I Can't Do This On My Own (Hope and Healing - Week 2)

Have you ever hidden your deepest struggles, afraid of what others might think? Pastor Shawn courageously shares his own battle with alcohol, people-pleasing, and defensiveness, revealing how Jesus transforms our shame into hope. Through the biblical story of the man with the withered hand, Shawn illustrates how healing begins when we stop pretending and stretch out our brokenness to Jesus. Ready for real transformation? This raw, honest message shows how bringing our hurts into the light leads to freedom. Don't miss this powerful reminder that in Christ, our stigmas become stories of grace.

Transcript

Hi, my name is Shawn. I have a. Hi. I have a new life in Christ. And I struggle with people pleasing, and I struggle with getting defensive sometimes to the point where it makes me reactive and reactionary. And I've definitely burned some bridges because of that.

These two things have been pretty consistent in my life for as long as I can remember. I've kind of wrestled with them. But nine years ago, if I were to stand up here and be honest with you, I would tell you that there was something else that I was struggling with. It was people pleasing, and it was getting defensive, but it was also alcohol.

In July of 2016, my mom passed away after a season of being sick and continuing to have health that declined. And we were out in Rhode island, where we felt like God had called us to and just was confused. Many of you, you know that part of my story. I've shared it up here before. But what most people don't know is that in that season of my life, I kept spiraling into deeper and deeper depression.

I was angry, I was confused. I was trying to work through my own emotions while leading this church that was struggling, that we weren't even sure if it was going to be able to continue a year from now. Felt all of this pressure to be something that could be the catalyst that God would use to make this church place successful, which I never should have put on myself to begin with.

But then, two, dealing with all of this pain inside that I didn't know what to do with.

And it started as just kind of casual drink. And I'm like, I've never been a hardliner on alcohol. I'm still not even today. I think that scripture gives us liberty when it comes to that, to use it in moderation within the laws of the land. I know there's a lot of varying opinions about that, and I understand.

I think that it's one of those things that we can hold in tension with one another and don't have to necessarily break fellowship on. But Scripture is clear about warning against the dangers of drunkenness for good reason. There's this fine line between enjoying something and abusing it. And in the fall of 2016, I crossed that line, and I started to abuse it. I was using alcohol to numb the pain that I was feeling.

It was a way for me to escape.

It used to be something that I did with my friends while we were watching a ball game, maybe enjoyed, know, a beer with dinner. It turned into something more. It became something that I did in secret by myself.

And I was intentionally going over that line of moderation, like seeking to go over that line that I knew I had. And remind you, I was leading a church at the time. And so every Sunday, like now, I was standing up and I was preaching about the, the love and the grace of Jesus and the power that the gospel has to transform your life.

And I wasn't experiencing it myself. I felt like I was crying out to God, save me from this, rescue me from this. I just kept going back. My friend Alan Algram, who was a minister at a church in Colorado for years, unfortunately passed away too early last year.

Alan used to say that preachers are in danger of becoming traffickers in unfelt truth, meaning we preach the truth of the gospel to others, but we don't experience it ourselves. What we're preaching is true, we're just not feeling it in our own lives. And that's where I was. It wasn't long until I started to believe. Well, maybe this gospel isn't as powerful as I thought that it was.

Maybe Jesus doesn't heal the way that I thought that he did. And if he does, then why isn't he doing it for me?

Like all of it made me feel like a fraud.

I didn't know who I was anymore. I didn't know what I believed anymore.

I just knew that I was not in a head or heart space to continue to lead a church. I thought that if this church had any chance of surviving, it needed somebody better than me to lead it. And so I just had to get out of the way is what I believed.

So In March of 2017, we sold our home, we loaded up a truck and we moved into my in laws basement, which let me tell you, nothing has a way of sobering you up like being 36 years old living in your in laws basement.

I had no clue what was next. But what I found in my life and what I've seen in the lives of a lot of others is that it's oftentimes when we hit rock bottom that we find what we've been looking for. And I don't know, I still don't know to this day if we hit rock bottom and we find what we've been looking for, or if we it takes us hitting rock bottom before Jesus can finally show us what we've been looking for.

But either way, like that's where I was. And as we were living with my in laws, God began to meet me in that space. In my brokenness and in my pain and my shame, my regret, my embarrassment, felt Like, I let my family down, God down. People who had supported and encouraged us over the years, down.

I began to cry out to him, and as I did, he began to heal, heal me and give me new life. And in a lot of ways, he used this church to do that.

