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This is a conversational podcast that brings powerful moments from the Inspirational Media sermon library into fresh, engaging dialogue. Hosted by voices who care deeply about sharing timeless biblical truth, each episode unpacks key ideas from sermons, devotionals, and real-life stories — helping listeners reflect, relate, and rediscover hope in today’s world.
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00:00:00 Speaker: The text for this morning is Hebrews twelve fifteen. You needn't look it up. It's so short it just says, see to it that no root of bitterness spring up to cause trouble, and by it the many become defiled. Now, this morning we're going to be speaking, just telling one story right after another, that you might see how roots of bitterness operate. And we're going to be dealing with only one particular aspect of our inner being, and that is the power of negative expectancy, which means the way in which the law judge not Matthew seven one judge not, lest ye be judged. For with the judgment you mete out, it shall be meted unto you. To show how that works, how from within us we have the power to project other people unconsciously into treating us the way we expect to be treated, and how that affects our marriages, our work, relationships, and everything else. I want to say in the beginning that we need to remember, as we say these things, that we are saying them in order to spark into your minds and hearts, memories and thoughts which can be healed in your prayer times. And I call them prayer times rather than discussion groups. I would hope when you go to the discussion group, as it's called, you turn it immediately into prayer and say, look, I have this thing they were talking about. Pray for me and pray for each other aloud. Right? Then make it a body ministry time so that the Lord Jesus Christ may touch with healing. Another thing I would like to say about it is that as we speak of these things, I want to give you a little warning that, uh, the directors may remember if you took the same course as I did in seminary, that when we went through abnormal psych, about one third of the way through the course, we had everything. And so don't don't trip out. Hang on to your common sense. Next thing I'd like to say in preface is that I said last night that whatever the tree of trouble is, wherever the symptoms are, that we always go back to the life with the mother and father for the roots. That does not mean, however, that we can say, oh, my mother and father did this, therefore I'm this way. We cannot point back to the mother and father and blame them. It is only our sinful response to what they did with which we are concerned. It is always sin. Only if there is guilt can it get to the cross in terms of forgiveness. And so whatever the parents did or did not do, our response in bitterness and in anger, in resentment and rebellion is what we deal with. And then the last thing in preface is this we are not so concerned, even with the events that happened or did not happen in our childhood. What we are concerned with is the built in automatic responses to those events, the shape of character which resulted in us. And it is that carnal nature which needs to go to the cross in our prayer times afterward. And let me stress again that just talking about these things in us does not get it done. The psychologist says, ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. And he means you'll know with your mind. But people come to us who have been six years to psychologists and psychiatrists, and they say, I've been there six years, I know all my demons, and I've still got them. And so we have power. And every one of you, as a minister of the Lord Jesus Christ, in the priesthood of all believers, Every one of you has authority in the Lord Jesus Christ to pray for the forgiveness of the other. And so let's take up that authority in our groups, in praying for each other, and set each other free from these things, which we'll be talking about now for the first story. We're taking in the beginning of this talk several stories which are more poignant and even outlandish that you might see the power of this thing. The first one is the case of a woman who came to me, whose father had made her work in the fields as a child, like a hired hand, like a man. And then when she got done working, he would only criticize her and attack her. This made her angry and rebellious against him. And besides that, he himself was an unstable man. Now, with that judgment in her, that root of bitterness. She married a man. After a while that man would get drunk, made her go get a job and earn the money. When she came home from work, he would accuse her falsely, as though she were doing all kinds of wrong things. She did that, suffering that with him for eighteen years and finally divorced him. Then she married another man. Within a few months he was getting drunk. He made her go to work. When she came home, he accused her of doing all kinds of things falsely. She divorced him. Now she found a Christian man, a man who was wealthy, who had real estate and who she thought this man I'll be happy with. Within a month he made her go to work and get a job. He would get drunk every day. When she came home, he would accuse her falsely of doing all kinds of wrong things. Do you see what was really causing it? Her inner being was broadcasting to him, to any man she would be with. This is what I expect of life, job said. The thing that I feared has come upon me, and we have that kind of power to draw to us the kind of life we unconsciously expect. Our judgment must be fulfilled, and we cause people to fulfill our judgment, and they treat us according to what we say from within. And so this woman was that way, and I've chosen this one