40 - Your Story Redeemed, pt 2

In no way does your past dictate your future! I hope you know that. This final teaching is about looking forward to what God has for us, which is glorious! If you reflect, even for a few minutes, on the almost unbelievable and bright future God has in store for each one us - how can this small, tiny and insignificant habit have any weight in your soul? Let's finish strong! 

Email me at mike@menrestored.com if you'd like more information about my 90-day Exodus Freedom Journey pathway and cohort. It's built for men in ministry, just like you and also the Christ-follower still feeling enslaved by pornography. 

Together, let's reclaim your freedom! 

Transcript

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Hi everyone, I'm not sure if you're a man in ministry, but I want to invite you, if you are, and this is a problem for you, pornography. I want to invite you to this cohort that I have. It's safe and it's confidential, and you need that. You need a place to go to talk about this and to get some deep learning and brotherhood to fight together with other men. That's what I want to offer to you. Stay tuned at the end of the episode to find out how to be in touch with me so that you can learn more about this cohort. I don't want you to have to ever live in isolation like I was living for so many years as a young pastor. I want you to know that you don't have to be alone in this anymore. So I'll see you on the other side. Listen in and let's get into the episode. You are a man seeking freedom from pornography. You know what's at stake if you don't break free. Your marriage, your family, and your faith. Welcome to the Exodus Freedom Journey podcast. Here you'll discover insights and tools to help you find lasting freedom, starting in as little as 40 days. You are worth the fight. Your marriage is worth the fight. Your family is worth the fight. Together with God's mighty hand, let's reclaim your freedom. You have made it. Maybe you're listening just as the first episode because I again am putting this out as a podcast. But maybe you have gone through all of the episodes and teachings, and this is the last one. You did this all in sequence. You've made it. This is the last one. Um I know I've said this a few times uh in the teaching themselves. This thing took me months to put together. I agonized through this, and I felt so much opposition from the enemy on this. And I spent so much time in prayer. I spent so much time writing out handwritten notes. You should see the stack of legal pad paper I have. Uh I wrote out so many notes, and eventually I do plan to make this, hopefully not too in the too distant future, a actual book. Because I have more than 120,000 words uh compiled with all of these teachings. So I'm so grateful for the writing that's gone before me from uh Ryan Holliday's book, The Obstacle is the Way, to of course Morgan Snyder's book, The Way of the King, or um not the way of the king. Um now I'm drawing a blank of the on what it's called, Becoming a King. Sorry about that. Um that book has meant a lot to me. I've recommended it to a lot of people. Um and so I just can't and atomic habits is another one. Just growing ourselves as men and growing yourself as a man. And there's so many other resources out there. I hope that this little bit of a curriculum has been able to help you. So let's go into this last section. And this last section is where it gets open-ended. It's talking about what's next. It's talking about how what plans do God does God have for you. I mean, we don't know details of God's plan, we have an idea, but uh we know that God has good for us, we know that God wants good for us, and we know that God wants to use us, flawed men, for his kingdom. So let's do just that. Go into this episode with an open mind. Hopefully you've looked at your past and now you're ready to see what's next. I'll see you on the other side. Here we are. Welcome to the last session of module four and the whole curriculum. This has been a long journey for me, especially. I don't know how it's taken you to go through this so far, but you are almost there. I hope this journey in this curriculum has brought you to freedom. And these last two sessions are about your story because it's so important for me to share with you just how important your story is. You cannot overestimate enough or too much how important your story is and could be to another man. That's why I'm doing this whole thing: your freedom and your story to help save somebody else. Your freedom isn't free. You cannot be restored by yourself, and you will not continue in restoration by yourself. Remember that. Restoration happens with Christ and among other brothers. I know that you may not feel like there's other people around you sometimes, and yes, God is with you all the time. We're going to be revisiting that in this session a little bit. But remember the purpose of redemption. What is the purpose of redemption? Redeeming your story is part of God's redemptive story. The purpose of redemption, I believe, is for God to be reunited with his people. The purpose of redemption is God being one with his people for all of eternity. Everyone who chooses him, who wants to be with him, he wants to be with them. And if they choose it and say yes, he is all about it. So remember the question from the last session that I ended with. How do you take the redemption of your story's past into your future? And here's the simple answer: align it with God's future, align it with his story. How do you take your story now that's been redeemed? You align it with God's story so that it can be fully redeemed. Again, hint. I said this last session, hint. Your full story, past, present, and future, is fully redeemed. It already is. The cross is magnificent. He has fully redeemed humanity. Now, are all human beings redeemed and saved? No, because they have to choose it. But God is making it freely available. And part of that