Somebody that I Used to Know - How Ever Do You Want Me – Purity 664

 Somebody that I Used to Know -  How Ever Do You Want Me – Purity 663

Purity 663 02/24/2022  Purity 664 Podcast

Good morning,

Today’s photo of peaceful blue skies over Otsego Lake comes to us from a “brother and a friend” from my college days who shared this picture from their visit to Cooperstown NY on Monday.  

After safely making my way back to the Empire State yesterday, I thought I would share a scene that shows winter in Upstate New York that more accurately reflects my “new normal” as it is “back to life, back to reality” as my honeymoon vacation in Tampa Florida is over and a significant amount of snowfall is forecasted to welcome me back.     

Yup it’s back to “Back to Life, Back to Reality” and for those who aren’t old, those words are lyrics from an old Soul II Soul club classic and they tend to come to mind when a vacation or a weekend ends.  But it’s Friday today and I am going to thank God for the fact that I am safely home, I don’t have to work until Monday, and that I know Him and His Love.   

The concepts of “relationships” has been at the forefront of my mind lately as my relationship with my wife, TammyLyn, has grown stronger through our recent travels and due to the fact that we had dinner with one of her old friends on our last night in Tampa. 

All the down time of vacation has me in a contemplative mood and I am marveling over the nature of our journey through life and how we could view our lives as having different seasons where we formed new relationships only to transition to new seasons where our relationships changed or ended.    

As we enter life we form relationships with our family first and then venture into the world and make friends, acquaintances, and enemies with people in our neighborhoods or at school.  Through our childhood and adolescences, we can make new friends every year as our school classes change and we can meet new people through sports, camp, or other activities.   As we venture into our teenage years, our interests turn to romantic relationships. As we settle into the working world, we make friends and acquaintances through our business contacts.  In our lives of faith, we can make friends at church and through ministry work.   

Among all these different options and environments, we will make, and break, relationships based on our direction in life that is determined by our choices and preferences.  As many friends and close relationships we can have in life , we can only choose a limited number of people that we will decide to spend time with or who we will remain in contact with.  

Social media certainly affords us the ability to keep track of our friends and our friendships remain intact but if we are honest we can come to the realization that our relationships are more “past” than present and that in “reality” we may have no actual contact or interaction with the people we call friends.  

Hey don’t get me wrong now,  I got love for all of my old friends, and current friends, and wish them well. I am not saying that we don’t like these people that we have limited or no interactions with, nor am I saying that if we don’t hang out with everyone they are not our friends.  

But the “reality” is that all our lives move forward in time and space and the choices we make in life will send us all in different directions and cause us to only be available for a limited number of relationships.  Its just realistic.  We all have lives to live and as much as we may value the relationships we have made along the way eventually many of the people in our relationships could be referred to as “Somebody that I used to know”.  

Anybody who remembers the 2011 Gotye song of the same name, knows that even our most intimate relationships can become painful memories of regret as break ups sort of change the relationship dynamic causing us to throw out the good memories with the bad as we just try to forget about people and erase them from our lives as easily as making them disappear for our social media pages.  

I just saw one “friend”, (really a co-worker who I am friendly with, at work) announce that they are having another “purge” of their FB friends.  Obviously, the weight of carrying on even the most uninvolved relationships can be felt and may cause us to break relationships with people who we are no longer in interaction with or whose opinions and preferences have caused us to re-evaluate them as people and our need to be in relationship with them.  

We can understand the need to distance ourselves from people we no longer get along with or whose beliefs and opinions contrast with ours but what I have been thinking about lately is the almost tragic phenomenon of the way time, situations, distance, and our decisions can cause relationships we cherish to go by the way side.     

As we grow and go through life and move ever onward toward eternity our time becomes precious to us and our situations change causing us to invest our time in energy with only a few relationships. 

If we are wise we reduce the number of relationship “problems” we have be learning from our mistakes and by choosing to invest our time into the relationships that give us peace, love, and joy rather than disagreements and discord.

But even amongst our “good relationships”, we could benefit from seeing that as much as we love some of our family and friends,

·       They may not value us as much as we value them.

Or

·       We are simply going in different directions.

Or  

·       Through our choices, we simply don’t take the time to invest in our relationships.  

These considerations can make us feel guilty or question our family, friends or our own ability to have healthy relationships.  We can easily become jaded and condemn the people in our relationships for not loving us enough or we condemn ourselves for not being a better friend or family member.    