in order to say also, this woman was older and was raised in an psychological age and could not admit that she had anything in her that was creating this pattern. And so I would say to you, I didn't get this woman healed. The Lord couldn't heal her because she wouldn't admit it. I would say, if you are told by some member of the body of Christ that there is a thing operating in you and you can't see it because it's unconscious. Admit the possibility and say, Lord, I confess that this may be so. Come, show me and deal with me so that you may be healed. Step right up to I want to share with you the story of a specific person. And yet, this story has been repeated so many times that we've come to the conclusion that it must happen very often. Janie was born, uh, after quite, quite a few brothers in the family had been born. And so for a few years she enjoyed the love of a father and the companionship and the love of brothers. But by the time she was four, her father died. By the time she was nine, an oldest brother had died, and by the time she was thirteen, all of the brothers in the family were gone. Now, when she came to us, she was in a state of fury because her husband had just left her and she couldn't understand why? Because she said there wasn't anything particularly wrong. We didn't have any big arguments. We didn't have any really insolvable problems. He just left. And I was trying to be a good wife to him. I was really trying to to do my best. And here are our children and here I am. I'm I'm left and I just don't know why. And she was just asking why? Why, why? It's not fair. It's not fair. And when we discovered that she had had this pattern of losing first one member, her father, then her brother, then other brothers, we realized that what she had been doing because of this pattern of expectancy was just beaming forth that message to her husband. Just beep beep beep beep. You know, come to me. Love me, I need you. I really need your arms around me. And at the same time, there was that more powerful undercurrent message going forth to him saying, I know you're going to leave me. I know you're going to leave me, because every man that I have ever risked myself with has left me at some point. He didn't consciously know that that message was coming across. And yet, deep in his spirit, that's what was coming across to him. And so he dutifully obeyed. And he was as confused as she was about why he had left. Well, what we did with the woman was to lead her to the cross. First of all, causing her to repent for the anger that she had felt even as a four year old child. For the father's having left her. A child can be very, very angry down deep. When a father dies, even an older child who loses a father, even though they understand that it wasn't dad's fault that he left. You know, he just died. The child can experience a very deep anger at being rejected and abandoned, and so we let her into repentance about this. Another thing was operating, and that was a very great anger toward God. If God is a loving God, why did he let this happen to me? And it was hard for her to admit that she had an anger against God. But when she recognized it and she said, Lord, I'm sorry that I put this blame on you, and I repent for what I did to my husband for the way that I drove him off base just by this terrible negative expectation. Then the Lord came in and set her free through forgiveness. And what resulted in the lives of these two people was that when that repentance, that forgiveness had been achieved when we had prayed for the Lord to. Transform that deep expectation so that she could begin to open and expect that he would come and nurture her and care for her. The husband came back and she came in. She was just absolutely delighted because she says, he says, let's send the kids away for the weekend and let's go on a honeymoon. Let's start things over again. There was a man who worked for his father, and every time he did a chore for his father, the father only criticized. This made him angry as a little boy, and he pushed that down and forgot that it was there. But he was angry and judgmental. Now he had trouble anytime he went to work, because the boss became a father figure and stepped into what was in him in relation to his father. And so he went to work, and he did a good job for the boss. And the boss thought to himself, I'm going to go in there and sit down and compliment Sam. And within five minutes the boss was ripping Sam up one side and down the other. The boss comes out, hits himself in the head. Would I do that for? I went in there to compliment him and all I did was rip him up. I can't understand, I didn't want to do that. I found myself doing it. Didn't want to do it. Why did he do it? Because Sam was beaming. Undercurrent unconsciously. This is my judgment of life. This is the way I will be treated. Confirm my judgment. Until the boss did it. When the man saw that was his sin and repented of his judgment of his father and asked for forgiveness, and a new expectancy was prayed for, then the boss didn't have to come and criticize him anymore. He came to compliment and affirm. Whenever it was born, his mother didn't want him at all. He was an inconvenience. He fouled up the way things had been going. And so she would farm him out first in one relative's home and then in another. He would just begin to rest in the home in which he was living. Just begin to put down some roots and establish some trust in love. When his mother would come and say, well, I've bothered this relative long enough, now we'll move him to somebody else so that the whole family sharing the responsibility. So Everett would be uprooted and moved again and again. He never stayed in one place more than a year at a time. And at the same time, his mother was very critical of him. If