Discover Your True Self - You are Beautiful, Part 1

Few things in life will make you feel more dirty, ugly, anxious, and unworthy of love than unresolved guilt.

Left unchecked, guilt will literally kill your soul. So what's the answer? Well, today we're going to find out. You don't want to miss this. Welcome to this Edition of Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. Living on the Edge features the Bible teaching of Chip Ingram on this international discipleship program. I'm Dave Drewy, and in this program, Chip continues his series, Discover Your True Self. It's about a personal journey Chip and his wife Teresa have been on to overcome the lies of doubt and self-worth that we all experience. Through the course of this series, Chip's revealing the freedom and the power God wants all of us to enjoy and how to activate those things in your life starting today. Now, after the teaching, Chip will be with us in studio with a specific application you don't want to miss.

But if you do have to step away, remember you can catch up anytime with the Chip Ingram app. Well, Chip's in Ephesians chapter two, so if you have a Bible, turn there now and let's get going. It is hard for us to believe, but I would just remind you that if you're a genuine follower of Christ, you've received Him as your Savior, He's your Lord, that when God sees you at this moment, you are wanted, you're chosen, you're valuable, you're secure, you're competent. And it feels a little weird for at least some of us men, you're beautiful. It doesn't mean you're pretty, guys. You're beautiful in God's eyes.

There's something attractive when He sees you, your inner character, your life, what He's transforming, and every aspect of you, you're beautiful. But if there is one thing that can mar that lens and make us men and women feel dirty and ugly and unworthy and unlovable, it's guilt. If you pull out your teaching note, we're going to talk about guilt. I have seen guilt torture people's lives.

Someone has rightly said, guilt is perhaps the most destructive of all emotions. I lived with a dad who had overwhelming guilt. At 17, 18, he was on Iwo Jima in Guam. By his recollection, he killed thousands and thousands of people.

After being wounded, he was pulled out, and all of his company died but him. He had the guilt of things he did, and he had guilt for surviving. All was the least of his problems.

Outbursts of anger were the least of his problems. Guilt was the core, but he had no idea how to deal with it. As we walk through this message together, I would ask you to whisper a prayer and ask God to give you the courage to be honest with yourself and honest with Him, because He wants to help you. So much of what you deal with, we deal with, so many of the relational issues, the struggles and the challenges, their root cause is guilt. But guilt's tricky. There's true guilt and false guilt. There's guilt feelings. There's theological guilt, what's true of all of us. So on the front of your notes, let's define guilt before we get to the solution. The literal meaning is it's a state, circle the word state, of having committed an offense. In other words, guilt in and of itself is you actually did something wrong.

You violated a standard. In more common usage today, the psychological definition of guilt is an emotional response to the perception that we've broken a prohibition or fallen short of a standard. Circle the word emotional. Underline the word perception. Dr. Becca Johnson writes, thus guilt can be both a fact and a feeling and the two aren't necessarily related. You can not feel guilty at all and be very guilty. Sociopaths kill people and feel zero remorse. Some of us violate the law of the land and the law of Scripture and we internally feel no remorse because we don't agree with it.

By contrast, the opposite is true. Some people have guilty feelings and they're not really guilty. Those of you in this room or those watching that have been abused feel guilty. It's a bizarre thing that the victims feel guilty. You're not guilty and yet you deal with that guilt.

You need to learn to discern between true guilt and false guilt and we're going to address that and you'll learn at the end of this why and how. Theologically, guilt is the moral and legal condition of all people prior to salvation. It's our personal accountability and the just condemnation for sin and transgressions against God's law.

God is holy and perfect and to have relationship with a holy God, you must be holy and perfect and all have sinned and fall short to the glory of God. We are all guilty before God. Prior to receiving Christ and Him taking on our sin and us receiving His forgiveness, all mankind is guilty. After we've received Christ, God took our guilt, placed it on Christ and He obliterated guilt. If you're a genuine follower of Christ, you have no guilt before God. Some of you are thinking, then why do I feel so guilty? We're going to talk about what that is and how you deal with it. So the last question is, how do you cope with guilt? What are the things that make you feel guilty?

