The scariest monsters are those that come from within!

JR. Forasteros - February 15, 2015

What God Speaks

Is This On?

When we encounter painful circumstances, we seldom stop to ask how we’re contributing to the pain. We stay in that pain unchanged, or we leave, taking our brokenness into the next relationship or job or home. But God offers us something better than unchanging, endless cycles of pain. God speaks to transform us, to make us into a people who change the world around us even as we have been changed. We don’t leave, and we don’t settle. We choose to stay, choose to be changed and to change.

From Series: "Is This On?"

Ask most people if God speaks to them and they'll wonder if you're crazy. Most people think God only speaks to the very religious or the not-quite sane. But what if God is speaking to everyone? What if - because Jesus has come - God's voice is all around us, in our every day lives? How can we hear God's voice? What does God sound like? What is God saying? In this series, we'll learn how to hear the God who is speaking to all of us.

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Today’s about Ghost stories. Though they appear in many forms, the quintessential ghost story involves the spirit of a dead person who’s stayed around (usually a haunted house) because they have unfinished business. Maybe they have to deliver a message or ensure proper burial or get revenge. Whatever the case, once their business is complete, they leave into the afterlife.

Unlike our previous two monsters, today we’re not ghosts. Rather, to quote Peter Rollins,

We are the haunted houses. — Peter Rollins

We move through life collecting hurts, wounds and scars, evidence of pain inflicted on us by other people. Some may be slight, exaggerated in our heads – maybe someone who cuts us off or says something cruel or who causes us harm by accident. Others could be huge, life-altering. A spouse who left. An abuser. And there’s a whole range of hurts between.

Whatever their source, however legitimate or not, these people, these hurts don’t just exit our lives.

We carry them around with us, in our heads and in our souls. They haunt us, returning again and again out of the ether to drag us through the past, to relive history, to reopen old wounds.

The problem is we don’t know what these ghosts want. We don’t know how to resolve their business and get them to leave us. We can’t escape their haunting – especially if the person who hurt you is still a part of your life.

If we want to escape our ghosts, if we want to be free from the haunting of our hurts, we must learn the difficult art of forgiveness.

Join us Sunday as we learn how to forgive and find healing.

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