Is Something Wrong With Me?

Today on Summit Life, Pastor J.D. Greer talks about guilt. Not all guilt and not all shame is bad. Sometimes guilt and shame are like pain. You wish your life could be pain-free, but pain is a gift to you. If you're leaning your hand against a hot stove, the pain lets you know that you're destroying your arm. I'm grateful for that kind of pain. Guilt can be God's messenger showing you that something's not right. Welcome to Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Greer.

I'm your host, Molly Vitovich. Let me ask you a question. Would you say that you're a pretty good person? I mean, sure, you have faults, but at least your heart's in the right place most of the time, right?

But that kind of begs the question of the day. If our hearts really are in the right place, then why do we keep doing wrong things? Why do we still hurt people, act selfishly, or lash out in anger?

Why don't our actions fit our ideals? Don't worry. You're not alone in asking.

And Pastor J.D. answers that question today on Summit Life with a message he titled, Is Something Wrong With Me? The very first question last week from Psalm 1 was, can I really be happy? And if so, how can I be happy?

This week, we're going to look at something that connects very closely to that question. I read something by a psychologist once who said that in order for the human soul to be happy, it has to feel safe, clean, and significant. And what he meant by that was that in order to be happy, we have to feel a certain sense of freedom. We've got to feel like we're valuable. We've got to feel like we don't need to walk around feeling ashamed or condemned. But many people, this psychologist said, are overshadowed by a lurking sense of judgment that just seems to hover over them. Sometimes it goes back to specific actions that they have taken, regret over a destroyed marriage, a destroyed family, selfish choices, and they can identify this is what this goes back to.

But he said other times you really can't identify what it is. It's just this kind of dark cloud where you feel like I'm not good enough. Or if people knew the real me, they wouldn't like me.

They would reject me. So I got to spend my life trying to prove that I actually am worthy and I have worth. One of the best literary depictions that I've ever seen of this, I've told you about, is in a little obscure book by a guy named Franz Kafka. The book was called The Trial. Basically what happens in the book is you get a guy who is accused of a crime, but he's never told what the crime is. So he goes from trial to trial, facing accusations, but it's never clear what he's being charged up. So in between the trial, you have his internal dialogue, him trying to figure out what he had done wrong.

So he goes through all these scenarios in his life. Maybe that was it. Maybe that led to this.

And maybe this happened over there. The last scene of the book, the warden in the jail where he is pulls out a knife and stabs him. That's the end of the book.

There's no resolution at all. But Kafka in his memoir said that he was trying to give a picture of the human soul. Whether the human soul believed in God or not, they seem to walk around with this sense that something's not right. That something's wrong. There's something wrong with me.

That's our question for this weekend. Is something actually wrong with me? And if so, is that what keeps me from really finding true happiness is that sense.

And how do I deal with it? David is going to open up Psalm 32 with the same word that opened up Psalm 1 from last weekend. If you remember, it's the word happy. Blessed is the man whose transgression is forgiven.

Blessed is the Hebrew ashray. It literally means happy. Happy is the one whose sin is forgiven, whose transgressions are covered. In this Psalm, he's going to connect happiness with forgiveness. He is going to say that there is in fact something wrong with you. And that feeling of shame or uneasiness has a grain of truth in it, even if it's been distorted.

And I'll explain that in a moment. And that in order to be happy, you have to deal with that feeling, but you're not going to deal with it in the way that you typically think that you should. So let's keep reading verse three. For when I kept silent, when I tried to ignore it, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. Verse four, for day and night, your hand was heavy upon me.

My strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Selah. Selah is a word that scholars say probably means stop and think about this. So let's do just that. Let's stop and think about that for a few minutes. Let me think about it out loud. The psalmist in verse three begins to look upward and he connects this feeling of unhappiness, this sense of condemnation to God.

And he is correct in doing that. You see, when Adam and Eve first sinned, the first emotion they felt was shame over their nakedness. And so feeling ashamed of their nakedness, they did what really anybody does when you feel naked. They tried to hide themselves. They made coverings for their nakedness and they hid in the bushes because normal people, that's what they do when they feel naked. I've told you that I have a recurring dream, takes place about every 18 months, where I show up somewhere to preach to some big large audience and I got nothing but my boxer shorts on. It's a terrifying dream because I don't want to show up somewhere underdressed or feeling naked. Normal people don't like to be exposed and naked in front of others.