he had a complaint about where he was or what was happening to him, or he pled for her to be with him. It was just criticism. It always fell back, the blame and the guilt on him. So as an adult, he had that expectancy in him that everyone would criticize. He would get a job and he would unconsciously do little things to draw the boss's judgment on him or the boss's criticism. In about twelve to fifteen months, he either would have done so many irritating things in the job that the boss would fire him, or the anxiety level would be so high in him that he was sure that the boom was going to be lowered any time, and so he would do the rejecting before he could be rejected, and he would just simply take off somewhere, change residence, do anything just to keep moving. So he never really had to face anything. When we prayed again for the Lord to reach into that little boy and to comfort him, to enable him to forgive his mother for the moving around, to forgive people, for not really holding him and nurturing him in love. When we asked the Lord specifically to To change that expectancy pattern to give him a new life. Then he did begin to change, and he took a job that he stayed at for a period of several years. And then it began to kind of creep back on him. And one day he took off again. He managed to imagine, really, it was an imagined thing in his mind that somebody at work didn't like him. They just didn't like him. And they were telling lies about him. And he wasn't going to stand for this. He wasn't going to work in a place where somebody was always going to be undercutting him. And so he took off and his wife came to us and she said, well, I'm kind of confused because I thought he was healed of this. He was beginning to really settle down and make something of himself, and he was really beginning to relate to the children, and he was really beginning to be a loving husband. Now he's gone. And so we realized that oftentimes there's more needed than just the prayer. But there needs to be something reconstructed in terms of human touch. Another experience of someone choosing the person who has been so many times rejected. And so we said, well, you know, you're timid, you're afraid it isn't an easy thing for you to do, but you go down there and you find him. He was in Seattle, and she had a kind of an idea of where he might be. She prayed that she might be able to find him when she got down there. It's a big Seattle's a big place, you know. And so she took off. It wasn't easy for her. She had to find transportation. She had to arrange for her own job. She had to arrange for somebody to take care of the kids. But she got down there and through a series of God incidences, not coincidences, she ran into the husband and she didn't go up to him Accusingly and saying, boy, you know, after all the Lord's done for you in your life, and then you're just pulling the same old tricks again. She just simply went over to him and she said, hi, honey. Wouldn't you like to come home? We need you. We love you. And he felt chosen. And he felt embraced. And he came home just very easily and restfully gladly. And things have been different ever since. I want to take you now to a deeper kind of a story. I want you to understand that through counseling and through the Word of God, we have seen that people are very deeply affected even while they are still in the womb. The scripture for this. You remember that Elizabeth was six months pregnant with John the Baptist, and Mary came to visit. And the Scripture says that John the Baptist leaped for joy in her womb. How did John the Baptist encased in that womb, know that anybody had entered any room, much less that it was Mary, much less that she who was not showing was carrying anybody, much less that it was the Lord himself. But he knew. And I would testify to you, I wish we could just deal with this subject alone. It's so important that I have dealt with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cases now where people were affected by what happened with their mother and father talking about the baby that was coming and how that child in his spirit knew the circumstances of his birth and all about it. Now, in this case, there was a very beautiful lady, still is friend of ours who came to me, and her pattern was she had been married three times and was now divorced again. Each time she would be going with a man who was a wonderful, gentle, kind man she would not get interested in him. She couldn't get interested in him. She would push him away and reject him. Then she would find some drunken, violent bum and marry him. She would then go through perhaps a year of hell in which he beat on her regularly divorce him, and go right back at the same pattern again. I dealt with her for, oh, quite a while, talking about her life with her stepfather and with her mother, getting all those things healed. And she still had the pattern. And now she was going with a guy who was simply using her and was not going to marry her in any way. And then one morning it came out, she said, she began to say, I don't have a father, I don't have a father. And then came out a story. It turned out something she had never shared before, that her own natural father had been very violent and drunken and would beat on her mother regularly. And it climaxed when the mother was six months pregnant with her and the father was beating on her in the kitchen, pinioning her arms behind her back and the mother was screaming, I hate you, I hate you, I'll kill you! Whereupon the father left. She didn't ever see her father until she was eighteen, and that gave me the clue and I saw it. She came out of the womb with a judgment that came through her mother, and through her own experience against men, that men were drunken and violent and would treat you that way. Therefore, she