Lazarus did not emit the stench. That was from the decay of death. And we are not bound to that anymore.

And by faith we walk away from that. Now think about Lazarus. He knew that he was alive. And he could probably smell the clothes. But he was rejoicing that he was alive. People helped him get rid of that stuff. Washed it all off. Cleaned him up. And let him go.

What a great piece of news that is. We're not in bondage to this. But how I've lived as a caregiver is to recognize that I don't need to put perfume on the putrid. This is Peter Rosenberg and this is Hope for the Caregiver. We'll be right back. Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver.

This is Peter Rosenberg and this is the program for the family caregiver. And that is my wife Gracie. Don't you think that she has more songs left to sing in her? I think she does. That is her singing the incomparable Keith Green's song I want to be more like Jesus.

She recorded that many many years ago and I love going back and listening to that. We were talking about Lazarus and we're talking about when you say lucid grave clothes. They said lucid but let him go. Really what that's about if you play it out. It's sanctification. Paul talked about that as letting go of everything else and pressing on towards Christ.

That's the whole point of this. And as caregivers we hold on to a lot of things that we just don't need to hold on to. We grasp them like grim death and it's time to let them go. They're not doing anything but creating a bondage situation for us.

A putrid smell if we stay on that same theme. And some people get it mixed up. They think you've got to be sanctified before you can be justified. Lazarus wasn't sanctified before he was justified. He wasn't loosed from his grave clothes before he was raised from the dead.

You follow me? He was raised from the dead then we loosed the grave clothes. But we get it backwards. We think somehow we've got to go up and be all pretty and smell pretty and not be rotting in order for God to save us. And God says no. I'm going to save you.

Then I'm going to clean you and loose you and let you go. Do you see the difference? One of us is dependent on us doing something. And the other is depending on God doing something.

Both of those can't be right. We either depend on God or we depend on ourselves. And if we depend on ourselves then we've got to justify ourselves before God. And I don't know about you.

I don't want to do that. And that's why sometimes I had a friend of mine once say you plead guilty and go straight to execution and then let God resurrect. Because we have nothing to stand on.

Nothing. But when he summons us from the grave when he calls us forth like he did with Lazarus we walk out. And yeah at first we're stumbling a little bit and we may have stinky grave clothes on us. But then that's our privilege as Christians to be able to care for one another in that regards to help remove those things and keep pointing people to the one who called them out of the grave. That's how we do it as believers.

And that's how I do it as a caregiver. Go back to what Paul said in Galatians chapter 2. I have been crucified with Christ. I no longer live. The life I live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God. The old man is gone.

What's been resurrected is completely different. The life I live as a caregiver. That's the way I do it. Now you may have a different opinion.

You may want to do something different. That's your business. I'm not here to tell you how to live your life.

I'm telling you how I've lived mine. This is what I've learned. And if you want to put perfume on something that stinks that is your business. But I'm not in the business of doing that. And I feel no reason to be coerced into that by others.

It stinks. It is what it is. I do not place the nature of my sin in the same sentence with my relationship with Christ. I have been redeemed. And now I identify with Christ and I belong to Him. Exclusively. Not to my sin. Now you may wonder how this has to do a lot with being a caregiver. But to me this is my life.

Again I talked about this at the first block. This is my life. And how I live my life is reflective of my theology. And I've come to understand that He called me out of a tomb. And just like Lazarus I had a lot of stinky grave clothes. And I needed help getting those off. Some of that came through counseling. This is what I talked about again at the first block.

When you go to a counselor what is your goal here? And your theology is going to come into play here. And I have found that there's a lot of weak theology being promulgated. It is really sad. And that stuff will not sustain you when you spend two months in the hospital on your wife's 86th surgery.

I promise you it's not going to sustain you. Weak theology never does. I can't have a casual relationship with God through this. And I'm certainly not going to insult the costly redemptive work He's done in my life by somehow aligning that with my sin. So when somebody comes up and says they're a gay Christian or they're an adulterating Christian or they're a fornicating Christian or they're a lying Christian. I am guilty of all of the law but I do not want to put it in the same breath with the redemptive work of Christ. I have been crucified with Christ Paul says.

I no longer live. So if I'm trying to somehow grasp an identity that is not of Christ then I haven't been crucified with Christ. Look what Paul talks about in Philippians chapter 3.

Let's start with verse 9. And be found in Him not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law but that which comes through faith in Christ the righteousness from God that depends on faith that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and may share His sufferings and become like Him in His death that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect but I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me His own brothers.