And the process of healing did not happen overnight. And to be honest, I mean, the temptation doesn't just ever fully go away. There are still stressful seasons of life where I'm tempted to go back to it. I've got better safeguards in my life now than I did then. I've got a group of guys that I meet with regularly, not just about this, but just about anything.

Any hurt, hang up, struggle. We're open, we're vulnerable with one another.

There's this phrase in recovery, maybe you've heard it, it says, you are only as sick as your secrets.

When we let secrets kind of take root in our soul, man, they have a way of just eroding us. They fester and grow in darkness. But sin dies when we expose it to the light. There's power in that. And so I've got a group of guys that I can be honest with.

I need them. And so I stand before you today and I can say, hi, my name is Sean. And. And I used to struggle with alcohol. And even though it's still a temptation sometimes, man, Jesus is bringing me new life.

And I still struggle with people pleasing and pride.

To be honest, it's a little embarrassing to stand up here before you guys and just kind of admit all of this. I woke up at 3 o' clock this morning wrestling with the Lord, saying, I don't know. I don't want to share this. I don't know.

I don't know what will happen.

As a church, we don't ever want to put our wounded on the front lines. But we've also probably all seen where the church is really good at shooting their wounded.

And so I don't. There's a little part of me that's nervous this morning about what might be done with this vulnerability.

But when I looked at my phone this morning, I had a message from Matt Nussbaum as I was wrestling, going, should I share this or not? It's like 3:08 in the morning. And he had sent me a message late last night just saying, hey, I'm praying for you tomorrow. I know you're going to be sharing some hard stuff, and I just think that the Lord's going to use it. And so I woke up this morning and I packed my bag to do a baptism.

And I don't know if we're going to have one or not, but I'm believing that we're going to because Jesus wants to change lives, and he wants to use our stories to help others take their first steps to him. And so, yeah, it's hard and it's a little embarrassing to stand up here and share these struggles. Again, I'm a people pleaser. But the reason I'm not ashamed to tell you my story is because my sin does not define who I am. My addictions, my struggles.

That is not who I am. My identity is in Jesus, and so is yours.

He defines who we are. He has given me new life. He has given you. He has offered us new life. He has made a way for us to be adopted into God's family, to be called sons and daughters of the King.

And it's not because we did anything to earn it. No, it is the exact opposite of that. It is by grace. You have been saved through faith. It is a gift of God that is no works of our own.

This is part of my story, and I'm just curious this morning, what is your story?

We all have a story to tell. We all have something in our life that we are embarrassed by, that we are ashamed of. Wounds that we carry still today because of it.

Maybe something that you've just had to bury and hide and move on from. You're afraid that it's going to come back up. You hope that you never run into a certain person or certain people because you know it's just going to rehash some stuff.

These things are typically known as stigmas. The dictionary defines stigma as a mark of disgrace.

And many of us, if not all of us, we carry some kind of mark of disgrace in our lives. Something that we bury, something we try to hide from, something that we hope that nobody ever finds out about.

Addiction, a past, legal trouble, moral failure. These things we don't typically like, bring them up at dinner parties because we don't want to think about them ourselves, let alone make other people know about them. They're a source of deep pain or shame for us. And so we keep them hidden in the dark because we think if people knew about them, then they might look down on us. They might think less of us, they might weaponize them and use them against us.

We might lose our jobs, we might lose our families, we might lose our reputation. And so we keep our stigmas and we keep our. Our sig. Our shame and our sickness hidden.

We cover up our hurts Our hang ups and our habits, and we hope that nobody finds out about them in our text. Today, Jesus meets a man who I think is in this place. He had a stigma that was a source of shame in his life. And this account is primarily about God's grace and his mercy and, and that he loves us more than he requires rules and rituals to be followed. But I think in this encounter we see that man, Jesus wants to heal us from these stigmas in our life, those marks of disgrace that we try to hide.

We don't have to hide them from him. And when we reveal it, we can start to find hope and healing. So I want to go through the text that Maggie read for us earlier. Matthew chapter 12. Starting in verse 9, Going on from that place, he, Jesus went into their synagogue and a man with a shriveled hand was there looking for a reason to bring charges against Jesus.

They being the Pharisees, these religious leaders, they asked him in, is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? Luke's version of this account, retelling of it, says that at this question Jesus got angry. Not, not like why would you ask me? But like angry that they were propping this man up to be used in their fight against him. Angry at how they just missed the point of God's love and mercy and care.