All right? That feeling of soul nakedness is now ingrained in our souls and it goes back to our relationship with God. Not all shame is legitimate. Sometimes shame comes from suffering or abuse.

That has nothing to do with you. But we have a sense of soul judgment that comes from our separation from God and the realization that it connects to God as a gift from God. Not all guilt and not all shame is bad. Sometimes guilt and shame are like pain. You may think you wish your life could be pain-free, but pain is a gift to you. If you're leaning your hand against the hot stove, the pain lets you know that you're destroying your arm.

I'm grateful for that kind of pain. Guilt can be God's messenger showing you that something's not right and that's what this psalmist is experiencing. Maybe you are finally at a place now where you have for the first time in your life begun to see what your selfish actions have caused in the lives of others. Maybe you're sitting on the edge of a broken marriage. Maybe you're looking at relationships with kids that have been destroyed.

Maybe you're looking at a thrown away career. Maybe you are right now listening to me and you are incarcerated and for the first time you're seeing and feeling the consequences of your actions. For me, I remember this sense of shame coming on me the first time somebody really explained through the 10 commandments and explained what they actually meant, how they dealt with the heart. I just sort of looked at them like 10 rules that you'd try to be good at keeping at. Then the guy went through and explained they all had to do with heart attitudes.

When they got done, I realized I had not kept a single one of them. The first one, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. I'm like, there's like a hundred things that I've loved more than God. I've paid attention to more than God.

I've cared about more than God. Then he gets down to command four or five where it says honor your father and mother. He explains that this is God's way of saying honor the authorities that God has placed in your life and be submissive to them. I was like, there is not a single authority God has ever put in my life that I did not resent and rebel against. Do not covet.

Don't wish that other things that people have actually belong to you and you wish that what they had is your property. The whole time he's talking, I'm like, get the murder. Come on, get the murder, get the murder, get the murder, get the murder. Cause I'll pass that one. Then he explains, you know, Matthew chapter five, Jesus said, if you hate somebody in your heart and you desire their harm, you're guilty in your heart of committing murder. And I'm like, I'm over for 10.

If you get a zero out of 10 on the final exam, you're not passing the course. And I was like, what is this sense of shame and condemnation that I had before God? I read of one philosopher who came to this realization from simply reflecting on the fact that if there were a God, that God had observed every single thing in his life.

Jean Paul Sartre, who was definitely not a Christian. He says, if you had the vantage point of looking through a keyhole in on somebody else's life and you can observe them without them knowing, he says, that would be a feeling of mastery and power, right? The feeling came over me that if there was a God, that's exactly what he was doing with me. And there was nothing I had ever done, said, or thought that was not recorded and may not be brought back up one day that was terrifying to me.

And one of the reasons I did not want to believe in God. How would you feel if suddenly I was able to call your name and up on the screen behind me, I was able to play the last 24 hours of your thoughts, or I were able to say, here's what's happened over the last month, the last year, you would be mortified, right? I had a friend who, first day of middle school, one of the older kids that is middle school, comes up to him and gives him a little card and on it is a 1-900 number. Now, this is going back a ways, but do y'all remember a 1-900 number? Back in the days for the internet and all that stuff, 1-900, it's essentially like phone porn. And so my friend had no idea what it was, goes home, dials the number, hears what's happening on the other end of the line, hangs up the phone, picks up the phone a second time, dials the number, listens to it all the way through, hangs it up, picks it up a third time, calls a friend of his because it's Friday night and his parents are going out, calls a friend of his and says, bro, you got to come over here now.

I got something you need to listen to. He said between Friday afternoon when I'd been given that number and Saturday morning, I dialed that 1-900 number 58 times. He said, my dad, the next morning calls me into the living room and said, dad, you've been calling, son, you've been calling dirty phone numbers?

No, sir, daddy. I've never called a dirty phone number. Son, I picked up the phone. I hit redial. It dialed a dirty phone number.

Why are you lying to me? My friend said at that point, I knew I could not deny it. I broke down. I started to cry and said, daddy, I'm so sorry. This older kid gave me the number and told me it was fun. I should call it.