I do not consider that I have made it my own but one thing I do forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Do you see what Paul's doing? He's not identifying himself as a Pharisee Christian. He's not identifying himself as anything other than crucified with Christ so that he may be raised with Christ and by faith he is hanging onto that knowing he is being sanctified. Knowing that all those grave clothes are being peeled off of him to be presented faultless as the book of Jude says if you look at the last bit of Jude's and this is how I ended my new book A Minute for Caregivers when every day feels like Monday. I'm just kidding I do that a lot in my caregiver support group.

They always laugh at me. But I ended the last words on the page of the whole book are from Jude 24 when it says now unto him that is able to keep you from falling and to present you what? Faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy. That's what Paul is striving towards.

That's what he is looking forward to. Letting go of all these other things. So if we are continually relishing and as I said the other block wallowing in stinky things of grave clothes that need to be discarded and we want to somehow identify with that all we're doing is prohibiting ourselves from growing and what Paul is mentioning there just to press on to strive towards that there is nothing else. So as a caregiver we sometimes get ourselves so twisted around we think we're not happy this is a distraction for our life this is this is an inconvenience we're not we're just upset we're this we're this blah blah blah blah. We see our failures we see all these things we wallow in it realize that wait a minute I have been crucified with Christ I no longer live the life I live as a caregiver. As Grace's caregiver you don't think I have to make amends on a daily basis for the things that I do and say? She'll tell you. I mean I've had ample time to fail at everything but I don't identify with the failures I identify with the one who called me out of the grave and with his mercy and his grace there are people that he has sent my way to help untangle me from these things so that I am able to then pour into Gracie's life the things that will equip her and help her deal with the challenges she has and the same with you all and listening to this program. I'm not here to put perfume on something that stinks you don't polish a cow pie you don't put sugar sprinkles on horse manure you don't do it and anybody that says it they're a fool okay what you do is you press on you let go of all these things and you realize that needs to go that demandingness that you're smelling that comes from the grave clothes you've been risen to something new you're not in bondage to that anymore that anger that despair that frustration that guilt people say well I still feel guilty well that's your problem because you're not believing the word of God that says if any man confesses his sin he is faithful and just forgive us and cleanses of all unrighteousness so are you saying that just because you feel something God is not true do you see the ridiculousness of how we get ourselves into these pretzels it's not about how you feel it's about what he says and I asked at the big at the end of the beat block do you believe this and if so what are the implications if you believe it then by faith I live by faith in the Son of God that's what Paul says in Galatians I live by faith I take him at his word and his word says you have been summoned out of the grave you have been brought forth out of death you are in Christ and that is hope for the caregiver this is Peter Rosenberg and we'll see you next time you've heard me talk about standing with hope over the years this is the prosthetic limb ministry that Gracie envisioned after losing both of her legs part of that outreach is our prosthetic limb recycling program did you know that prosthetic limbs can be recycled no kidding there is a correctional facility in Arizona that helps us recycle prosthetic limbs and this facility is run by a group out of Nashville called Core Civic and we met them over 11 years ago and they stepped in to help us with this recycling program of taking prostheses and you disassemble them you take the knee the foot the pylon the tube clamps the adapters the screws the liners the prosthetic socks all these things we can reuse and inmates help us do it before Core Civic came along I was sitting on the floor at our house or out in the garage and when we lived in Nashville and I had tools everywhere limbs everywhere and feet boxes of so forth that I was doing all this myself and I'd make the kids help me and it got to be too much for me and so I was very grateful that Core Civic stepped up said look we are always looking for faith-based programs that are interesting and that give inmates a sense of satisfaction and we'd love to be a part of this and that's what they're doing and you can see more about that at standingwithhope.com slash recycle so please help us get the word out that we do recycle prosthetic limbs we do arms as well but the majority of amputations are lower limb and that's where the focus of standing with hope is that's where Gracie's life is with her lower limb prostheses and she's used some of her own limbs in this outreach that she's recycled I mean she's been an amputee for over 30 years so you go through a lot of legs and parts and other types of materials and you can reuse prosthetic socks and liners if they're in good shape all of this helps give the gift that keeps on walking and it goes to this prison in Arizona where it's such an extraordinary ministry think with that inmates volunteering for this they want to do it and they've had amazing times with it and I've had very moving conversation with the inmates that work in this program and you can see again all of that at standingwithhope.com slash recycle they're putting together a big shipment right now for us to ship over we do this pretty regularly throughout the year as inventory rises and they need it badly in Ghana so please go out to standingwithhope.com slash recycle and get the word out and help us do more if you want to offset some of the shipping you can always go to the giving page and be a part of what we're doing there we're purchasing material in Ghana that they have to use that can't be recycled we're shipping over stuff that can be and we're doing all of this to lift others up and to point them to Christ and that's the whole purpose of everything that we do and that is why Gracie and I continue to be standing with hope standingwithhope.com