Rejection and Emotional Insulation Self Deception Series 26 – Purity 1115

To see today's photo, go to mt4christ.org or follow me, M.t. Clark, on Facebook or Twitter. Good morning. Today's photo of a picnic table and 3 chairs positioned around a roaring campfire comes to us from Paulette Hodges, who shared this tranquil scene at Wabika Family Campground in Copake, New York, on social media back on July 22nd. Paulette's photo reminds me of many a campfire spent with family in my youth at the Lake George RV Park, and as an adult with my children camping in our own backyard. There is just something primal about sitting around a campfire that causes one to loosen up and to be at peace. In the intimacy around a fire, we can let go of pretensions and share stories to amuse one another or to reveal the deep thoughts and feelings of the heart. Something about being around the fire can make you feel safe and accepted and allow you to be vulnerable in a way that you aren't in the light of day. I get a similar feeling when I share my testimony or how— or hear how another brother or sister in Christ shares how the Lord has come to their rescue and showed them the way to freedom or peace. Yesterday I spoke to a brother in Christ, and even though we only knew each other in passing before our meeting, after we shared a little bit of our stories, I felt that we knew each other because of our mutual acquaintance of the Lord, who called each of us to do things in our lives that were unexpected and risky, only to discover that the Lord was faithful to meet us where He called us to and provided for us when we got there. We weren't given guarantees of success, but when we took our steps of faith, we each discovered that God was faithful to help us and give us what we needed when we needed it. Our stories were a confession that we had heard from the Lord and followed a still small voice. And even though others may think that sounded insane, we both chose to be vulnerable with one another as we bore witness of how God moved in our lives. I am not sure what will develop out of our new friendship, but at the very least, we were both encouraged to keep walking and talking with God, and we would not have received it if we had decided to keep our feelings to ourselves. Part of our life walking in the Spirit is about being vulnerable with our hearts. When we choose to ask for help or choose to help others with their problems, we take a risk that we will be embarrassed, disappointed, or rejected. And when those things happen enough in life, we can grow bitter and choose to stop letting people into our hearts. We can believe the lie that if we shut off our hearts, we won't feel any more pain. And that brings us to our current series on self-deception, where we have decided to investigate some of the ways we decide— we deceive ourselves by walking through Step 2 2, Deception Versus Truth, of The Steps to Freedom in Christ to see what ways we have been deceived by the world and ourselves, and in what ways we have wrongly defended ourselves. So today we present the third of the ways to wrongly defend yourself, uh, number 3: emotional insulation. The Steps to Freedom in Christ describe emotional insulation as withdrawing from people or keeping people at a distance to avoid Rejection. Hurt feelings hurt. The pain of rejection is sharp and devastating. The opposite of being accept— being accepted, rejection is an affront to us individually as we are judged to be not good enough in some aspect of our lives and are shut out of the company of others. Rejection says you're not smart enough, pretty enough, rich enough, or like the— or like the others in some way that makes you feel less than and unwelcome. Rejection informs you in subtle or not so subtle ways that your presence is not required or desired by the people you made yourself vulnerable to. Whether you want to admit it or not, rejection breaks your heart and can cause you to be depressed or angry at being deemed unacceptable. One defense mechanism that we can go to in response to our pain of rejection is to decide to emotionally insulate ourselves from others, to purposely keep people at a distance lest they get too close and break our hearts again. I know I've used emotional insulation as a defense in the past. I've made my, uh, I've had my heart broken pretty early in my youth, causing me to have distorted views of relationships and quite a fair amount of bitterness and angst towards society in general. Rejection caused me to think I had to earn people's love, that unrequited love was the best love because it proved your love was genuine, that you were willing to pursue it all at all cost and possibly endure years of rejection until you were finally seen as worthy of acceptance. That was one view I had early on, but after my suffering wasn't alleviated, my rejection was made crystal clear and painfully obvious. I hardened my heart and pursued a hedonistic lifestyle of cold detachment, pantomiming emotions and sincerity to get the temporary pleasures I wanted, and using people as a means to an end, and never letting anyone into my heart. But playing Iceman wears on your soul, and it tends to leave you lonely and guilt-ridden as you shut yourself off from the love you could have for some grand idea of the unobtainable that you will never achieve. The resultant loneliness caused me to eventually compromise all discernment and to make some bad relationship decisions that no amount of people-pleasing could fix and were doomed to failure. Just like camp— a campfire that needs constant fuel to stay alive, seeking circumstantial happiness is never— is a never-ending struggle that requires constant attention and will consume everything