Bonding –             the ability to:

1.             establish an emotional attachment to another person.

2.             relate to another on the deepest level, sharing your deepest thoughts, dreams, and feelings with each other with no fear you’ll be rejected by the other.

                                                                Changes That Heal  Cloud & Townsend

 

Rules don’t change people

but love can.

 

Admit your helplessness/Ask God for help

Give your life to God

Ask God to search your heart

Admit your sins to God and another human being

Ask God to remove your defects

 

The Healing at the Pool
1Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for a feast of the Jews. 2Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. 3Here a great number of disabled people used to lie--the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. 5One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. 6When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, "Do you want to get well?" 7"Sir," the invalid replied, "I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me."
8Then Jesus said to him, "Get up! Pick up your mat and walk." 9At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.

The day on which this took place was a Sabbath, 10and so the Jews said to the man who had been healed, "It is the Sabbath; the law forbids you to carry your mat."
11But he replied, "The man who made me well said to me, 'Pick up your mat and walk.' "
12So they asked him, "Who is this fellow who told you to pick it up and walk?"
13The man who was healed had no idea who it was, for Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.
14Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, "See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you." 15The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well.

                                                                                                                John 5:1-15

Ask God to remove your defects

1.             Become ready to give up your defects

9 The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?

                                                                                                                Jeremiah 17:9

Did the invalid want to get well?  Of course he did right?  Why would Jesus ask? To get him to express his desire. To stimulate hope in man hopeless.  MAYBE!

 So the things you’ve been hearing from God & that you want to change you hate them right? But if you hate them so much why do you do them?

Wouldn’t you miss powerful feeling of ability to control /superiority at least in mind?

The adrenaline rush of your sexual fantasies?

The intimidation & control comes from blaming, shaming, & fits of rage?

Spending as you’re used to if you were to give up greed?

Eating certain foods if eliminated or cut back amounts (pick favorite dessert here)?

The very character defects that end up destroying our lives are ones we don’t & won’t let go of.   Why?

A.  We’ve had them for a long time and have built our lives around them.  Wouldn’t the income of a Middle East beggar change dramatically once he’s healed?

B.  Some are coping mechanisms or survival strategies we’ve learned to get us through.  Coldness & walls that kept us somewhat safe when people raged at us as kids.  These defects that may have worked in past to keep us alive, OK, safe, now are costing us big time. But many of us aren’t ready to give them up because we’re used to them and they seemed to work and we’re scared to go down a road we’ve never been on compared to one we know.  LOOK AT WHAT IT’S COSTING YOU!!!  Great Divorce CS Lewis

 

2.             Recognize you can’t change yourself -    requires great degree of honesty/humility.  Remember the potato chip commercial that challenged “Bet you can’t eat just one!  Bet I can”  Bet you can’t get rid of lust!  Bet I can! A lot of what passes for faith is simply the engine of willpower cranked up one more time.

Invalid recognized but comes off a whiner.

 

3.             Acknowledge your idolatry – Roots of our problems is the worship of ourselves, things, experiences…& what we worship will control our lives.  To ask God w/integrity to remove defects  demands that we will acknowledge & give up our other lover gods.  Sin takes even good things and makes them destructive by getting us to crave, obsess, make goal of life.

 

4.             Pray for God to remove the defects and the idols –

A.            Simply ask for him to help/change/pry your fingers off idols

B.            Focus your prayer.  Lord tomorrow from 10-noon I’m going to be in a meeting where I’ll be severely tempted to make self look good, protect my turf, put other people down, position self to get best assignment, so replace my pride w/humility, love, team spirit. Help me during that 2 hour block of time!  OR Father you know my lust and trouble it causes. Tonight from 8-12 help me look at my date as a whole person not just a body for my pleasure. God remove lust far from me from 8-12.

C.            Cooperate – Make your body act consistent with what you’ve asked.  Expect to be helped to resist but fight your habitual urges.

 

5.             Celebrate when you see change – 1st peek at progress.  1st time go 30 days without raging all over people have a party.  1st time stay within budget for two months throw a cheap party.  When go 3 months w/sexual purity call a few close friends & announce “I’m not getting sicker, I’m getting better.

 

Prayer – Thank you for humbly stooping to keep helping me

Some no hope. Give them hope & willingness to work at change with you.

Some don’t think they matter.  Convince them they’re wrong.