The last thing God wants is for us to condemn others or ourselves. SO if you feel that way stop it.   God knows we are human and only have a limited capacity for what we can do in life and for how we can answer the call to represent Him by loving our neighbors as ourselves.   

The reason I point out the transitioning ways of our lives and how our relationships with others come and go and how they can be less than satisfying is to encourage you to seek a relationship with God first:

·       to experience His love,

·       to be at peace with Him. and

·       to be at peace with yourself,

·       and to be more loving and discerning in your relationships with others.  

As heartbreaking as our lives of changing relationships can be, they should drive us to the realization that all our human relationships have a time limit because of the choices we make and because of the brevity of our lives. 

Instead of driving us to despair, the finite nature of our lives and relationships should seek us to find the meaning and purpose of our lives.  

The Bible tells us that God is love and that His love for us caused Him to bridge the gap between God and man by sending Christ to reconcile us to Him by paying for our sins with His life.  

Anyone who seeks God and puts their faith in Jesus, is forgiven and is given eternal life and a relationship with the Lord that will transcend our lives, continue forever into eternity, and increase our capacity to love others.     

As I contemplated the changing nature of our world and the way our relationships have time and seasons, it caused me to reflect on the relationship that will never end: our relationship with God.  

If we place our faith in Christ, we will be with Him in paradise, along with everyone else who make that decision. 

But if we don’t place or faith in Christ, it won’t matter what our interests were or how great a friend we could be to others.  If we reject Jesus, our relationship with God is contentious, as we will deny Him as sovereign King and as our heavenly Father.

Our choice to not accept God’s free gift of salvation through Jesus Christ will separate us from Him and send us to a place that Jesus described as “darkness” where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth”, hell.  

Many speculate whether we will remember those who are consigned to hell or if God will erase them from our memories as “somebody we used to know”.

In response to a student who asked how they could be happy knowing their loved ones where in hell, the late theologian Dr. John Gerstner is reported to have said. 

"Don't you know that when you are in heaven you will be so sanctified that you could look at your own mother in hell and rejoice in the display of the justice of God." (https://www.ligonier.org/posts/2010-ligonier-national-conference-rc-sproul-ii)

When we see know God’s love and finally see Him face to face, we will see just how wicked it is to reject the free gift He offers us through Christ.  

The choice to “to “not hang out with God” is a choice to not be in relationship with Him.  When we choose ourselves or other relationships above our relationship with Him we are choosing His wrath.   

The pain of the loss of friends and family that we suffer in our broken relationships, though their deaths or just through decisions to go a different way or to spend time with someone else will be nothing compared to the loss one will experience when they are separated from God’s love and feel His wrath.  

So as I have come back to “reality”, I realize that this turned into a heavy message but just as that Soul II Soul song was about making a decision to be “real” and was asking someone if their relationship had only been a fantasy or if they truly wanted to be with them, God wants us to live and have a relationship with Him in peace for all eternity.  

The song says :

“Tell me now, take the initiative
I'll leave it in your hands, until you're ready

How ever do you want me
How ever do you need me,”

I don’t know if you want God in your life, but I know we all desperately need Him.  He is waiting for you to be “real” with Him and to walk with Him into the relationship that will give you peace, love, and joy for all eternity.    

So as we move into another weekend, seek to invest time into the relationships that make you feel loved and give you peace. 

God put other people in our lives to love them so we should enjoy our relationships, but we should also remember the One who made all things and show our gratitude for all the God has done by making peace with Him by putting our faith in Christ and sharing the love of God with those who don’t know it.

 

Today’s Bible verse come to us from “The NLT Bible Promise Book for Men”.

This morning’s meditation verse is:

Hebrews 12:1 (NLT2)
¹  Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses to the life of faith, let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up. And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us.

Today’s Bible verse encourages that we are not alone in our walk of faith and that we should endure in the journey God puts before us.  

Today’s verse reminds us to remember the other members of the body of Christ to motivate us to keep following the Lord and to forsake the things that will get in the way of our purpose in Christ. 

All the saints in history stand in heaven as witnesses to our walk of faith and they are encouraging us to continue as they did to be faithful.  Knowing all the good works that faithful men and women of God performed and knowing that many sacrificed their very lives in the service in the Lord should encourage us to perform similar works and to make personal sacrifices to be true to the call of Christ on our lives.  

Christ bids all His disciples to follow Him and we should be motivated by His example and the example of other brothers and sisters in the body of Christ, to endure in our faith until the end.  

