Restoration 2018:  Our Picture of God

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Restoration Ministry

Dee Casper

Do You Want to be Made Well?

Sweet Jesus, I thank you that you became just like me, that you're acquainted with my experience, and yet were without sin, but can offer strength and peace to me in my woundedness.

Lord, I pray that you would be here this evening in a mighty and powerful way.

As we cover a heavy topic, I pray that you would minister to our hearts and that we would receive a great, great blessing.

Lord, I cannot do what needs to be done ever, but I feel my weakness even more this evening.

So I pray that you would send the spirit to do for these people what I cannot, and I pray that you would show us your glory just now, in Jesus' name, amen.

What I'm going to be sharing with you this evening is based largely upon some principles I've come to better understand through a ministry called Straight to the Heart and a friend of mine named Paul Conniff.

He's a licensed family and marriage therapist and an Adventist pastor, but he wrote a book called The Hidden Half of the Gospel that has radically transformed the way I view the life of Jesus and what it means to me individually.

And what I'll be covering with you this evening are some principles from that book, but the real power is found in the prayer ministry that he runs.

So I'm just giving you principles and teachings, but I would strongly encourage you to check out their website, hiddenhalf.org, and you can find more information there.

All of that being said, many of us may find ourselves on this sin and forgiveness cycle, right?

We mess up, we ask for forgiveness, and we just can't get off that hamster wheel, right?

Just the cycle that continues and we can't figure out why it is that we're just not seeming to make any progress and I think that having an encounter with the living Christ is what we all are in desperate need of in an even deeper way.

And what this has helped me to better understand is how much Jesus could relate to me and what he offers.

And so we'll be covering some of that this evening.

What is the way in which he's engaging in warfare against you and against me?

Well, what he does is he sets us up to be hurt so that you can whisper lies in the first-person language that I'm not good enough, that I'm worthless, that I'm never going to improve, that I'm never going to be whatever.

So he sets us up to be hurt and then define ourselves based on what's been done to us.

So whenever we start to believe these lies, they cause negative feelings, leading us to self-medicate those feelings in damaging ways.

Next, he leads us to view ourselves as nothing more than our negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Feeds us lies, then causes us to take action to numb the pain that we're feeling from those lies, and then causes us to basically just identify ourselves with the things that we're now doing.

And so he sets us up to be hurt, and then he sets us up to hurt ourselves with addictive medicating behavior.

And I kind of alluded to this in my testimony on Sabbath evening, but my experience is 1 just like this.

My parents got divorced when I was 3 or 4, for those who weren't here.

When I was about 3 or 4, my mom, that was her second marriage, the guy she married after my dad beat her up really bad.

My grandfather dropped me off at my mom's apartment at the projects.

When she opens the door, she's purple, she's swollen, she's blue.

And as a 5 year old child, just fear overtook me and I was just horrified.

Now I never cried myself to sleep, but immediately I started doing things that were just destructive medicating behavior because the amazing thing about the human psyche is that you can actually be medicating pain without even knowing that you're feeling pain.

And so what I was doing for years was running to different things and habits and addictions and stealing at the age of 5 and lying perpetually at the age of 5 just to create some sense of security of me being in control of a situation.

And that process continued for many, many years.

And it's because I didn't understand what I was going through.

I didn't understand how to process it that early of an age, plus the divorce of my parents.

Those 2 things just set me into a tailspin of addictive, destructive behavior, right?

Couldn't function well in school, and that was why.

I mentioned this again during my mom, when I told the testimony, that our view of God is based largely upon our experience with our parents.

So my mom, whenever she was born, her parents got divorced and the mom basically abandoned her and left.

So she's been rejected by her first mother.

When my grandfather remarried, the woman that he married has never really, at least from mom's perspective, made her feel like she's her daughter.

And so mom has been basically feeling as if she's been rejected by 2 mothers.

And so because she has this vacancy, God intended, it says in the Bible that it is not good for man to be alone.

For 1, you learn things in the covenant of marriage experientially that you cannot learn any other way.

I'm not a married man, so there's certain things I can give a good explanation of it, but to know experientially, I can't.

The idea of 2 living for the betterment of each other, being willing to lay aside what you want to live for the betterment of someone else, and thinking with 1 mind.

These were meant, and whenever there's so much love between these 2 parties that they wanna bring life into the world, they have children, right?

These are aspects of the character and nature of God that you begin to better understand by experience in the covenant of marriage, right?

You're learning things about God that I can't know experientially.

And so what ends up happening is whenever 1 of our parents fails us, those aspects of the character of God and the nature of God are foreign to us.

So if you have an absentee father, it's very difficult for you to kind of resonate with the idea of the paternal love of God.

For my mom, it was very difficult for her to resonate to the nurturing love of God, because she didn't really have a nurturing maternal figure in her life.

Both parents are bringing aspects of the nature of God into that experience.

So she was looking in all the wrong places.

She's actually been married and divorced 7 times.

And she was running to relationships to try to fill that void, that vacancy that she was feeling in her heart, not knowing that something else was available to her.

But as I alluded to this last weekend, Jesus is husband number 8, Amen?

She's fell in love with a man named Jesus, the 1 she's been looking for all along.

And she's walking in the light that she's been given and she's growing and I'm proud of her and I'm proud of Jesus for not giving up on her or me.

So the point is that our experience within our family unit has a large part to do with how we set our compass on who God is and how he thinks about us.

And if people fail us in those roles It makes it harder for us.

And this is 1 of the reasons why God hates divorce.

It depicts disunity in the Godhead for 1, and 2, it causes confusion for the kids.

So all that being said, what I'd like to do is, so I can relate to brokenness.

The thing was, I did not know that I had all this brokenness in my life.

I mentioned in my testimony on Sabbath afternoon that I had a rough encounter with a friend of mine at a camp meeting, didn't really want to look at myself in the way that I needed to.

I was too proud to ask him what it was that he saw about me that bothered him.

And this book, Paul Conniff's book, was offered to me that summer.

I didn't read it, I thought other people had problems.

That's why I'm in ministry, is to help other people have problems because I don't have problems, right?

And I was gravely mistaken, in case you're wondering.

And it wasn't until God in his mercy brought Paul Conniff to my house.

Brought him over to my place, cooked dinner for him, and then he started walking me through the principles of his ministry and how it operates, and I thought, I've never heard that in my life, but that's right.

This is what I've been looking for my whole life.

I've been in ministry for 5 years at this stage.

And I realized that whatever this guy has is what I've been looking for all along.

Just this picture of Jesus and an answer to brokenness.

And he said that every 1 of the addictions we have in life is us numbing pain that we're feeling.

And I thought, he's right, but where's the pain?

Because remember, I never had to cry myself to sleep, I never went to counseling, never did any of that.

Yeah, but do you think that I wanted to know until this stage?

Back to Menu

Do You Want to be Made Well?

Transcript

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Related

Plenary

When Temptations Return

1h 18m

The Shadow’s Light

Don’t Forget Where you Came From

55m

Preparing for the Latter Rain: The Judgment Hour Message

Prepare To Meet Your God

1h 15m

Overcoming Addictions (Evening Meetings)

Gaining the Victory

50m

Plenary

Why Many Have Left

38m

Amazing Discoveries Reveal the Future

Antichrist Cult: Will You Spot the Final Fraud

1h

Prayer by Gem Castor

Gentle Healer

54m

The Strength of Vulnerability

1h 5m

The Silence of God

43m

Personal Testimony: From Islam To Adventism

1h 19m

How to Overcome the Devil- Part 2

55m

Restoration 2023

The Zombie Apocalypse

1h 21m

Sound Doctrine