True or false? Again, in this little book, she's a friend, Good Guilt, Bad Guilt by Dr. Becca Johnson. If this is an area or an issue, I encourage you to read the book.

She says we feel guilty about some things, but we feel guilty because of others. Listen and just let me ask you to lean back. Okay, you've got those notes. I feel them moving. That's good. It means you're tracking.

But I want you to lean back for a minute. Which one of these do you identify things that you feel guilty about? What you should eat or not eat, wasting time, not being a good parent, being lazy or undisciplined, forgetting to call your mom or email your boss or get back with people who have given you a message. Do you feel guilty about habits like smoking or biting your nails or not exercising or too much time in front of the TV or the net? Or maybe you feel guilty about not praying often enough or long enough or Bible study. And then she says we not only feel guilty about certain things, but we feel guilty because of certain things like not liking one of your children or having an abortion or being in an affair or struggling with lust or pornography or masturbation or fantasies or not saying anything but not feeling or treating your mate because you don't feel any love for them or stealing from work or lying or being a private compulsive gambler.

The list could go on, right? Most of us with our guilt in unhealthy ways, we do exactly what our first parents do. Number one, we hide it. Number two, we deny and excuse. And then number three, we usually blame other people. I'm like this because of my parents. Well, I wouldn't steal except that they don't pay me a good salary anyway.

And pretty soon, I wouldn't be on the internet if my wife was more affectionate. We all have a drug of choice to cover our guilt when we don't follow God's way. My drug of choice is work. I was challenged with being a workaholic year after year after year after year, denial, denial, excuse, excuse, blame, blame, on and on and on until I walked into a bookstore and I just saw a title.

I didn't even read the book. The title said I feel guilty when I relax and I thought that's me. And I realized that my workaholism and my desperate attempts to cover what I was feeling inside wasn't anything but guilt. And I went on a journey and it was painful. It was a journey how I was trying to cover up and appear okay and to please people all because I had some unresolved guilt, some that was true and some that was false.

So just before we go on, what's yours? What's your drug of choice? Is it shopping? Is it food? Is it an addiction?

Does it work like me? What's your drug of choice when you have that restlessness over little things or big things we just bury them. And if you bury big things like in your past, they just brew. And I've been on the front seat of that watching it brew in a man's life until it nearly destroyed him and his family and everyone around him.

Now let's get to the solution side. God does not want you living with guilt. God has taken care of our guilt and He has an antidote to guilt. He wants you to know that guilt is a formidable and complex foe. He wants you to know the difference between true guilt and false guilt. He wants you to understand the danger that sometimes you feel guilty when you shouldn't and the even greater danger sometimes you don't feel guilty and you really should.

And so here is examining the universal problem. Ephesians 2 verses 1 through 3, as for you Paul writes to the Gentiles inspired by the Holy Spirit, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you walked in the ways of the world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work and those who are disobedient. All of us, the reference Jew, Gentile, all people, all mankind lived among them at one time gratifying the cravings, the word is lust, our passions and our sinful nature following its desires and thoughts like the rest we were by nature objects of wrath.

Now you'll notice I put some things in bold. I'd like you to circle the word dead, circle the word disobedient, and circle the word objects of wrath. The word dead here literally means separated. Scripture says in that day when you sin you'll surely die. Adam died, he was separated from God but he still was physically alive and had activity. But sin separates us from God.

There's nothing we can do to get reconnected to him. And then he says why? Your transgressions, that means you drift off the path or you come to a crossroads. This is right, this is wrong, and you choose wrong.

And we all do and we all have. Sins is a word that means miss the mark. It was used for someone throwing a spear or shooting an arrow and it falls short.

It doesn't hit the target but it hits other things. So because we've all done that you are alienated from God. And then it says you're in this lifestyle. There's a world, there's a culture. In this culture there's a ruler of the air, Satan. And there's a way that people treat one another, have been treating people in disobedience to God. And they manipulate and they kill and they destroy. And they hurt and they abuse. And we've seen it.