everything to keep things shiny and bright. So emotional insulation isn't the answer, and it either will leave you lonely— and it's not good for man to be alone according to God's word— or it will cause you to create idols out of people who aren't God, like yourself or someone else that you think will give you a happy life if you could just make them happy. God's word would direct us to be honest with our feelings, to know our value in God's eyes regardless of the acceptance of others, and to love others with self— selflessly and, and sacrificially, but without sacrificing to them like an idol. God commands us to love him first because his love is perfect. When we are grounded in His love and know who we are in Christ, we know that we will never be alone and don't have to base our worth or happiness on someone else's opinion. So, seek the healing that God's love provides and allow it to make your heart of stone into a heart of flesh. God's love and wisdom will empower you to be vulnerable, but also secure in the knowledge that His love is forever. And never fades away. Today's Bible verses come— well, verse comes to us from the Quick Scripture Reference for Counseling by John G. Cruis. This morning's meditation verse comes to us from the section on Affliction, Discipline, Chastisement, and Trials. And today's verse is Romans 8:28 from the New American Standard Bible. The word of God says And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose. Today's verse falls under the 12th point of our Counseling Reference Guide's resource section on Affliction, Discipline, Chastisement, and Trials. And that 12th point is: In everything, God works for the good of those who love him. Today's verse is one of the most hope-sustaining verses that one can find in the Bible, but I am quick to point out that this great promise of our faith is a conditional promise. The verse does not say that God causes all things to work together for good for everybody. It says God moves all things together for good to those who love God and to those who are called according to His purpose. Do you love God? Do you really? Loving God can be a foreign concept if you have not attached to Him relationally. Have you ever told God you loved Him? Do you talk to Him? Our relationship to the Lord is just that, a love relationship, not a deal or a legal agreement. It is not quid pro quo. Whoa, it's not, I believe in you and you forgive me and give me blessings and eternal life. Where's the love in that? One of the instructions I give for the path of Christian discipleship is to seek the Lord, and that instruction is given, uh, in the hopes that you will seek to know him more, because I believe that to know God is to love him. When you know about how much He loves us, and how awesome He is, the natural and appropriate response is to love and worship Him, to adore Him. And when we love the Lord, we in turn are filled with the desire to obey Him, to seek out His purpose for our lives as an expression for our love. The promise of, and inheritance of, eternal life that we receive when we put our faith in Jesus Christ is the ultimate good that God is moving all things together to accomplish for us. As for the ebb and flow of our existence on this mortal coil, I can't offer any guarantees. The word indicates it will be a mixed bag of joy and suffering. But when we love God and are called to his purposes, we will see the beauty of our lives that transcends positive circumstances and know our eternal hope and joy is always before us. So if you are afflicted, continue to seek the Lord's purposes and love the Lord, because all things are moving together for your good, and eventually you will see them manifest together one way or another for your good, peace, and joy. 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 A.W. Pink's The Holy Spirit, and today we continue sharing from chapter 18, The Spirit Indwelling. And today's section is on what the indwelling spirit is. So if you ever wondered what the indwelling spirit is and need to find out, go to mt4christ.org and take a look at the bottom of today's blog post where you'll see that resource that, and what A.W. Pink has to say about that. As always, we encourage a lifestyle of Christian discipleship because we found the pathway to peace. It's— it leads through— it begins with faith in Jesus Christ and continues, uh, when you, when you follow him, uh, with the way you live your life. And that's not just, you know, doing the right thing. It's drawing into his presence, um, to experience God's love, to know God's love an experiential way and to allow that love to work in your life, to cause you to forgive others, to be vulnerable to others, and to love others and to seek God's purposes. And his purpose is to go and make disciples. The greatest love we can give is the knowledge of Jesus Christ. The relationship we have with Christ can be passed on to others. Um, but we have to be out there and walking in it and telling people about it. So that's why we do the, uh, the, the podcast, um, is try to impress upon people, um, that, uh, our faith isn't just a weekly observance and a set of doctrinal beliefs that we check off and believe in. It's a relationship with the living God. And, um, when I run into brothers and sisters in Christ who testify of, you know, getting an unction or a feeling or an intuition to follow the Lord in some way, and how they, they, they were faithful to it, and how it turned into a blessing, and how it turned into a life that was transformed. I know God's alive, and I know he's well, and I really feel that the world has been, you know, spiritually blinded, but it's also emotionally insulated from the Lord. You know, we prayed to God