He said to them, if any of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, like, will you not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a person than a sheep? Therefore it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath. Then he said to the man, stretch out your hand. So he stretched it out and it was completely restored, just as sound as the other.

We don't know this man's name. We don't know anything really about his story except for what we read in these verses. We don't know if he was born with a withered hand. We don't know if it came later on in life, maybe the result of an accident. Luke in his account, again, he's a doctor, he gives the most details when it comes to the miracles and the healings that, that Jesus would perform.

He tells us that it was his right hand, using your left hand was kind of considered dirty, another source of shame. And that's all that this man had. And so he had kind of a double stigma going on. And we can assume based on first century culture, that that he was seen as a disgrace, as an outcast. The assumption is that if you had something happen to you, then it was clearly because God was punishing you.

You. It was because of something you had done. And, and if it wasn't something you had done, then it was something your parents had done or. Or someone close to you had done. And so God was taking out his vengeance on you.

And. And if God was taking out his vengeance on you, then we don't really want to be close to you because it might rub off on us. And so this man, for his entire life, was met with people who would say, hey, we're just going to stay over here, and you just stay over there.

He was shunned.

He was excluded.

I imagine there were days where he would look at his hand and yell at it. I hate you for what you've done in my life.

Maybe you've looked at something like that in your own life.

He hated the looks of it. He hated what it had done. I imagine that it was a source of shame. And he would just walk around trying to keep it hidden. Most people probably knew that he was the man with the withered hand.

Communities were small, but he didn't want to just flaunt it out in front of them. And so he would put it underneath his robe, walk with his hand behind his back so that people wouldn't constantly see it and think about it, didn't want to draw attention to it.

So imagine being this man and you're at a place of worship. You went to the synagogue, you went to church that morning. Maybe you'd heard a little bit about Jesus, you were curious. Whatever it was, you find yourself in church. And the very thing that you hope nobody points out or notices is the very thing that the religious people in your community point to to try to trap Jesus.

They call it out, they point to you, and they use you as this pawn in their game. And to make the embarrassment even worse, Jesus. Jesus asks you to come to the front of the room and do the one thing that you have spent your entire life trying to avoid. In verse 10, he tells the man, stretch out your hand. Show us your stigma.

Show us this source of your shame.

But as he obeys and he begins to stretch out his hand, he doesn't just start to feel tingling in his fingers. He doesn't just start to feel strength in his hand. What he doesn't feel is shame from Jesus, who rumor was starting to say is the son of God, the God that other people have been telling you was punishing you for something. You look in his eyes and you see compassion. And he's brought healing and a new sense of hope.

So what is your story? What do you carry around hidden, that you hope nobody finds out about the stigma that you hide?

What if Jesus were to invite you to the front of the room this morning and say, stretch out your hand.

Stretch it out. Show me. Show others. Not so that you can be shamed or embarrassed by it, but so that the power of God's grace can be made manifest in your life so that Jesus can meet you in this place of disgrace and pour his grace out on you. There's a reason that the first step in every recovery program is admitting that you have a problem.

Man, I've talked to people. I've helped lead a recovery ministry for five years. I've talked to so many parents who call on behalf of their kids. Kids who call on behalf of their parents are like, you need to get my XYZ into recovery. And we'd have to ask them, well, do they want to get.

No, there's not much that you can do. I've seen people forced into something, and it lasts about as long as that. You have to start from this place of admitting, man, I've got a problem. There's some kind of hurt that I can't heal. There's some kind of hangup I can't get over.

There's some kind of habit that I can't break. And we talked about last week, we are all one of those people.

So step one sounds something like this. We admit we are powerless over our addictions, brokenness, and sinful patterns, that in our own power, our lives are unmanageable.

Would you say this with me? We admit we are powerless over our addictions, brokenness, and sinful patterns that in our own power, our lives are unmanageable. Step one is a form of stretching out your hand and saying to Jesus, I can't do this on my own. I can't fix it. I need you to heal me.

And the truth is, is that all of us need to stretch out our hand. We all need to admit that without him and his grace, we can't do it on our own. We need to come to Jesus openly and honestly about our hurts, our hangups and our habits. And when we do, Jesus does not shame us for brokenness. He heals us.

He doesn't affirm it and be like, oh, it's okay. Do whatever you want to do. It's fine. God's a God of love. No, he says, go and sin no more.

But there's grace that meets you in that moment of honesty and vulnerability and openness. He heals us. The transformation process begins. He turns our stigma from a source of shame into a place of. Of hope and healing, yes, in our lives, but maybe even in the life of somebody else.