It's easy to see on the macro, right? The Bosnias, the Sudans, the ISIS, the Hitlers, the Mussolinis, the Stalins, the 60 or 70 million unborn babies that are killed in America through abortion. The murders that happen both with words and with guns and with knives.

The accusations, the racism. In other words, he's just saying mankind has lived in disobedience to God and there's fallout and there's consequences. He says this passion, this craving, this nature that we have inherited from Adam makes you the object of God's wrath. Literally that God hates evil and because he's both holy and just, he has to punish evil.

And so the summary is we are guilty and we are members of a condemned, dysfunctional family. G.K. Chesterton was a British writer, journalist actually but a great theologian, sort of informally, had a huge impact on C.S. Lewis. And someone asked him, what's wrong with the world? Now he lived through World War I and World War II and his answer was great.

What's wrong with the world? I am. What? I am. It's not the government. It's not this group or that group.

It's me. It's in me. There's sin in me. And in every other human being.

The theologians call this total depravity. See, there's a fundamental issue and most of us, academically at least, if we've been in the secular public arena, we have been told and told and told that man is basically good. We're all basically good and with enough education or the right environment there's a utopia out there somewhere somehow or through technology or through we're going to get more food. When people come into power even if they have a just cause, you just go through history and what you will find is the same, same pattern.

Corruption, greed, immorality and the haves and the have-nots. And we have a life history of wars over stuff, over power and at times over sex. The source is Romans 5 verse 12, therefore just as through one man, Adam, sin entered into the world and death through sin and so death spread to all men because all sinned. In other words, when kids are born, they're born sinners. David would say, from my birth, you don't have to teach one and two year olds to be selfish.

They just get it down all the way on their own. And then we get more sophisticated how to look not selfish and be selfish. Jeremiah 17, 9 says, the heart is deceitful above all else and desperately wicked. Who can understand it? Here's my question, do you believe that? See, I think we live in a day where I just need a little help.

I just need a little repair. I will tell you, my father's guilt ate at his life and that guilt, the only way he could drown it was through alcohol. First a little then more and more and more and more and more. But your guilt and sin is never isolated. It always impacts other people. There's no such thing as a private sin. In an alcoholic family, there's usually a scapegoat. My oldest sister who was not loved and not treated well rebelled. My next sister, there's usually a compliant one.

I want to keep the peace and they feel invisible. So she cooks meals and helps out with everything and has an eating disorder. And by the time she was a senior, just skin and bones. And in an alcoholic family, there's usually a rescuer. That's where I show up. And so as my father would sit and drink all day on Saturday, when he got up, I would take and pour it down the drain thinking I was helping him. My mom was the enabler. The most amazing person in the world, emotionally intelligent, no boundaries, no convictions until it went from a couple beers after work to missing supper to not getting home till 11.

And then my mom did something that every person in that situation needs to do that turned our family around. Here's what I want you to know. The result is death. Until you face the problems, until we see we are separated from God, that's our past. In the present, we live disobedient lives apart from Christ. And the end is destruction. There's judgment because God is fair. In His mercy and His love, notice though what He does, understanding God's solution. The next word, look at your text, verse 4. But, in the Greek language, there's not a single word He could use. It's like glaring red flashing lights.

But, yes, all that negative is true. But God, because of His great love for us, in parentheses, He's rich in mercy. He intervened. He made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in our transgressions. And then Paul gets excited and he wants to jump to his next thought. It's called a paraphastic phrase. And put in brackets, for by grace we are saved. He just goes, oh, this is so exciting.

But then he goes on with this thought. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus. Why? In order that in the coming ages, this is a word for eons and eons and eons, that He might show the incomparable riches of His grace that He expressed in His kindness to us. How? Through Jesus Christ. With your pen, second line, would you underline with Christ? Skip a line, go down next, underline with Christ. The next line, underline in Christ Jesus. Last line, write in Christ Jesus. Does anyone make an observation?

