The Truth

In John 10:10? He said, “I came to give you life and live life more abundantly.” Or are we not having the abundant life? By the way, the abundant life to me, in all of the time that I’ve been a pastor at JoyStones has been Spirit, Soul, Body, Relationally, and Financially. Just because you have a lot of money, and you get a divorce, and your kids suffer, your wife suffers, or you suffer, everybody suffers, that’s like ripping a family apart, does not mean you’re prosperous. If you have a great family life, and you are overweight, and obese, that’s not prosperity. Okay. If you’re an angry, angry person like I was, and you take it out on your family, that’s not what Jesus was talking about.

He was talking about prospering. It says in 3 John 1:2, “Beloved I wish,” I exhort, I want you to prosper in every area of your life equal to what? Your soul prospering. You will  have health, you’ll have wealth, you’ll have spiritual blessings, you’ll have relational blessings when your soul prospers. Well what’s the problem? What is the truth? Well the truth is this, Satan is the god of this world, and when Satan … In Adam and Eve, they were naked, they were not ashamed. Ever thought about that? They were naked, they weren’t ashamed. Then they disobeyed God, they lost the relationship, they had a new father, his name was Satan, and their eyes were opened. Well what changed? I believe what changed is that their 5 physical senses were switched on so that they could see, and feel, and think evil thoughts, and see evil. They were naked, and they hid, and they covered themselves with fig leaves. That’s what Genesis 3 tells us.

What really ended up happening? What ended up happening is that our eyes were open. We came to know … Satan said, “You will know like God knows.” Well how does God know? Well he knows evil and he knows good, but he can handle it because he is all good. We can’t handle knowing evil and good, and so we have 2 ways of knowing. We know by our 5 physical senses and we know by experience. Well I’m not going to talk to you about the 5 physical sense way of knowing, because I know, because I studied brain science, that when we get upset, when we have an emotional upset, the left side totally shuts down. That’s all the 5 physical sense area by the way. What will happen, the right side, where we have learned by experience, so we’ve experienced these different things, we will do whatever we’ve experienced. We will do whatever we need to do to survive. Some people shut down, some people run away, some people fight. It’s fight, flight, or freeze, the 3 F’s if you will.

What ends up happening? We must realize that the truth is, that we don’t learn, and the things we learn by our 5 physical senses will always be over ridden by the experiences of our life, always over ridden. That may be why you may have a problem trusting God. It may be why you have a problem being obedient to God. Maybe that’s a reason that you have trouble trusting anyone, any authority. What happened? Where did that come from? Well the truth is this, is that when we were babies, sometimes in the womb, if there was father and mother that didn’t want to have the baby, the baby can actually pick up in utero, in the womb, the feelings of rejection, the feelings of abandonment, particularly rejection. That baby’s going to struggle as it grows up, and an adult for the rest of their lives. They’re always going to be wondering if they’re going to be rejected, and they’re always going to be a people pleaser, they’re always going to be pleasing people.

Well that happens to all of us. What happens is, is that Satan makes sure, because he uses pain very skillfully … Remember, in the garden, they felt amazing pain when they lost the relationship. Have you ever lost a loved one? Have you ever known anybody that lost a loved one? It’s devastating, it’s physically devastating. I don’t know how Adam and Eve survived. Satan uses pain so skillfully that he can actually cause us, through our parent’s ministering, administering, not ministering, administering or causing us pain, emotional, physical, sexual, neglect, no connection, no bonding, our parents can cause us emotional pain. What happens is, is we don’t trust them. Who trusts anybody who brings us pain? We don’t trust people that bring us pain. We don’t even … We avoid people that bring us pain. You probably avoid people that bring you pain. I know I have. Now I don’t so much, because I understand where it comes from.

It comes from the fact that in childhood we experience painful childhood experiences. Those painful childhood experiences, unless they’re dealt with through the re-parenting process, or God does a miracle, what ends up happening is we’ll carry that for the rest of our lives. We’ll carry all of that for the rest of our lives. Now you can go to therapy, you can do other things psychologically, but it won’t really get to the root, because the true root, the truth of the situation is, every situation where we think is … Where people are doing bad, and they’re doing drugs, they’re doing sex, they’re doing alcohol, they’re doing chocolate, they’re obese, they’re fat, whatever they are. I don’t use that word condescendingly, they’re overweight, let me put it overweight. What happens is, is that those are symptoms, those are not the real problem, and this is the truth. That’s not the real problem.

When people come into our church that have problems like that, we don’t … They’re tatted up, they have tattoos all over them, they have dreads, or whatever they have, we don’t throw them away. We don’t look at them as scant, we know what the problem is. We know the problem is they don’t feel valuable, important, and worthy, because as children, they were abused, they were traumatized, they didn’t get what they needed, and so we know. We know what the truth is, the truth is not what it appears to be. Satan has made it look like the truth is the symptoms. The truth is never the symptoms. It’s not the fruit, it’s the root. What we need to do, is we need to get to the root. How do we get to the root? We got to understand the truth, and the truth is that we all are being driven and affected by what happened to us as children. It is sad that God’s people are perishing for a lack of knowledge. They don’t know the truth.

The truth is, the basic truth is what we believe about ourselves is not true. Now I’m going to take a couple of minutes, stay with me, because here’s the root problem. If my father, let’s say, because this happened to me, I’m eating peas, I don’t like peas, I spit out my peas, and my father slaps my hand and yells at me. Now what I have learned in 20 years of studying human behavior, mostly to figure out what was wrong with me, I have discovered and found out that psychologists, behavioral scientists, people that know about human behavior will tell us that a toddler, an infant, who spits out peas and gets slapped by their father, does not have the ability because they depend … Their life depends on their parents, their father, their mother, and so they have not got the ability to differentiate, the brain is not set up to differentiate that that’s dad’s problem, and not my problem. Instead of thinking I did something wrong, I hear in my mind I am wrong, I am bad. I did something bad, no, I am bad.

Now where’s that thought come from? Well it comes from the knowledge of good and evil. Remember, Adam and Eve ate at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This is another truth you got to understand. The knowledge of good and evil always, always misinterprets, always judges, always sets us up for believing lies. I’m not bad, I just made a mistake, and dad hit me, but the pain … See there’s the pain, Satan comes in, and he drives the thought you are bad. Now what happens after that, it gets reinforced over and over and over and over again, until finally, in my case I hated myself, because of the way that I was treated, I hated myself. This is the truth, and the truth will set you free.

Now I can’t give you the solution today, you can come to the website JoyStones.org, and get the solution. The solution is Re-pa. If you’re not on our website right now, if you’re looking at YouTube or Vimeo, then come to JoyStones.org. Like I said, it’s under construction, but it will give you solutions. We’re in the solution business. We know what to do, we’ve got lots of testimonies. Leave us your email, and say, “Hey I heard the truth video and I want to get more truth, I need to have more truth, I want to know the solution.” The solution will set you free. I guarantee that when you get the solution, and you start working it, you will come out of the problems that you … What you believe about yourself, and you’ll be free. You’ll have an opportunity to live the abundant life.