Let Me Control Your Life Part 1

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Some people are so consumed with their own importance that they seek to control the lives of those around them to prove their worth. Today, we turn the light of Scripture on the lives of so-called control freaks by examining the life of King Saul of Israel.

To learn more, stay with us. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, will you be explaining how people become obsessed with dominating others' lives? Yes, Dave, and often that happens because of their background, because of the home in which they were born. And I need to say that if there's any message that is absolutely critical in this series, this might be one of them, because we're living at a time when there are so many unhappy marriages because one partner wants to dominate and control the other.

And they don't understand the roots of this, and they don't understand how destructive it can be. And by the way, speaking of Saul, he's a goldmine of psychological insight. So I think that what we're going to be covering today is going to be very helpful. And you know, I've written a book entitled Managing Your Emotions, God's Good Gifts Gone Wrong. In it, I discuss love, depression, rejection, loneliness, anger, and so forth. For a gift of any amount, this book can be yours. Here's what you do.

Go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Now let us open our Bibles and let us look at the life of Saul, and perhaps we will even see ourselves. Some of you know that on the Oprah Winfrey show, there was a story recently about a couple where the wife wanted to control the husband. In some respects, that wasn't an entirely new story, but what gave it interest is the extent to which she wanted to do it. She told him how to comb his hair, how to hold his fork, what to eat, what he couldn't eat. She kept a calendar to see how he was doing so that she could keep tabs, notebooks full of rules, fold your jeans in half, mine in thirds.

The one I like the best is never give yourself anything without asking me what I want first. Where does all this business of control come from anyway? It actually comes from the Garden of Eden. You know, when the serpent said to the woman, you shall be as God, knowing good and evil.

I'm God over my little turf, you're God over your little turf, and because our turfs intersect, we can't get along and I want to control you and you want to control me. And so control lies at the heart of sin. Sin, in fact, could be spoken of as self-will. Sin is setting up my kingdom instead of God's. Sin is being willing to do anything to protect myself and to exalt myself and to be king over my little territory, whether it's big or small. Jesus said that it is the Gentiles, he says, which exercise authority. I like the translation that says they exercise dominion over people, but he says it should not be so among you because, he said, you should be servants.

It should be different in the church than in the world. You know, you think of the essence of sin. It says in the book of Proverbs that there are sins of the spirit.

Proverbs chapter 6, these six things the Lord hates, yea, seven are an abomination unto him. Let's just tick off a few and see how control lies at the heart of them. Haughty eyes, the Bible says God hates, because I want to control what people think of me. A lying tongue, I want to control what people believe.

Hands that shed blood, I want to protect what it is that I think I have, and on and on it goes. And at the root it is this whole idea of control. We are all born controllers.

You've heard the expression control freaks. That's somebody who is a controller to a huge extent, as we shall see today in the scriptures. As you know, this is a series of messages titled Why Good People Do Bad Things, and we've talked about shame and anger and addictions and all these things. Our purpose in the series of messages is to shine God's word into the human heart and to see it in all of its ugliness, and then to understand God's message of grace and redemption and how we should respond to it. I'd also like to say a word about psychology. Much of psychology is an enemy of Christianity. But there is a part of psychology that is helpful. Psychology, for the most part, is based on the idea that we aren't sinners and also that God is not the foundation of all things and the answer to the human need.

That's why it is such a visceral enemy of the Bible. But there's a part of it that is very helpful and that is its analysis of human behavior. You read some of these books and you say, yeah, I know somebody just like that. There are people who have spent their life studying human behavior. So they give us insights even if they don't have the right answers. Today I may at times mention a psychological term and I want to point out it's not because I've bought into psychology.

It's just that I sometimes am fascinated by the accuracy with which human behavior has been able to be analyzed. At the end of the day, what we're going to do is talk from the Bible. I'm going to preach about a man who turned evil and we're going to try to find out why he turned evil, but we're also going to speak about his evil controlling and how someone reacted to that controller and the lessons that God taught him in the midst of the conflict.