could not get interested in a man who would threaten that judgment. She would not be interested in a man who would not live out that pattern, which she really had decided. Life was at a very deep, unconscious level and she wouldn't see it. When I showed it to her. And so I said, okay, let's just go into prayer. And so we went into prayer. Now I said, honey. forgive your father. Do you know? She sat there and shuddered and shuddered, and she could not get the words out. And I said, now do you see it? And she said, oh, yes, and broke down and cried. And then we prayed for her spirit to be able to forgive her natural father, and for God to take away this judgment, this root of bitterness from her which had been defiling her life and the life of the men with whom she dated. And she was healed. And I believe that now she's going to find a man who will not act out that pattern, which she had been expecting. Now we're going to share some more everyday run of the mill problems from normal people like ourselves. Nobody's ever beat on me. Nobody in my family ever was a drunken bum and all that, and yet I had some hang ups and so did John. I was the oldest child in a family of five, and I had three rambunctious brothers that were born soon after me. Those brothers loved to tease. My dad was also a teaser, but particularly the brothers would tease. And I can remember one time they went to such length. I was sitting in the bathtub and suddenly in came all three of them, bursting through the door. They had their hands full of earthworms, and they scattered them liberally in my bathwater. And you know, it seems like I was always hollering, mom, make him stop, mom, make him stop! You know, my mother was a busy person, and she wasn't always around to make him stop. Dad was traveling, so he wasn't always around either. But I really grew up expecting the male figure year to tease me, not to respect my privacy, not to respect my inmost thoughts. And I grew to be a very private person. If the Lord had not set me free, I would not be here today telling you about my bath time. When my friends would come over, my brothers would always, if they knew any juicy little tidbit about me, they would manage to say it in some kind of humorous way, which was not at all funny to me. And so I simply learned to keep my thoughts to myself. It was difficult for me to share, and I was always afraid when I married John, that he was going to share something which would be embarrassing. I really had a dum dum complex if I would ever use an expression which was akin to swearing, it would be old brother And I still do that out of habit. But I think what is behind it, you know, has changed somewhat. But this was so strong in me that when John would speak in the pulpit there, I was thinking, oh God, don't let him say anything that's going to overexpose us. And I would even go to the extent of before he went out of the house saying, please, honey, you aren't going to say anything startling today, are you? So you know what I had to do? He couldn't help himself, you know. He was always standing naked before the congregation, you know. So I had to be dealt with. And the Lord chooses many ways in which to deal with us. And sometimes those ways in themselves can have a great deal of error in them, and yet the Lord can come through to us. We were in a cell group with a number of people, and there was a very strong personality in that cell group who had had some previous experience with such kinds of groups only. His experience had been one of confrontation. When you see something in the other person that needs correcting, you hit them right between the eyes. You nail them to the wall and you hold them there until they see it. And this can this can really be a very damaging thing. This is not a Christ like kind of confrontation. The Lord will call us to account. But when he calls us to account, it is with a firmness and a gentleness, with an invitation, with a support of love, that will draw from us, which will invite us to see what's in ourselves. Well, it was not so with this guy. He saw in me that I was strong willed and stubborn, and that in many ways, I was trying to compete with John. He says that sense of humor that you have, that you think of as being so delightful is actually a gallows laugh. And it's the way you get out from underneath, facing what is in you. And he just kept coming at me and at me and at me until I all I could say was help. You know, and for the first time, really, I felt that the situation was completely out of my hands, and I had to fall back into the arms of my husband and let him really take care of me and trust that he would really nurture me and speak to my heart. It was one of the best things that ever happened to me. And yet it was a painful, hurtful thing at the time. But the Lord will use these painful kind of things to speak to our hearts and set us free. And then when she was healed, I no longer had to say dumb, dumb things because she was projecting it into me. I set them from my own. Yeah. Now, my mother was one of these women who could keep house, like the Ajax house cleaner, you know, part of the time. And the rest of the time it went to rack and ruin. And I hated that. Detested it and of course, judged her and therefore had a bitter root of expectancy. And so, in the first years of our marriage, Paula, just let you know things. It was just a mess. The house was always a mess. And of course, we couldn't find the stop handle for kids. And so we had more than we knew what to do with immediately. And they were always making messes. And she was always running around in the center of the room trying to put things away. And they were always creeping right back out. And I used to get after her to keep better, you know, keep the house better, keep the house better. And