Is there anything about what you just underlined that tells you the solution? Yes, we were dead apart from Christ. Yes, disobedient. And yes, we deserve the righteous condemnation of God. But, in Christ, in Christ, in Christ, in Christ.

Notice, He flipped every one of them. Instead of dead, He made us alive. The word is quickened. The moment that you received Christ and you were joined with Him, you were dead spirits and boom, you were made alive and reconnected to God the Father. Second, He raised you up.

You were co-resurrected. Jot down Romans 6 colon 4. Instead of walking in disobedience, He says that we died with Him and since we died with Him, we also were raised with Him in order that we might walk in newness of life. New power. Sin doesn't have power over you anymore as a follower.

Death no longer stings. Satan defeated. You walk in newness of life and then finally, instead of destruction, you were seated with Him in the heavenly places. Literally a better word is you're enthroned. The disobedience of this world, there's a ruler and there's a power, the enemy. And He's orchestrating it through people's flesh and desires and passions and selfishness and anger and violence.

And He goes, no, no, no. You're out from under that dominion and now you've been enthroned with Christ. You're a brand new person. That's why God sees you differently as wanted and secure and valuable and competent.

And guys, even beautiful. Jesus' intervention rescued us from condemnation and into His family. Rescued.

Notice, from and into. The answer is Christ. He's the only answer for personal peace.

He's the only answer for peace in the world. My mom did something pretty brave when she realized after many, many, many, many, many years that she was the enabler. When she saw what was happening to our family, she was a counselor.

And finally she set up a boundary. Here's the intervention. And some of you have been there and you've gotten some good friends and some good psychological help and some counselors.

And right, you all get together and the key to an intervention is it's a safe environment and we all sit around and we tell this person that we love you, we're for you, but your behavior is going to destroy you and you're destroying others and we're for you and you need help. I remember that moment. And I remember my mom holding up a bottle of beer and you talk about reality therapy. You can have this bottle and continue in that or me and the kids.

You just can't have both and you got 48 hours. My dad was a math teacher. He did the math.

And he was a marine. He quit. He just quit. In fact, he thought, you know, I drink beer all day and I smoke three and a half packs of cigarettes, might as well quit them both. So he quits them both. About three months later, I want to say, Dad, please drink a beer.

He didn't deal with any issues. He didn't understand his guilt, but I mean he just made us nuts. But then what he realized was, you know what he realized? I can't solve this. See, for many of you, the symptom isn't shopping. It's not money. It's not pornography. It's not alcohol. It's not your relationships. It's not one of your kids.

It's not whether they got into a school. The issue is guilt, some real and some perceived. And he finally realized that was the problem.

In fact, look at this text. The motive, verse 4, jot down God's love. God didn't rescue you because you're special or wonderful or nice. He rescued you because he loves you. God is good to you, not because you're good.

It's because he's good. Beyond his motive, his action, what? Instead of death, he made you alive. Instead of disobedience, he raised you to walk in newness and power. Instead of future destruction, there's future hope. And his purpose is to demonstrate and reveal.

Did you realize this? You're this trophy. You're this fallen, hurting person who's done things wrong like I have. Some have received abuse and difficulty and pain.

We all have this stuff. But God wants to transform you and it is a journey and it's a process and it's often painful. And that's why I ask you to pray.

Could you be honest? Could you just quit pushing and pushing and pushing and settling for substitutes and sedating your pain and ask yourself, why do I do what I do? For years and years, I tried hard. I'll change my schedule. I promised Teresa.

I won't work so many hours. But it wasn't until I dealt with the why behind it, the guilt, that change occurred. Chip's going to be back with his application, but just a quick reminder, this message, You Are Beautiful, is from his series, Discover Your True Self. You know, at some point in our lives, most of us cut through all the clutter to ask a fundamental question, who am I? Well, in this series, Chip opens the book of Ephesians to explain that the answer to that question changes when you become a son or a daughter of the Most High God. Issues of worth and belonging take on a completely different meaning when we give our lives to his son, Jesus. But if we don't know that, we tend to get bogged down in the doubts and struggles of our past. If you long to break free and truly live in the power of Christ, this series will help you do that. To check out your resource options for Discover Your True Self, just go to livingontheedge.org or tap Special Offers. Discounts are available for a limited time.