That's where we're going. So at the end of the day, we're going to have a word from God for all controllers, but also for the controlled. You see, there is some things such as what we sometimes call a codependent controller. Just going to spend a few moments so that we understand what it is that we're talking about and recognizing these kinds of human behavior. Codependent controller is somebody brought up in an alcoholic home, a home that is disordered.

He's absolutely, he or she is determined that they're going to do everything right. Therefore, they become very controlling to hide their shame and minimize their pain. They tend to congeal, to use guilt, to manipulate. They want to criticize and nothing in their life seems to be right unless they really deal with this before God. Now when you begin to ask, how does control manifest itself? Well, the list goes on endlessly, but let me give you a few examples.

First of all, there is the let's deal with your sin controller. I know a young man who would make friends of young ladies during the dating process. He would find out all of their secrets, all of their sins, and then in the end he would use those against them as a means of control.

It was leverage so that he could get to them and control of them. There is also the don't forget I'm your husband controller and the Bible says wives are to be subject to their husbands and their husbands who take that out of context and use those verses in the worst possible way. There is the I will control my body controller, the person who is so insecure regarding the way in which they appear that they will have an eating disorder and starve themselves to death still thinking that they look overweight. There's the obsessive compulsive controller who wants everything in his hands and there's this unstoppable repeated patterns of behavior where they expect to control events and other people. Having been sinned against, they sin against others by exercising this control.

It's all a mistake of course. When will you and I finally come to the conclusion that we can't change people, that only God can? And how much better it is to simply say I can't change human nature because even if people do what I tell them to do or think they should or criticize them when I turn my back they're going to go back to their old ways anyway. Of course parents have the responsibility of quote controlling their children using that word in the right way. But there comes a time even when parents have to simply give their children to God. I've known parents and the child may be older and on his own and they just keep saying you know you should be coming to church or I told him he should be doing this, I told him that he should be doing that, I told him. You want to just smile and look into their face and say well is it working? Is it working?

And the answer is no of course it's not working. How much better to give the child to God and to simply say God only you can change them and I will love them and it's all up to you. I think Harold Blackaby has a point when he says there are many children in whose lives God cannot work because the parents are constantly getting in the way. Well there are other kinds of control. There's the disordered controller and this is what is sometimes known as borderline personalities because there are people when you meet them you think that they are normal and you get to know them and they aren't normal at all.

In fact because they are impulsive they have a tendency to addictions, they dread being alone, they're flighty, they run from place to place seeking significance, they can't hold down a job and disorder is the name of the game and so they to them disorder is important because they constantly keep people off balance. Nobody quite knows where he's at with them and that's very important because it masks their own deep unmet need that they refuse to face and so they control things by mood shifts, by constantly changing the rules. One man I know his wife made him fried eggs, he threw them on the floor. You should know that I don't like fried eggs. Okay well the next time she made them boiled as he had wanted and then he threw the boiled eggs on the floor and on and on it goes because the disorder within him constantly is there and as a result of that these sorts of people when you're with them or if you have to live with them as some people do you'll find that you can't have people over to the home even because you're constantly walking on eggshells because you don't know what their mood will be, you don't know what kind of phantom illness they may have at the last moment. Now also these folks like all the rest of us are very slow to accept their faults.

In fact they can't. The reason I speak about these things is because in counseling you see this all the time I know a situation in which a Christian man is determined to destroy his daughter and her husband in Christian ministry. He's determined to do it and he uses manipulation, control. When the daughter was growing up he would slap her which no man should ever do to a daughter but he would slap her and if she went and told her mother then he'd say why did you tell your mother it is you that is making your mother and I fight. All responsibility rests with the child.

He receives none of it. Now what I'd like to do today is to look at evil by looking at an evil man in the scriptures. You say well when do you make the transition? The folks that we've described so far are bad because they've not dealt with their own insecurities before God but when does a person actually become evil and I'd like to give you a definition and then turn to the scriptures and then see the answer for the controller as well as the controlled. I believe that a person becomes evil when he destroys those around him for the purpose of self-protection and self-exaltation. When somebody does that we can say they're not just not bad they're just not struggling with sin as all of us do.