process is you start to look back at your story. You start to look back and you see the value of your story. You start to see the value of yourself as a beloved son of God, and you see the value in sharing that story with another man. Look up Psalm 37, verse 4. It's a wonderful verse. It does look forward. It says, Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Take delight in the Lord is the condition. If you want God to give you the desires of your heart, you have to split those two. Take delight in the Lord. In other words, worship God. In other words, put God first. In other words, make sure that everything that God wants for you is your highest priority. Now, after that, your delight becomes his delight. And you know what's wonderful about that? When you live out your life in your will, you'll be just carrying out God's will. Does that sound unbelievable? Your will and God's will are not and should not be that far apart. You take delight in God and He will give you the desires of your heart because those desires are God's desires. It's just that simple. That's how you take your story's past and redeem it into the future. That's how you take what's happened in the past and let the cross take care of all of that. Yes, you still need to do all that work to process what's going on in the inside, in your heart, in your mind, but God is in all of that process of redeeming the past because the cross is back there. I like this word picture that God gave me a number of years ago. Time is linear. If you're a believer in God and of the Bible, time is linear. It had a beginning and it's going to have an end. It's a storyline, right? It's a story that had a beginning and it will have an ending. But I like this word picture. Picture a spiral. You've got a starting point right in the middle. That's the beginning of redemption, if you will, or the story of creation, maybe. And that's the beginning of time, right? And then you do a spiral. Then you do a spiral out from there. And so time is linear and it's spiraling out, and it goes out further and further, and you will have an end point in which it ends. Your life's in that story, my life's in that story, but sort of not quite the middle, closer to the end, you've got the cross. Imagine this spiral line that's on some kind of plane, if you will, and it's going out and going out, and the cross happens. It gets planted right there on that timeline at the moment that it happens in 30 AD. And think of the cross as this moment where it's just pounded down onto that line, and the lines reverberate forwards and backwards through time. And so that cross reaches backwards all the way to the redemption of Adam and Eve, the first parents that sinned, to the very end of time, to the last human beings who ever will sin, and covers all of that. All of humanity has been redeemed at the cross, but not all of humanity has chosen it. That's simple theology right there. It's the wonderful news of the gospel. But here's the thing: so when you start to align your story with God's story, it will be opposed. The enemy, our common enemy, hates it. And he will enlist his servants throughout this whole great controversy that we're in, and he will oppose that. But know that that opposition will also come in the form of your past, trying to reclaim your mind, your heart, your soul. It'll try to inform your life up to now, and it will keep you from moving forward, or it'll try to keep you from moving forward. Your story being aligned with God's story for his kingdom for eternity, that's opposed. But as I've already said a couple of times, your full story from beginning to end has already been redeemed in the cosmic sense. But here's the work that we need to do. We need to bring to God these broken parts of our lives so that we can be best equipped to move forward into the future. That's why part one of this is so crucial that you work through and you don't try to hurry it. But I believe your best years are ahead of you, my brother. Your best life is still ahead of you. Do you believe that? I hope you do. I believe that for myself and I believe that for you. Your best life is still yet to come. God is going to do some amazing things through you with your life and your story redeemed as it has been. And then you agreeing with it and aligning with it, your story, redeemed fully by the gospel and the cross, it's unstoppable. So you are moving towards this amazing future. There are these horizons. You remember we talked about horizons a couple of sessions ago? I believe there are infinite horizons out there in all of eternity that we have yet to even possibly imagine. We'll we'll get to the new Jerusalem after Jesus comes and sweeps us off this planet. And our minds will be expanded like they've never been expanded ever before in our little earthly lives here. And yet we still won't be able to imagine what's waiting for us out there in that infinite universe, those infinite horizons. They will be things for us to do, places for us to go, responsibilities for us to take on that we can hardly even imagine. But we do have a future to live into in this life. And if the past is any indication of what has happened in this life, our future is going to include more pain, more trauma, more sadness, frustration, anger, and grief. But yes, also a lot of joy, a lot of celebration, and a lot of redemption because you're going to help redeem the stories of other men. But here's one thing I need you to get. If you don't take up the invitation to work with me, if you don't take up the invitation to sit with other brothers to hear your story, to help them with their story. If you're just working on your own story, you know what? I'm never going to fault you for that. The best work, though, is doing it with other brothers. I can tell you that much. But if you never do any of that, I can tell you one thing for sure. Your future, there's uncertainty in the future. God does not tell us details about our future because it's going to include all of that stuff. If he told me all of the stuff that was going to happen to me 20 years ago in the following 20 years, I think I'd be a little worried. I think I'd be a little intimidated. And so God is in his grace not giving us details about our future. But there's one thing that we can take into any future, any part of our story, and that is found in I'm going to go to Romans 8. We have three places we're looking at in the Bible with this session, Psalms 37, Romans 8, and we'll have one more as we finish. But go to Romans 8. Go to Romans 8 and look at verse 34, and we'll read through the rest of that chapter. Verse 34 and Romans 8 says, Who is the one who condemns? Well, nobody condemns. Did you go back to verse 1? There's now therefore no condemnation for those who are what? In Christ Jesus. Christ Jesus is the one who died, but even more has been raised. Now, here's an important thing to remember. Jesus' resurrection was the beginning of God's new creation. That was the very beginning point of new creation where God reaches into the hearts and minds of men and women and begins to build his kingdom. That's why I love this little phrase that God gave me in connection to the name of my coaching. So this moment, though, when Jesus was raised from the dead, that's the true beginning. Our beginning happens, the new creation happens in us at our restoration, at our redemption, when we receive it. But even more has been raised. He also is at the right hand of God, interceding for us, who can separate us from the love of Christ. That is what I want us to catch right here. Nothing, and that's the rest of this chapter, by the way, it goes into so much detail. We are never separated from that love that reaches out into all corners of all humanity to everybody's heart at all times. The Holy Spirit is reaching into the lives of people who have no idea he exists. He did that for me. And if somehow I were to believe that that's not happening, I would lose all hope. God is reaching out into this world and he is at work all the time, 24-7, reaching into the lives of people in one way or another, in his creative ways, God is working. So who can separate us from the love that is in Christ? And he names a bunch of these things. Can affliction or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword, as it's written, because of you, we're being put to death all day long. We are counted as sheep to be slaughtered. Now, this is the verse. No, no, in all of these things, we are more than conquerors. Now, this is so cool. I just discovered this literally in the last hour before I hit record. More than conquerors. That is one Greek word. And it includes the same root word for victory, for conquering, for overcoming. Revelation 12, 11. And they overcame by the blood of the Lamb, the word of their testimony. Same root word, overcoming, victory, conquer. The verb form is in Revelation 12, 11. The noun form is here, but it's even better. Paul, I think, might have even made a new word. I would have not discovered this if I didn't have N. T. Wright's book. It's a word that's like a super conqueror. If I just transliterate the Greek, it says hypernikomen. Hypernikomen. And I believe he calls it completely victorious. Later in his exposition of this, he says, NT Wright says, it is, we are super conquerors, hyper-conquerors. I love that it's the same word. I just discovered that, like I said, in the last hour. It's the same word out of Revelation 12, 11. The power of the blood of the Lamb to help us overcome. Back to Romans 8. No, in all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I'm persuaded, says Paul, that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. If you don't work with anybody who is connected to this curriculum, if you don't work with another human being and you still find freedom, I thank God for that. I hope that you know that you're never alone. He is still Emmanuel. That's my favorite name for God in the Bible, Emmanuel. Our God is with us. That's who Jesus is. It's clearly that. Jesus is with us, and his love never goes away from us. It's always working to us. Why resist it? Take his love into the past. That list right there that I just read, the past can't separate us from the love of God, neither can anything in the future separate us. The one thing that we can take into the future is this fact. God's love will always be working with us. God's love will always be trying to reach us. It's our part to let God in. It's our part to say, God, I want you to redeem this dark, deep wound that is so hard for me to get through. And when the time comes in the future, when you're struggling to still get free from pornography or you're still dealing with consequences in the future because of the choices you've made in the past. God, please redeem this. Please work in this. Please come through for me. And he will. And he will. You gotta be a little bit patient though, brothers. He works through time. Not like we understand it. It looks like it's a long time for us. But he works. I believe that with all my heart. And I believe he's never not working. Do you believe that? Okay. Let's finish with this. 2 Corinthians 5 17. When I read this here a couple of weeks ago, I thought this is how I need to work on finishing this whole thing through this verse. 2 Corinthians 5. Check this out. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. And see, the new has come. Past tense. The new has already come. He's referring to that cross. And you read further down, and it's all about what Jesus did to reconcile humanity back to God. And then guess what? We have that same responsibility to reconcile God to the people around us. Your story has power. Freedom isn't free. I can't say it enough, my friends. But I believe your future is amazing. I believe the redemption that God has given and the redemption that God has for you is amazing and almost unimaginable. Oh, it is unimaginable. We can't even imagine what God has for us. But let me paint one word picture for you. There will come a time when God wants to give you responsibility. And the responsibility that you start with here in this life, your story, is where you learn how to take on that responsibility. Remember when we talked about the responsibility of freedom. Take that responsibility on now in this life. Because one day, now imagine this conversation. Imagine God one day out there in eternity, you're sitting down with Jesus in a field somewhere in the New Jerusalem, which is now the old Jerusalem because you've been there for so long. But you're in the holy city and you're sitting there with the Son of God, and he looks at you and he says, Hey, you know what? I've got something for you. I've got a galaxy that's just about to be finished by our Father. I was told by him that I've got this galaxy that you can take care of, that's going to be your responsibility. He's just about to create the first planet in this galaxy, and he wants you right there by him. Do you want to take that on? And I would be like, where do I sign up? Imagine that. I don't think that's out of the realm of possibility. There will be orders to God's authority, orders to God's responsibility throughout all of creation. I believe there will be people in charge of galaxies. I believe there will be people in charge of planets in those galaxies, solar systems. And you might have other beings that you're going to be in charge of as they are being created. There's all kinds of unimaginable possibilities out there. You are a unique part of God's creation. God needs you to be in his kingdom. And if you're not, that unique part of his creation is lost for all of eternity. I don't want that. I hope you don't want that. The Father doesn't want that. The Son doesn't want that. Holy Spirit doesn't want that. I want you to be there. If I never meet you in person, I hope to one day see you because this curriculum has somehow blessed you. And you turned a corner and you realized I am a beloved son of the king. And I can be in God's kingdom because I've decided to follow his lead, to take on the responsibility of a life of freedom and to live my story to an adventure that will absolutely never, ever end in all of eternity. God bless you, my brothers. I hope that this curriculum has changed your lives. It's changed mine. It's taken me many months to put this together, but it's been an amazing process. And I know I'm going to change things around in the months to come. And I will offer different variations of this whole thing. But fundamentally, this curriculum can be life-changing for you. I want to end with a prayer of blessing. Father God, I lift up my brother to you. He's been on a journey of freedom. He's been on a journey to bring redemption into his past and now into his future. He's learned how to overcome obstacles. He's learned that he is a beloved son of God. He's learned how to build better habits. He has learned how to be a better man through restoration, God. We believe fully, I believe fully that a man restored is truly the beginning of your creation, of the new creation. God, that heart of his needs that restoration. I claim him for you in your kingdom. I will not let him lose. Jesus, you died for this man, and you now live and intercede for him. Bless him to know that he's never going to be alone if he doesn't want to be. He never has to be alone again. I fight with him, I pray over him right now, and I pray God's redemptive blessing, an eternal blessing on him right now. In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen. Bless you, my brothers. Thank you so much for staying the course in this curriculum. And there you have it. That's 40 episodes, 40 sessions, 40 teachings, with some resources dropped along the way. I hope that you've gained some insights. I hope that you've grown as a man. I hope that this whole session, uh this whole set of teachings has brought you closer to your freedom, or if not, into your freedom. It means a lot to me that you've spent the time and taken the time to listen to this, to consume it, and I hope you pass it on to others. And if it means something to you, I'm always open to uh critiques and additions and changes. So really truly, this is never meant to be done by yourself. This was never meant to be an entire teaching curriculum that you do on your own. It's meant to be done with others. I did this by myself. I felt prompted by God going on two years ago now to do this. Uh but here I am, uh, having put this thing together and hopefully reaching to a lot of men, thousands of men, tens of thousands of men, hopefully. And the invitation still stands. If you need to do this, if you need to quit, and I I have my heart is heavy for you men in ministry. Please uh do this. Reach out to me, Mike at Chaplain Mike. That's another existence, Mike at Menrestored.com. I used to be a chaplain. I actually currently am a chaplain, uh, but I'm not a chaplain in the hospital anymore. My life has changed since I've started uh recording these episodes earlier this year, actually, these last number of episodes. I've got a new job. So God has opened up another horizon for me. I'm a hospice chaplain as of this recording. So God is good, and I've had some amazing experiences, and you just never know where God is going to take you, right? So God has done so many things for me, and I continue to look forward to reaching other men, though, through this curriculum that I hope are changed. So, Mike at menrestored.com, please reach out to me. If you want personalized coaching, one-on-one coaching, we can definitely do that. Or better yet, let's get in a group where you're working with other men, and we are doing this together. So, thank you again for listening to these episodes. I appreciate you so much. God bless. Thank you for listening to the Exodus Freedom Journey podcast. Together with God's mighty hand, let's reclaim your freedom.