He said, I called the number. And as soon as I, the lady, this is wicked woman, dad, on the other end of the line and dad, as soon as I heard what she was doing, I hung up the phone and I'd never done a again. I only did it one time and I'll never, ever do it again. His dad said, well, it sounds like an honest mistake.

I'll let you. Just don't do it again. My friend said, as a seventh grader, I just had no concept of that thing they call the phone bill that is going to show up and said, until a month later, the principal comes on the intercom, calls me out of class. I get in the principal's office and say, what's wrong? He says, just go see your mom. And he says, I walked out to the parking lot and my mom's sitting in the car and the door's open and they're on the seat where I'm supposed to sit is a phone bill for over $500 with 58-1-900 number calls on it.

He said, the idea that everything that goes in and out of that phone is being recorded is something that was beyond my mind. If you knew that all these things that you had done in secret, all these things that you thought were hidden would one day be exposed, is that not terrifying? The realization of that is a gift of God. It is God's mercy to you.

It is a gift of God. That's why for 300 years, the Christian church has sung the song Amazing Grace that has the verse that says, tis grace that taught my heart to fear. Then grace my fears relieved. How many of you think of grace that being the first thing that it does in your heart? Is it makes you afraid?

Why? Cause it's like the light of God that comes into a dark dank room for the first time. The first thing that'll happen is you start to see everything that's messed up. You see before you can clean it up.

You've got to see what tore it up. And then you can come face to face with the brokenness and then God can begin to heal it. But until you begin to open your eyes to it, until grace teaches your heart to fear, you'll never have your fears relieved. Thanks for listening to Summit Life with Pastor JD Greer. We'll get back to today's teaching from Psalm 32 in a moment.

But first, I wanted to let you know about our brand new featured resource that we've created just for you. It's designed to go along with our current Summit Life teaching series in the book of Psalms and the next, which will be based specifically in Psalm 23. It's called Goodness in the Middle, and it's an eight part study through that famous 23rd Psalm. You've probably heard Psalm 23 before. You might even have it memorized, but we believe it's worth a closer look to really soak up the rich truth that fills that beloved part of scripture. This will make a fantastic supplement to our Summit Life broadcast as a part of your own devotional study. And like many of our resources, it's a fantastic resource to give to a friend or a family member, especially one who might need some encouragement. We'd love to send you a copy with your gift of $35 or more.

Give us a call now at 866-335-5220 or give online at jdgreer.com. So the psalmist goes on. The first sign the light of God is coming into you is that day and night you feel like your hand is heavy on me and your strength is dried up. Psalmist goes on verse five. So I acknowledged my sin to you and I did not cover my iniquity. I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord. And then you forgave the iniquity of my sin, Selah. Stop and think.

So let's do that again. He's telling us, begin to tell us how to be happy. He's going to give us five ways here. Number one, to find happiness, he said, you got to be honest about your sin. You got to be honest about your sin.

I didn't cover my sin. That's a clear reference back to the Garden of Eden because that's what they had done in the Garden of Eden. They had id. The first thing that God did when he came to them was he called them out from hiding. He made them uncover themselves. And after they had come out from hiding and uncovered themselves, it was then that he dealt with their sin. And he did that by killing an animal and making them coverings from the animal's skin, giving them a picture of how he would deal with their sin in the future. In order for God to cover their sin, you see, they had to first uncover it. That's an important lesson.

In fact, here's how I encourage you to write that down. Cover your sin and God will expose it. Expose your sin and God will cover it. Cover your sin and God will expose it.

Expose it and God will cover it, which is closely related to number two. To find happiness, you must own your sin. You've got to own your sin. Four times in verse five, he uses the word my. My sin, my iniquity, my transgressions. The first thing we typically do after our sin is exposed and we can't hide it anymore, what do we start doing?

We start justifying it. After the first sin in the Garden of Eden, after God brings Adam out from hiding and says, Adam, what have you done? Adam said, well, the woman that you gave me, she made me do this. In one sentence, he blamed two people. He blamed the woman and he blamed God for giving him the woman. You see the original blame shifter. Now, what does that look like for us in our lives?