That person is evil. I want you to take your Bibles now and let us look at King Saul of the Old Testament. King Saul many ways incredibly gifted that's the thing that makes them such an interesting study. Very very gifted and what I'd like to do very briefly and this has to be brief is to give you characteristics of a man who turned from being a relatively good king at one time winning tremendous battles and receiving a lot of adulation to being a man that we would define definitely as evil. What happened in the process?

Let me give you the characteristics. You remember in chapter 13 of 1 Samuel Saul is supposed to wait for Samuel before sacrifices are offered because only the priest was supposed to offer the sacrifices but Samuel was late. Saul is desperate because he fears that somehow the Philistines are going to get the upper hand on him so he goes ahead and does it in violation of the commandment of the Lord.

Look at what the text says and today by the way we're going to hurry over this man's life all kinds of chapters just hitting some high points. I feel as if I'm cheating you as a congregation in doing it that quickly but I'm not if you were to go home and to read the whole story of Saul because he is indeed a very interesting person. So Samuel comes to him then and this is chapter 13 verse 14. Samuel is speaking because you disobeyed the word of the Lord your kingdom shall not endure the Lord has sought out for himself a man after his own heart and the Lord has appointed him as a ruler over his people because you have not kept what the Lord has commanded you your kingdom shall not endure and Saul said okay if God takes the kingdom from me he is God and therefore I resign. Oh boy Saul is going to hold on to that kingdom.

What is the first characteristic? The first characteristic of this evil man is he is obsessed with possessing the kingdom. He is going to hold on to that kingdom until his knuckles turn white. He is going to hold on to that kingdom until the day he dies because he will not acknowledge God as king to give it to whomsoever he will.

If you ask the question why do good people do evil things that puts our finger on the heart of it the unwillingness to submit to God as the ruler of our kingdom. Now of course we're not kings in the sense of Saul but our kingdom can be our career. We've seen people hang on to their careers long after they should have given up long ago. We've seen that happen.

I've seen pastors continue to be pastors of churches even though the churches were splitting and fragmenting and there were all these difficulties and even after he has lost his mandate to be able to rule and to be able to be a pastor he hangs on until everything around him is destroyed because he does not believe that the kingdom belongs to God it belongs to him. It can be your career. It can be your money. The kingdom can be your giftedness. All of those things can be our kingdom and if we do not recognize that these things come from God we're going to want to possess and to control and to hang on and not give up and that is so going to distort us that we're on the verge of becoming evil.