For more information, just give us a call at 1-888-333-6003. I'll be right back to talk about today's message, but before I do, I want to give you a picture that I got to witness as a young pastor. There was a man there who was a master craftsman. I mean, he was a cabinet maker par excellence. And I remember watching him literally painstakingly with a piece of wood use a lathe and little by little by little by little, he did all these things that I couldn't figure out what was happening. And then, you know, all those little moments led to this absolutely beautiful piece of cabinetry or furniture.

And you know, sometimes we think little things don't matter, even calling them little things. And one of the quote little things that is the backbone of Living on the Edge are those people who support the ministry monthly. You know, I don't know if you are a current supporter or you've been praying about being a supporter, but let me tell you this, when you give monthly, it provides the bedrock and the consistency and the stability of all that we do here at Living on the Edge. So I want to thank you monthly partners for all that you do. And I would like you, if you're not a supporter, would you prayerfully today ask God, do you want me to support Living on the Edge? Do you want me to help Christians live like Christians?

And if so, would you like me to do it on a regular monthly basis? And by the way, thanks in advance for whatever God leads you to do. Thanks Chip. Well, to send a gift or set up a recurring donation, visit us online at livingontheedge.org or tap the donate button on the app. If you prefer to give over the phone, our number is 1-888-333-6003.

Again, that's 1-888-333-6003. And thanks in advance for your partnership with us. Together, we're making a difference. As we wrap up today's program, we did some heavy thinking and lifting. You know, I gave you the literal meaning of the word guilt. I did the psychological meaning of guilt. We talked about false guilt, true guilt, guilt feelings. And then I gave you the theological meaning of guilt, real moral guilt. In other words, when we're actually guilty, we knew what was right and we didn't do it.

Or we knew what we shouldn't have done, but we did it anyway. And we're living in a day where even the idea of guilt, you know, are you guilting me, man? Or, oh, you said that and you made me feel guilty. Or, don't say that, one of our kids might have guilty feelings. The fact of the matter is that there are times when you do something wrong, when you think something wrong, when you say something that you know is wrong that violates God's standard, you should not only feel guilty, you are guilty, and so am I.

And there's a remedy for that. It's called forgiveness, it's Christ's work on the cross. However, it gets mixed up because we have family of origin issues and we have false guilt and we feel guilty for things that God doesn't say is wrong or bad, but we've been conditioned and trained. So what I want you to know, it gets very, very confusing and complex. And so the first step is to get clear on the true moral guilt, own it, face it, and receive God's forgiveness. And then in our next program, we're going to begin to talk about how do you sort of splice the true guilt from the false guilt and how do you live with freedom. The actual title of this message is, You Are Beautiful.

And I can hear some guys in the back of their mind going, hey buddy, I don't know what you're talking about, but I'm not real comfortable. Handsome would work, but not beautiful. You are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus unto a good work. And that word workmanship is his masterpiece, his poem, his tapestry. What I want you to know is that God has forgiven you by his grace for a beautiful, mind boggling, absolutely wonderful purpose and agenda that he's made you especially for.

But guilt makes you feel and makes you live as though you're not only unworthy, but you bring no value to life. In our next program, we're going to unpack why God sees you as beautiful and the purpose he has for your life. You don't want to miss it. At Living on the Edge, we're happy to let you know about an easy way to listen to our extended teaching podcast. Hear Chip anytime on Amazon's Alexa Echo and Echo Dot. Just say, Alexa, open Living on the Edge. You'll hear that day's extended teaching program anytime you want. Well, for Chip and everyone here, this is Dave Drouie saying thanks for joining us for this Edition of Living on the Edge.