And we don't earn it. We just simply stretch out our hand in obedience and we allow Jesus to transform us. If we're being honest with ourselves, we know that, man, this sounds so much easier than what it actually is.

I think that we are all afraid that if we open ourselves up to be seen and known, that we are going to be rejected, People won't love us, that they might use that stigma against us. They'll talk about us behind our back, that our relationship's going to look different. And so we just work really hard to keep everything hidden. We hide our addictions, our anger, our shame, and we just pretend like everything is okay.

I think all the while Jesus is lovingly and tenderly inviting us just, would you just stretch out your hand? Would you just stretch out your hand? And trust me not to expose us to, but to heal us. You see, Jesus knows that healing begins where pretending ends.

That the finish line of pretending is the starting line for healing. These two things cannot coexist. You cannot heal and pretend at the same time. It's only when we stop pretending that we can truly start healing. And Jesus is finding us to find, inviting us to find true life in him, to find that hope and that healing.

When we admit that we are powerless to do anything on our own, he begins to change those places in our life that need Him. And so what do we do? Two scriptures this morning that I want to close us off with. The first one is one John 1:9.

Look for a theme in these verses.

John writes, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.

The second one is James, chapter 5. Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results.

There's two disciplines that I think that we've kind of lost sight of within the church. Confession and repentance. I just don't think that we talk about those two things enough. Matt Nusswong and I were joking around this week that, you know, sometimes it just feels like we need to put a little black box and say, here's a schedule. One of us are going to be in there and just come and confess.

Like sometimes maybe the Catholics have got it right. Maybe we just need a place where we can go and we can sit and we can just confess our sin in a place that is safe to get it out. I think that so much, but I don't think it's just about the mechanism of going through the motions and saying the things. I think it's when we invite other people into it that God begins to do that transformative work inside of us. When we unmask our sin to God and to others, we bring it into the light so that it loses its power.

When we stop pretending like we've got it all together, we can finally start experiencing the healing that Jesus gives. And we need each other, which is why Jesus has given us this community called the church. And it is imperfect in so many ways. And I know, I know. I know that some of us in here, we have been hurt by the church when we've been vulnerable.

Unfortunately, the big C church has become the last place that people think of when they think about finding recovery, where healing, it's turned into a place of pretending, where we feel like we have to just come in here, put on a good face, then go out and continue to struggle with the same thing year after year after year. It doesn't always feel safe in here. I get it, man. I can honestly say that my experience at Sherwood Oaks has been different. And since I've been in the seat that I've been in here, I've only wanted to continue what Tom and others have started, to make this a place where we can find and experience the grace of Jesus.

Because none of us have it all together. We can only find hope and healing in him. And so this morning, if you are tired of pretending, if you're tired of going through the motions, if you are tired of running, if you are wondering, is there anybody that would love me after where I've been and what I have done, what I struggle with, I want just invite you. Would you give us a chance? Would you give us a chance to come alongside of you and point you to the One who will never leave you or forsake you?

Jesus is a friend that is closer than a brother. And when we stretch out our withered hand and withered soul to him, he starts the healing process in us. If you're ready to take a step and find that, we'd love to come alongside of you. And there'll be some people with lanyards around the room here. I want to pray with you and help you take your next step.

And like I said earlier, I came prepared to baptize somebody this morning. I don't know why I might take dry clothes home, that's fine. But if you're ready to take that step and surrender your life to Christ and find new life in him, we got clothes and towels and everything ready for you. Come. We're going to come into a time of communion as well.

At the cross, Jesus took our guilt, our shame. He bore it on himself. He stretched out his arms and his wounds became our healing. And we remember this as we take the bread and we drink the cup that hope and healing are found in him alone. And so here in a moment, we'll get up.

We got stations up in the front, we've got him in the back. And let this be a time where we stretch out our hands to him, where we bring our brokenness and our needs and our sin. And we admit once more Jesus, I am powerless to do anything about this. And he's like, ah, finally you're right where I want you to be. So, God, thank you for your grace and your mercy that you just simply invite us to come to be honest with you.

And you begin to do a great work inside of us. And it doesn't always happen overnight and it's not always immediate like it was for this man in his hand, but you do it.

I'm living testimony of it. And there's so many more of us in this room right now. So for the person that is tired of pretending and is looking for hope, oh Jesus, would you meet them here by the power of your Holy Spirit and draw them to yourself. May they come running into the arms of a Father who loves them, who welcomes them, and who can transform us in Jesus name. Amen.