Let me give you a second characteristic insane jealousy. Look at chapter 18 verses 7 and 8. 18 verses 7 and 8. You remember David now has killed Goliath and by the way Goliath was no problem at all it was Saul in David's life that was the problem but you'll notice that the women probably they should not have done this after David returned it says in verse 7 of chapter 18 Saul has slain his thousands and David is tens of thousands then Saul became very angry for this saying displeased him and he said they have ascribed to David ten thousands but to me they have ascribed thousands what more can he have but the kingdom and Saul looked at David with suspicion from that day on. If we had time it's just fascinating to see Saul's paranoia always thinking that David was ready to steal the kingdom David was waiting for God he was not looking for a good time to steal the kingdom but Saul is so paranoid because he's so insanely jealous just like you and I can be if there's a younger understudy beneath us and the totem pole who is doing much better than we are and who's receiving greater adulation and greater success there's something within us that wants us to destroy those who make us look bad and that's where we begin to cross the line and become evil once again it comes down to this is the kingdom God's or is it ours? Saul saw this as such a threat let me say also number three obsessive anger notice it says in verse 10 now it came about on the next day that an evil spirit from God came mightily upon Saul and he raved in the midst of the house while David was playing the harp with his hand as usual and a spear was in Saul's hand and Saul hurled the spear for he thought I will pin David to the wall but David escaped from his presence twice now Saul was afraid of David for the Lord was with him but had departed from Saul and Saul absolutely cannot handle it he is the one who's going to take now the spear and try to kill him he is obsessed you say well why did the evil spirit come from the Lord where else do evil spirits come from that might be a surprise for you to hear from me but God is the controller of the demons of this world they can only do they cannot so much as wiggle unless God allows them to and what God was doing is judging Saul and saying Saul in light of the fact that you don't believe that the kingdom is mine I'm going to drive you to this insane schizophrenia not all schizophrenia may be demonic but Saul's was and there are going to be moments now when you're going to be in these moods when nothing is going to be able to calm you except the playing of David's harp and there's going to be times when you're going to be in distress and when you're going to be in convulsion of spirit because of the judgment of God you do not admit that the kingdom is mine and you're hanging on to something that isn't yours God is going to drive them to despair you say well how can Saul kill a boy like David what you have to understand is when people give themselves to evil they no longer have feelings a father who abuses his children people say well doesn't he love his kid can't he hear the plaintive cries of this little boy and the answer is no he cannot for he has zoned out his emotions have shut down well this is pastor luther and that's scary isn't it the fact that there are people whose emotions have been shut down you know I've written a book entitled managing your emotions God's good gifts gone wrong on the one hand you have those who deny their emotions and I've just been talking about them in this message they stuff them into their soul on the other hand you have people who are totally controlled by their emotions we are very complex beings aren't we God has given us emotions and I think it's very important that we learn how to manage them now this is the last week we are making this resource available and we're making it available because we think it will be of help by the way it also comes with questions at the end of each chapter for a gift of any amount this book can be yours managing your emotions God's good gifts gone wrong and here's what you can do to contact us go to rtwoffer.com rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337 would you remember as you pray for us and as you share the gospel of Jesus Christ with others that we're living in a world that is so broken we need to give direction to a nation and nations that have lost their way you connect with us today go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337 it's time again for you to ask Pastor Lutzer a question you may have about the Bible or the Christian life the issue of alcohol in a Christian's life has come up once again this time from Beverly in Illinois she writes our church is struggling with some issues in our constitution our pastor has been speaking on gray areas in the Bible and this has sparked a huge interest and brought much divisiveness among the congregation one of the issues being discussed and over which the board is divided is that our church covenant takes a stand against anyone joining the church that uses alcohol our pastor says alcohol in moderation is not condemned in the Bible however he does not use alcohol himself we have some who will not become members because they don't want to sign the covenant with that stipulation in the document well Beverly thank you so much for writing and of course you know that you've brought up an issue that has often been debated in Christian circles my preference of course would be that no one touch alcohol that's my personal preference and that's the way in which I live but we have to face the reality that in our society sometimes even among Christians drinking has become more pervasive strictly speaking the Bible does not forbid wine now I might assume that the wine that is spoken of is quite different than the stronger drinks that we have today but what the Bible does do is strongly condemn drunkenness you know I think that we have to have the maturity to realize that Christians can differ on this point we've been to Europe many times and virtually all of the Christians there drink wine or beer without a twinge of conscience they don't even think about it being wrong I don't stand in condemnation of them for many of them are filled with a spirit and they walk with God and they are godly but they do view this matter differently I pray that this will not divide your church your church covenant should be worded with a strong warning against alcohol but also I think give some latitude as members of the congregation may have a different conscience about it don't split over this issue some wise counsel once again from Dr. Erwin Lutzer if you'd like to have your question answered go to our website at rtwoffer.com and click on ask pastor Lutzer or you can call us with your question at 1-888-218-9337. You can write to us at running to win 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard Chicago Illinois 60614. Running to win is all about helping you find God's roadmap for your race of life control freaks are obsessed with themselves it's sad but true by subjugating others they seek to elevate their own importance next time on our broadcast more characteristics of spear throwers those people who want to control your life running to win is sponsored by the Moody Church.