she'd dutifully try and work at it and she'd just stir around in the house. It'd be a mess. And finally I saw the Lord dealt with me about that, and he showed me that I had a bitter root expectancy, which went into Paula programming her to mess things up, because that's what woman is. That's what woman does. And so when I repented. I had a member in my church who said, John, you start more fights in our house. When I repented of that immediately. Paula was free and we've had a clean house ever since. We still have our kids and our grandchildren around, I might add, too. I mentioned that my father was gone a good deal of the time. He was a traveling salesman, and so there would be two week periods that he would be gone. He'd be home on a weekend and it was a real celebration. My father was a great guy. He knew how to love, and we had fun together. But there was within me that pattern built of a kind of a loneliness, a feeling undefended because dad was simply gone with my conscious mind. I, you know, I could be appreciative of that. I knew that he was out there for our sake, that he brought home the paycheck that he was providing for us. And yet there were things that were simply not done. I In my child's mind, I felt like, well, he's tending to all that business out there. But what about my business? You know? What about my need? And so it was just a natural consequence that I would marry a guy who would enjoy being out there ministering to all of those people, you know? And this is fine. You know, that's the minister's job, to be out there ministering to all of those people. But there was such a strong expectancy in me in an area of me that had not forgiven my father for being gone, that unconsciously I was beaming to him. You're not doing the right thing for me. You're not giving to me. Maybe you don't want to give to me. And I was pushing him, really? To go out and find not just people who were asking for his help, but to drum up more work. You know, we'd go on a camping trip, and pretty soon he was off looking for someone who needed him in the campground, and, well, we found them. Yes. He'd bring home every hitchhiker on the road for dinner, you know, and this kind of thing. And when we saw what it was and we came to repentance, we really brought it to the cross. And we let the Lord be Lord over our lives in this area. Then he didn't have to be gone anymore. He could appreciate the ministry that he had at home, which really deserves a priority in everyone's home. If we aren't making our Christianity work at home, then it's going to be crippled out where we're trying to make it work. My mother was an Osage, is an Osage Indian, and received Osage Indian oil money, and at various times the family was wealthy. But my father and mother had a genius for losing money. They opened up a jewelry store and got robbed three times in a row. And the day when there was no insurance. And down it went. They opened up a gift store in Joplin, Missouri, and Joplin went into depression. And what's the first thing that goes when in a depression? Gift stores. So they lost that. So they went bankrupt two or three times. And it was built into me, a bitter root expectancy that the father would not be able to provide, and father's earthly father's body forth God to children. And so where it really counts at the heart level, though, our mind says that all the gold and silver on the thousand Hills belongs to the father, God and the father delights to give the kingdom. That's what the mind says. And the spirit says that. The heart says, oh yeah, he can't, because that's what we had with the father. And that's a bitter root expectancy. And right while I was trying to go through college to become a minister, they went bankrupt again and I had to go to work, working eighty hours a week in order to get through school and went through seminary, driving a cab at night, which was probably the best education I ever had. But that bitter root was there. And because that bitter root was there, that I would not be provided for, congregations happily and dutifully obliged me by not giving me any money. You know, they wouldn't give me raises and they wouldn't provide for me. And so we were always struggling along and struggling along until finally some person said in prayer over me, John, I perceive you cannot expect the Father God to provide for you bountifully and regularly. And the light went on. I'd had enough training in counseling and was a counselor. I saw it instantly and so went with the Lord back through my memories to deal with my bitter root expectancy that life would be like that. And then the Lord sent us out of the pastorate and into a faith work where we're supported on nothing but faith. And he told us to resign as of July thirty first. And we did in that church in the Congregational church, you have thirty days. You must serve the church, and the church must pay you, and you must serve them. So that meant November thirtieth we would be done, and that the Lord would not let us take another job. He wouldn't let us circulate papers to get another church. It's a free church system. And you circulate papers and you kind of candidate and get married. And he wouldn't let us do that. They wouldn't let us look for a chaplaincy or a counseling job. He wouldn't let us do anything. And that went on all the way through July, August and September. And friends are coming up and saying, John, what are you going to do? I don't know. And, uh, that confirmed that we were as nuts as they thought. And, uh, Sanfords were being worried for and prayed for by hundreds of people and, uh, nothing was happening. And finally, on November twentieth, the Lord said, you are to go to Coeur d'Alene. There you're to write seven books. You are to counsel in the afternoon, and you are to serve interdenominational in the kind of work Paula and I are now doing here. And he sent us down there to move to Coeur d'Alene. And when we went down there, we found out that rental was just so much. You pour it right down the drain, we thought, we'll use our camper as a down payment and buy a house. So I walked in to a real estate agency and out of twelve people there, walked up to the one Christian who had just moved there on faith. And we became his first customer. And I said to him, I'm a pastor. I don't have a church, I don't have a job, I don't have any money, and I want to buy a house. And he smiled. And he took Paula and me in the car and he said, now I've just been trained. This is my first case, and I want you to know that I was trained to go to the worst house first, and then take it to the last one last said, so I'm going to take you to the last one first. And so he took us right to the house, upstairs and downstairs, fireplaces, three bedrooms upstairs and living room, dining room, two baths, sixteen by twenty four foot covered deck and double garage. Just magnificent house with which we fell in love. Went home and found out that in the gasoline scare of that day, you couldn't even give the camper away. And, uh. But we prayed, went back the next day and said to the to his boss, Alan Planes boss, I'm a pastor without a church, without a job, without any money. I want to buy a house. And he smiled. On Sunday, a Catholic nun to whom I had been ministering talked to another Catholic lady whom I had never met at that time. She said, I've got six thousand dollars John can use. They called me up and that was our down payment. How about that for Ecumenicity? I went the next day. How many of you ever bought a house? Okay, I went the next day to the banker and I told him I'm a pastor without a church, without a job, without any money. Except I got the down payment and I want to start a counseling business. He said, how much are you going to charge? I said, twenty dollars a counseling thing. And he figured out how many hours, how many days. He said, John, we're going to move on this for you to the next morning. That was eleven thirty Monday, eleven thirty Tuesday morning. He called up. They'd already checked my credit rating favorably, already looked at the house and already processed my loan. And we moved in Tuesday night. And then the Lord said to me, John, Luke six thirty eight give, and it shall be given unto you, pressed down, shaken together, and overflowing shall men give into your bosom. John. You're never to charge a penny for anything you do. You're to give counseling. Now suppose that he had told me that on Sunday before I talked to the banker on Monday. If I'd have been the banker, I'd have said, try the next bank. And you know, we have been on faith, and it takes about a one thousand two hundred dollars overhead per month before we put any food on the table for our business to be in that house with us and everything else. And the Lord has supplied for two and a half years, just right out of the blue, just miracles just pours it in and we're walking simply on faith. And that is the story of healing, of that. John's already talked about a part of the healing of our mess. But I want to speak about one more aspect of that. In the process of not being defended by my father, who is not home, and having a great deal to defend myself from with my brothers. I became a very strong willed do it yourselfer. If no one would do it for me, then I would do it myself. And when I was trying to order my life in the strength of my own being, there was a great deal of striving and a great deal of anxiety and a great deal of tension involved. And, you know, our children, especially small children, act out what is in us, the kind of energies that we are scattering about our house the children will pick up on. And so the reason we were living in a mess for a while was simply that the children were acting out that energy, they were just simply tuning in, and they were busy as I was. They were working as hard in their own way as I was. And when I came to the realization that if Jesus Christ is Lord of my life, he will order my life, I don't have to do it myself anymore. I don't have to knock myself out. But it's my responsibility. If I'm striving at all to strive to enter the rest of the Lord, it's my responsibility to wait upon the Lord. And he will give me the desires of my heart. When I really came into that and said, Lord, I don't know how to get this done, but I'm your kid. You do it. You take charge. That's when order really began to come into our lives. That's when John was set free to be the head of the household. That's when our children started beaming in on the restfulness. And there emerged a harmony and just a quiet kind of a cooperation in the home. We have maybe, oh, at least a half a dozen people coming for counseling every day, oftentimes up to twelve people. And yet our household runs in an orderly way. The children oftentimes are just quietly there, visiting with the people who are coming in. They're already warmed up by the time they get to John. But it's the Lord's doing. It's just simply his sovereign order. Nothing that I did. When I was a boy, we had two cows and three hundred chickens and a thirty eight tree orchard and a half acre of garden, which was all my responsibility. And so I worked very hard as a boy. My mother, however, was raised in ranch culture and in ranch culture. Maybe some of you have been raised in ranch culture, and a man is only known for the amount of work he can put out. That's his worth, you know. And so every time I did some work around the house, I'd hear, but you never worked like my dad worked. You don't know how to work. You should have seen my brothers work. I never got any compliments for the work I did, which made me very