Christians have the promise of eternal life and all the possible costs that will have to be paid in our lives of faith pale in comparison to the inestimable value of all that God will give us.  

So remember the saints, and press on to the upward call of Christ by laying aside every weight that would hold you down from faithfully fulfilling your purpose in His kingdom,

 

As always, I invite all to go to mt4christ.org where I always share insights from prominent Christian theologians and counselors to assist my brothers and sisters in Christ with their walk. 

Today we continue sharing from June Hunt’s Codependency: Balancing an Unbalanced Relationship.

As always, I share this information for educational purposes and encourage all to purchase June Hunt’s  books for your own private study and to support his work.  This resource is available on many websites for less than $5.00.

C. What Is the Most Dangerous Dependency?

If you live your life with a misplaced dependency on others, you will miss the extraordinary relationship God planned for you to have with Him—you may even miss salvation and heaven.

When God created you, He planned for you to enter into a tender, trusting relationship with Him, for He is so trustworthy that you can totally depend on Him to meet all of your needs. He designed you to live in dependence on Him—not on anyone else—to complete you, to fulfill you.

How to Begin Depending on God Alone

If you have struggled with codependency, God has a solution for you—a solution that can be spelled out in four points.

#1 God's Purpose for You... is Salvation.

• —What was God's motive in sending Christ to earth? To condemn you? No... to express His love for you by saving you!
  "God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him." (John 3:16-17)
• —What was Jesus' purpose in coming to earth? To make everything perfect and to remove all sin? No... to forgive your sins, empower you to have victory over sin, and enable you to live a fulfilled life!
  "I [Jesus] have come that they may have life, and have it to the full." (John 10:10)

#2 Your Problem... is Sin.

• —What exactly is sin? Sin is living independently of God's standard—knowing what is right, but choosing wrong.
  "Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn't do it, sins." (James 4:17)
• —What is the major consequence of sin? Spiritual death, spiritual separation from God.
  "The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 6:23)

#3 God's Provision for You... is the Savior.

• —Can anything remove the penalty for sin? Yes. Jesus died on the cross to personally pay the penalty for your sins.
  "God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8)
• —What is the solution to being separated from God? Belief in Jesus Christ as the only way to God the Father.
  "Jesus answered, lam the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. '" (John 14:6)

#4 Your Part... is Surrender.

• —Place your faith in (rely on) Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior and reject your "good works" as a means of gaining God's approval.
  "It is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast." (Ephesians 2:8-9)
• —Give Christ control of your life, entrusting yourself to Him.
  "Jesus said to his disciples, 'If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?'" (Matthew 16:24-26)

The moment you choose to believe in Him—entrusting your life to Christ—He gives you His Spirit to live inside you. Then the Spirit of Christ gives you His power to live the life that God has planned for you. If you want to be fully forgiven by God and become the person He created you to be, you can tell Him in a simple, heartfelt prayer like this:

Prayer of Salvation

"God, I want a real relationship with You. I admit that many times

I've chosen to go my own way instead of Your way. Please forgive me for my sins.

Jesus, thank You for dying on the cross to pay the penalty for my sins. Come into

my life to be my Lord and my Savior. Help me to depend on You alone to meet

my needs. Through Your power, make me the person You created me to be.

In Your holy name I pray. Amen."

What Can You Expect Now?

If you sincerely prayed this prayer, look at what God's Word says that He will do for you!

"The Lord will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail." (Isaiah 58:11)

Biblical Counseling Keys: Codependency: Balancing an Unbalanced Relationship.

---------------------------more tomorrow------------------------

Join our “Victory over the Darkness”, “The Bondage Breaker”, "Freedom in Christ" series of Discipleship Classes via the mt4christ247 podcast!

at https://mt4christ247.podbean.com, You can also find it on Apple podcasts

(https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-mt4christ247s-podcast/id1551615154). The mt4christ247 podcast is also available on Google Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartradio, and Audible.com. 

These teachings are also available on the MT4Christ247 You Tube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTxjSNstREpuGWuL0bF3U7w/featured

Email me at mt4christ247@gmail.com to receive the class materials, share your progress, and to be encouraged.

My wife, TammyLyn, also offers Christian encouragement via her Facebook Group: Ask, Seek, Knock (https://www.facebook.com/groups/529047851449098 ) and her podcast Ask, Seek, and Knock on Podbean (https://feed.podbean.com/tammalyn78/feed.xml)

Encouragement for the Path of Christian Discipleship