one time and what happened didn't, you know, our relatives died or something good didn't happen, or we suffered loss or tragedy in some way, and we emotionally insulated ourselves from God from that point. We decided we weren't going to believe in Him any longer. Because he didn't bless our socks off every moment of our lives. And so we emotionally insulate ourselves from the Lord and walk with a cold heart through this world. We disbelieve that he exists, and we feel the, you know, we feel the consequences of the belief. When you don't believe in God, you don't see him, you don't experience his presence. You shut yourself off and you convince yourself there's nothing but this world, and you seek after pleasure. And things of this world to validate your existence, and those things were never intended to do that. The thing that validates your existence is the Lord, and he sent Jesus Christ to show you how worthy you are of his love, that he was willing to give it all to save us and to bring us into his family. And that's— talk about love— that's big love, and we can enter into his love when we put our faith in Jesus and decide to represent his love through this world with the way we live. And so we'll keep doing that because, you know, there's some ebb and flow there. When we forget, you know, who we are in Christ and how we are to live and what we put our hopes in, we can go astray. But when we remember what God says about us and how he directs us to live, we find the joy again, we find the peace, and we let go of the other things in this world that we were putting our hopes in, and we put our hope squarely in the Lord. So we encourage that. I want to give a shout out to the King of Spain, uh, Zero. Uh, I didn't know there was more than one King of Spain on Reddit, um, but apparently there is, and, uh I lost his message yesterday for a bit, but basically he gave me a heads up that my microphone was lower than it was. I'd recently switched out microphones, and, um, uh, because it gave me the option of hooking into the USB-C port of my laptop, but apparently, uh, the, the volume is significantly lower when I use that. So we switched it to the, uh that USB port splitter that I use, and it's back to a normal volume, you know, basically. So I apologize for the technical difficulties. I recently discovered how to fix the thumbnails on YouTube as well, to remain vulnerable and to show I'm not perfect. I'm not going back to fix every inverted photo. I did go back to like, uh, April. Um, so if you go back to April on YouTube, you'll see all the photos aligned perfectly. And I've discovered what the error of my ways basically had to do with iPhone technology and saving photos the right way. So if you ever want to do a, uh, share a photo to YouTube as a thumbnail, let me advise you, you have to turn it so the home button You have to turn your phone so the home button is on your right, edit the photo and save it in that position, and then it'll be perfectly aligned with YouTube. Um, so I, I think it was Metal Cop, uh, of, uh, on YouTube who shared a video of how to fix that. So I have to thank him as well. Um, but I'm, I'm pretty sure he's not listening. Um, Metal Cop. Anyway, um, so that's all the news. I do want to report and be accountable to y'all that I did work on my project for Deeper Walks Prayer Ministry, and I got, you know, probably 5 out of 8 pages done yesterday after all-day writing and, you know, taking a break to have that appointment. So today I intend to press on and to get her done, and I was able to get my other assignments for Deeper Walk and today's blog done this morning. So, you know, it's a working vacation of sorts, but the freedom that I'll get from completing this assignment early will be palpable. And, you know, it's nothing like getting, you know, doing what you have to do, meeting your responsibilities, and having them behind you, no longer in front of you. That's another part of this walk is doing what's right all the time and taking care of being a good steward to what we have. So, so I'm doing it, I'm doing it today, I'm doing it. I'll be able to finish. It might not be— it might be super actually too long, but we're going to complete it. That's, that's our intention anyway. And so we'll report tomorrow whether or not we are successful. That's all the work I got to do today. Basically finish up a paper for my School of Prayer Ministry and try to find some rest and relaxation with this vacation that's in week 2 and will be expired a week from today. So that's that. So let's pray. Lord God, Heavenly Father, thank you for another day in your kingdom. We thank you for all our friends, uh, you know, people who have made themselves vulnerable by saying, yes, I actually listen to your podcast. And who've come along our path to share their stories and share the hope that we all have in Jesus. So we thank you for those people, and we come alongside them, Lord. We ask for you to come alongside them in their prayer request, in their walk of faith, to empower them to not emotionally insulate themselves and to be vulnerable before you and before their fellow man, to show the love of the Lord. Um, and help them. And so, Lord, we just pray for you to go before us today, open our eyes to the things you need us to see, help us to accomplish the things you want us to accomplish, and lead us in peace the whole way. Because, Lord, all we want to do is represent you in your kingdom and share the, the hope that we have in you. And, um, we thank you for that, we, we praise you for that, and we love you for that. And, uh, Lord, we thank you, we praise you, we love you, and we pray all these things in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen.