The Sharing Choice

We are in the final week of Life’s Healing choices. So far we have looked at 5 choices we can make with God’s help to move towards victory in our lives.

1st choice: Reality Choice where we realize that we are not God and admit that we are powerless to control our tendency to to the wrong thing and my life is unmanageable.

We admit that no matter how hard we try, we can’t stop doing the things that cause us problems.

2nd choice: Hope Choice - We earnestly believe that God exists, that I matter to Him, & that He has the power to help me recover.

This is where we begin to not only believe in God, but believe that just maybe he has the power to change me… to deliver me from me.

3rd Choice: Commitment Choice - We consciously choose to commit all my life and will to Christ’s care and control.

This is where we commit our lives to Jesus and become new people.

We actually get a new identity. Our old self is gone and we are new in Christ.

4th choice: Housecleaning Choice - We openly examine and confess our faults to myself, to God and to someone I trust.

This is where we make a moral inventory of our defects. What do we feel guilty about? What do we need to change in my life? We prayed and asked God to help us make a list of them.

5th choice: Transformation Choice - Voluntarily submit to every change God wants to make in my life and humbly ask him to remove my character defects.

6th Choice: Relationship Choice - I evaluate all my relationships, offer forgiveness to those who have hurt me, and make amends for harm I’ve done to others, except when to do so would harm them or others

7th Choice: The Growth Choice - I reserve a daily time with God for Bible reading, self-examination, and prayer in order to know God and his will for my life and to gain the power to follow his will.

8th Choice: The Sharing Choice - I choose to yield myself to God to be used to bring the Good News to others, by both my example and by my words

In this choice we choose to be used by God to help others.

By my example and my words. God wants to use your troubles to help others. He wants to recycle the pain in your life for the benefit of others.

You may think think that God only wants to use super talented people, but that’s not true. God uses ordinary people. In fact, he only uses imperfect people. There are no perfect people in the world.

The bible is full of stories of God using ordinary people to do extra-ordinary things. I know that God wants to use you too. This step is about allowing God to use you to help others.

God will use your strengths and your weaknesses. As a matter of fact, when you are honest about your weaknesses God will use those even more than your strengths. When people see your strengths, they think… I could never do that… or be like that… But when you share your weaknesses, they think, if God can use someone like that, then maybe he can use me. When you understand that God uses our pain and our weaknesses then life will take on a whole ne meaning when it comes to our struggles. This is what recover is about.

The proof of your recovery is when you begin to focus on people outside of yourself. You stoop being so self absorbed about your pain… difficulties…etc. and you begin to think how can I help other people.

God never wastes a hurt.

He wants to take the hurts in your life, both the ones caused by others and the ones you caused yourself and use them for the Lord.

Why god has allowed the pain in your life and how he can use the pain in your life to help other people.

Why does God allow Pain in our lives?

There are a lot of reasons. But here are 4.

1. God has given you a free will.

Because you have a free will, you can choose to do things, some may be good for you and others are not. You can choose to do right or wrong, but you cannot choose the consequences of those choices. You can choose to accept Christ, or you can choose to reject Him… but you can’t choose the consequences of that choice.

God gave us free will because he didn’t want a bunch of puppets. He wanted us to love him and you can’t love unless the option to hate or not love is there. Love has to be genuine so he gave us Free will. That’s both good and bad because we too often make dumb choices.

I can choose to use drugs, but if I get addicted it’s my fault… not Gods. If it hurts other people, it’s my fault too.

I can choose to be sexually promiscuous and if I get a disease, It’s my fault, not Gods.

I can choose to go back to an unhealthy relationship and it’s disappointing, it’s not God’s fault, it’s mine. I can only blame myself when I go down the wrong path, it’s my fault.

Most of the problems we face in our lives, we bring on ourselves. We try to blame others, but we bright them on ourselves.

2. God uses pain to get our attention.

Pain is like a warning light in your life. The pain is not your problem, it only reveals the problem. Your depression, anxiety, your fear are warning signs or symptoms of something much deeper that’s going on.

CS Lewis.

God whispers to us in our pleasures but he shouts to us in our pain.

God doesn’t cause the pain, but he will use it to get our attention.

Proverbs 20:30 GNB

Sometimes it takes a painful experience to make us change our ways.

Anyone agree with that. We don’t change when we see the light, we change when feel the heat. It’s when we get to the end of ourselves that we are ready to depend on God. If you have not make this choice yet, do it today. How much more pain are you willing to put up with before you come to your senses?

3. God uses pain to teach you to depend on Him.

You don’t know God is all you need until God is all you have.

2 Corinthians 1:8–9 LBP

I think you ought to know, dear brothers, about the hard time we went through in Asia. We were really crushed and overwhelmed, and feared we would never live through it. We felt we were doomed to die and saw how powerless we were to help ourselves; but that was good, for then we put everything into the hands of God, who alone could save us, for he can even raise the dead.

Have you gotten to the end of your rope? When you do, you don’t tie a not in it to help you hold on. You let go and let the hands of a loving God hold you up.

If you never had any problems, you would never learn to depend on God.

Psalm 119:71 NLT

My suffering was good for me, for it taught me to pay attention to your decrees.

There are some things that we only learn through pain. Sad but True.

4. God allows pain to give you a ministry to others.

This is the focus. Pain prepares you to serve. It makes you sympathetic to others who are going through pain. People who have never gone through pain are usually not sympathetic to those who are in pain.

2 Corinthians 1:4 NLT

He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us.

God wants to use your experience to help others. God doesn’t waste anything. Don’t just grow out of your pain, or be healed from your pain… use it to help other people going through painful situations.

This is what the sharing choice is all about.

1 Peter 3:15 NIV84

But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect,

Be ready to give an answer to the hope that you have. We have the best news in the world. We need to be prepared to to give an answer. When you follow Christ and you are becoming free, people will notice. They may go … what happened? You used to be this way and now, you are this way… what happened?

Here is a suggestion to get ready for this step.

Make a list of everything you have gone through in your life… positive and negative. Ask yourself what you learned from that experience. How did God help me make it through that difficult time. This isn’t something you will read to someone. It will help yo have these experiences and how God helped you in your mind in an orderly way so that you can recall them when you need to. This is a way to prepare to give an answer.

Ask yourself, who would benefit from hearing my story? The answer is anyone going through what you have gone through.

The say, God I am willing and ready to help someone. Ready to help someone through healing, growth, sanctification… Then get ready. When you get ready and tell God, he will use you… over and over again.

God uses people who are available.

Sometimes we have to take the initiative. this is called an Intervention

Galatians 6:1–2 LBP

Dear brothers, if a Christian is overcome by some sin, you who are godly should gently and humbly help him back onto the right path, remembering that next time it might be one of you who is in the wrong. Share each other’s troubles and problems, and so obey our Lord’s command.

God doesn’t just want you to be healed. He wants to use you to help others. He wants to use you to help someone get back on the path. If you are not doing it, you are disobeying God.

Sometimes, your offer to help will not be welcomed. When people are caught up in a sin pattern, they don’t always want help… they need it, but they don’t realize they need it.

If they lash out at you, this is where the 8th Beatitude come to play.

Matthew 5:10 GNB

Happy are those who are persecuted because they do what God requires; the Kingdom of heaven belongs to them!

Your intervention may damage your relationship for the present, but often times, even through they are angry with you, it will help them get out of the quicksand they are in.

Reaching out to others is not always easy or welcome, but we are blessed when we do what God commands us to do.

Three suggestions for sharing your story

1. Be humble.

In your story, share a testimony, not a bragamony.

Don’t act like you have it all together and thank God you haven’t sinned in 30 years… that prideful and not true. Don’t super spiritualize your story. That’s why you need to write it out. Don’t lie.

We help others through our weaknesses not through our strengths. We want people to look at us and go, I could do that.

There are people who pray very beautiful flowing prayers… most people hear that and go, I could never pray that way… That’s why I don’t pray that way.

It’s why I preach the way I do. I want you to see and hear me, and think, God can use me too.

When you share your story, let them know here’s what happened to me… Be humble

2. Be real.

Be honest, open and authentic about your hurts, your feelings and thoughts. When you share your story, it gives hope to them and healing to you. Because every time you share your story you grow a little bit stronger talking about what God has done in your life.

When you move beyond pain to growth to serving others, it’s a great joy.

3. Don’t lecture.

You are a witness, not a prosecutor or even a defense attorney. An attorney is trying to win a decision. You cannot argue anyone into heaven and you can’t force someone to change. You share your story. This is what happened to me.

I had a kid in a Bible study say, he thought maybe Christianity was 50% true and 50% false. He asked me how I knew it was true. I explained some things about verifying the Christian faith, but the real answer I told him was I had experienced the transformation that God brings into your life.

You can say Pecan pie taste good, but until you taste it, you don’t really know.

Three action steps

1. If you haven’t commited your life to Jesus, what are you waiting on?

The most logical, beneficial and practical decision you can make is to open your life up to the Lord.

The greatest tragedy would be for you to have sat in these 8 lessons on finding freedom and not do anything about it.

2. Ask God to give you someone that you can share your story with.

Acts 20:24 NLT

But my life is worth nothing to me unless I use it for finishing the work assigned me by the Lord Jesus—the work of telling others the Good News about the wonderful grace of God.

That’s what life’s healing choices is all about. It’s about living in the Grace of God and applying these very practical habits in our lives.

There is no better feeling you will ever have than leading someone into a relationship with Jesus. They will become your forever friends.

3. Stay plugged in.

This is just the beginning. You need to be plugged into the church. You cannot grow into who God wants you to be alone. You will not find freedom all by yourself.

Prayer time…

Salvation Prayer -

Pray for each one to grow closer together and continue to grow.

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