It shows up in statements like this. Well, the reason I'm like this is because of this terrible situation I'm in. I've been treated badly. That justifies my bad actions where I've never had the privileges that other people have had. I've worked hard and I deserve more than I've been given. So that justifies me taking a little bit over here on the side or my wife is not responsive to me sexually or my husband does not honor me. And so that justifies me looking outside for some fulfillment or what I'm doing is really not that bad, you know, especially compared to other people or compared to how much good I've done throughout my life. I've made enough deposits in the righteousness bank account.

I can afford a few withdrawals. David is saying, you will never be happy that way. David's not doing any of that. He's like, yes, other people sinned against me, but I made my own choices in how I responded. It was not the woman God that you gave to me.

It's not the circumstances you put me in. I wasn't just hanging out with the wrong crowd. In fact, the reason I hung out with the wrong crowd is because I was the wrong crowd.

There was a right crowd and there was a wrong crowd. I chose to be friends with the wrong crowd because I felt more comfortable in the wrong crowd than I did in the right crowd, which is why I'm as guilty as to blame as they are. I got to quit blaming everybody. My choices are my responsibility. In the words of Led Zeppelin, ain't nobody's fault, but mine. Led Zeppelin fans here. All right, you got to own your sin.

You got to own it. You ever have somebody apologize to you by saying, you know, I'm sorry that I did this, but you, and then begins to lay off, you know, all the things that you've done wrong. And really you realize that what they're giving you is not an apology. What they're giving you is a justification.

Let me jot this down. God's forgiveness begins where blame shifting ends. God's forgiveness begins where blame shifting ends and you got to take off all the justification.

You got to lay it all down in order for you to find that happiness of forgiveness. I got a friend who's about my age and has a son about my son's age, three, four years old. And this, you know, his wife asked him to give a son a bath. And this, you know, kids also at the age like my son who likes to put on any number of, you know, outfits and uniforms and run around the house, Superman, the flash, whatever. So he's got, his kid's favorite one at the time was a shark outfit. You know, I guess he likes the movie Jaws or probably didn't let his kid watch Jaws, but you know what I mean?

It's like, you know, he likes sharks. So he says, son, get in the bath. And so he starts to climb in the bath with the shark outfit on. He's like, no, no, you can't get in the bath with the shark outfit on. But dad, I like the shark outfit. I want to, I want to swim in the water with the shark outfit. Son, you can't get clean if you got the shark outfit on. Dad, sharks like water and sharks swim in the water. So I'm keeping this thing on.

And his dad said, son, if you don't get naked, you'll never get cleaned. Now that's what I would say to you this weekend, spiritually speaking. I need a bunch of y'all to get naked, spiritually speaking.

All right. I need you to lay off these garments of justification, lay off these stories of all the things that you feel like justify your sin. You need to lay off the garments of hiding and you need to expose your sin and own your sin because that's where forgiveness begins. Number three, to find happiness, you must learn to hate your sin and not just its consequences.

Divine happiness, you got to learn to hate your sin and not just its consequences. The word used for confess implies something beyond what our English word confess means. Confess in Greek means that you see things from the perspective of the one that you've wronged. Not only are you admitting that you've done wrong, you are changing your perspective to the perspective of the person that you wronged. You see, in English, you can confess something and not really feel any differently about it. You can just admit that you did that. The classic expression of this is, if I've offended you, then I'm sorry.

You know as well as I do. That means I'm not really sorry for what I did. I'm sorry that you're upset about it. That's not repentance.

That is a cheap, selfish attempt at peacemaking. Somebody like, oh, you're just scrapping my marriage right now. Yeah, I get that. That's my wife and I do this all the time. She will not let me say this to her. I'm sorry that you're upset about that because that means I don't feel any differently about it.

I'm just sorry that you got an issue with it and that's probably your issue, not mine. Confess in this psalm means more than that. It means now, God, I see things from your perspective in confessing.

I acknowledge that what I've done is wrong. Many people confess their sin and turn from it because the consequences get painful. They get caught. They're embarrassed. They pay a penalty.

Life becomes painful. Their attitude toward the sin itself still has not changed. They're just uncomfortable with the consequences that came from that.

That's not real confession either. You see the imagery in verse nine? Look at it down in verse nine. Don't be like the mule without understanding which must be curbed with bit and bridle or it will not stay near you. When a mule consents to go with you, it's not because the mule loves you. It's not because he just wants to be where you are. It's not because he's consenting to your superior wisdom.

It's because the bit in its mouth that you're pulling is painful and he wants to avoid that pain. And the psalmist is saying don't be like that with God because God is not simply looking for people to obey like mules. He wants people to obey from their hearts. God is not just after obedience, you see. If he was after obedience, he would have created robots.

He's after a whole new kind of obedience, an obedience that grows out of desire, an obedience that seeks righteousness because it craves righteousness, an obedience that seeks to be near God because it loves God. A lot of people avoid sin, avoid sin because they are afraid of what others might think about them if they got caught. That's not genuine repentance either because you don't hate the sin.

You just don't want to be thought of badly by others. Here's a question for you. Again, I just kind of loosen your mind a little bit. If I could call your name right now and on the screen behind me begin to list out your sins.

Of just the last week. And just display them. Just the thought of that would mortify you. And then you would change and you would be like I'm not doing that anymore and I'm cleaning up my act and I'm turning over a new leaf and I don't doubt there's a single one of you in here that that would not work on if we could really do that. Yet, just about every one of you in here knows that God knows everything. So the idea that God knows it all is not a sufficient deterrent for you to change but the idea of other people knowing about it is a deterrent to change. Doesn't that show you that other people's opinions have much weightier place in your heart than God does? Doesn't it show you that the reason you don't sin has little to do with a lack of love for God or doesn't have to do with a hatred for sin?

It has to do with the fact that you just don't want to be embarrassed. When your attitude, your hard attitude toward the sin itself has not changed. You have not really confessed.

Number four, to find happiness you must actually change direction. You look down in verses 10 and 11 you'll see the psalmist has changed. He's talking about a new trust in God. He's talking about a new joy he has in God. A new surrender in God. Where there has been no change there's been no real confession. And just so you guys know, listen, where there is no change with the confession, that confession wearies God. Some of you got just enough distorted perverted church culture where you feel like after you've done something wrong that you can go to church and kind of make it up to God just by being here.

Right? That wearies God. I mean every year this time we got students, I know of students who get drunk on Saturday night and then show up on Sunday morning with a hangover and while you're sitting in here you're like, I hate Sundays. I feel so guilty. And God in heaven is sitting up here going, I hate Sundays too. I hate Sundays because you honor me with your lips but your hearts are far from me. Listen, you are always welcome here regardless of what last night was. You always are. But I need you to understand that what God wants is not your attendance, what he wants is your repentance.

You don't have to be perfect. But every time you fall, which will be more than you'd like, get back up and look to God. A challenging message from Pastor J.D. Greer on Summit Life.

Here at J.D. Greer Ministries we are so grateful that we've already met some of our 2023 goals and expanded Summit Life into brand new areas so even more people can hear the rich gospel teaching we have every day. J.D., what are some of those new areas for us?

Yeah, that's right. We had a goal for this year of expanding into places like Atlanta, Dallas, Phoenix, Houston, San Antonio. To be honest with you, when these opportunities were put in front of us, we did not have the resources to obtain them but we just sensed in our spirit that this is what God wanted us to do and to go through that door. So we stepped out in faith and the good news is that we have a listening audience. You, many people from other cities around the country who responded with generosity and they believe in the kind of things they hear here and they want other people to hear them. They were so generous in how they donated to Summit Life so that we could go into these new cities.

We're already hearing great stories, great reports of how God is at work there. We want to invite you to continue partnering with us by sharing this program, sharing our free daily devotionals and our podcasts, or by giving financially so that we can keep offering everything that we do free of charge and to be able to go into these areas. So go to J.D. Greer.com and find out how you can be a part of the ministry here at Summit Life.

Thanks, J.D. We'd love to get you a copy of Goodness in the Middle, an eight-part study in Psalm 23, with your gift of $35 or more to this ministry. You can give right now by calling us at 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220.

Or give online by heading over to J.D. Greer.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch.

So glad to have you with us and be sure to tune in next time as we take another look at the question, is something wrong with me? We'll see you Friday for Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.