bitter and angry. And so I had a bitter expectancy that I would work and work and work and put out for other people. And I would never receive any compliments. I would always be criticized. And so I would work and work in my study and counseling people in the church. And then I would prepare what may have been a good sermon. But every time I would preach, people would criticize because I was telling them, that's the way I expect to be done, come fulfill my judgment. And so they come criticize me and attack me. And it happened everywhere. And we got persecuted in three churches before the Lord dealt with this in me. And when it was dealt with and he went all the way back through all my memories of putting out for other people and not being rewarded and putting out and talking and blessing people, but being criticized for what I did. And I repented that I was causing people to sin. Now hear this one, especially pastors. I repented that it was me putting people in jeopardy before God because I was projecting to them to criticize me, and that put them in trouble with God. And so I repented of that and said, Lord, deliver me from that. I don't want to hurt my people anymore by getting them to criticize me. So they're in trouble with God. And I repented of that thing. And do you know, since then, and I've also prayed that there would be a new expectancy, that there would be warm acceptance and love between people. Do you know, people now come to me and they affirm and they compliment. And if they have a word of criticism to offer, it is always said now within a context of blessing. To me, it didn't stop me from getting that kind of feedback I need to change, but it put it in the kind of context which was love and acceptance. One final story from me and I want to start it with a question. Are you afraid in your families or in your churches to let a program or a project or an endeavor fail? I was very much afraid of letting something fail. I thought I had to get it organized. I had to be the mover behind it. I had to get all these people going. If it was a program, it was the Lord's work, you know, and it could not fail because it would be such a terrible witness to the community. I just got very tired at one point and I said, okay, Lord, I quit. It's your program. I was really active in the church, in Sunday school and women's groups and everything, and I just said, it's it's your church, it's your program. It's your thing. If it succeeds, it'll succeed. If it fails, there must be some reason for that, too. And you can speak even through a failure. When I just came to that stopping point and I gave it into the hands of the Lord, was just before we had daily Vacation Bible school, we had always had to get on the phone and call and call and call and beg people to help. That year, all we did was put a notice up on the bulletin board with a list of the various classes asking for. Volunteer teachers had another list asking for people in the congregation to donate cookies and Kool-Aid. We wound up that year with no more effort than that, with three teachers for every class. For the first time, we had an effortless and a beautiful, harmonious team teaching. And all I could say about that was praise the Lord. You can do it better than I. Now this is a way of saying for all of these situations, you see, that we never get the situation healed, even if it's ninety percent the fault out there and ten percent here, or whether it's ten percent, ninety percent here or ten out there, we never get the situation healed as so long as the problem is out there. Maturity begins and healing begins. When you say, it's me, oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer. Deal with me. That's when you begin to get free. As long as it's those awful people who don't appreciate, you know, healing. Healing begins when you say, Lord, take it out of me. I'm. God will raise up Nebuchadnezzar's to bring you to your knees. And this is the reason that he brings about opposition. And this is the reason he brings you a beloved enemy in marriage. He is so that you will have to deal with that thing. He always brings somebody whose faults and troubles and expectancies are diabolically designed to grind with yours. And the reason he does that is that we are lazy, and we won't face and see what's in us unless our beloved enemy forces us to. And so praise God for your differences. By now you may have discovered that we are quite different. Praise God for your differences, because it is in that that God is causing you to have to deal with what is in you. And finally, as a word of balance about that, Let the Lord be the one who reveals and deals with what is in you. Don't make so much of a project of it that you join the Naval Stirrers Club. But let the Lord bring people whose rebuke calls you to deal with what is in you. And any time anyone lays something on you, say, Lord, what are you saying to me? So that that thing may be healed in me. Amen. Let us bow in prayer. Lord, we pray, thanking you that in the Lord Jesus Christ to discover a flaw in us is just simply joy. Because you will take it away. Give us, O Lord, all this congregation, this day, the joy and the delight of seeing sin in ourselves for when we see it. Then you set us free. And Lord, we ask you to walk in in our prayer groups now and find us in all those bitter expectancies by which we have been programming life, by which we have been causing people to treat us in ways they really don't want to, and bring us to our death on the cross this day that we might be born anew. We thank you, Lord Jesus. We pray now that your Holy Spirit may go with us, undergirding us with joy, that we might laugh at ourselves in the midst of our healing. Thank you Jesus. Amen. This is the end of the recording. Please advance the tape to the end of the track.