Probably one of the things that we’d all like to do is to grow as people. Hopefully today, we’re a bit more mature and balanced than we were, say 5 years ago. And in 5 years time, we’d hope that we’ve learned a bit more. That the years have brought some wisdom and some insight compared to who we are and how we behave today.

That’s what we’d like to think. But it’s not always the case. The reality is that there are some things in us, sometimes, that hold us back. That constrain us from being all that we can be. They stop us from living life to the full.

One of the things that many of us struggle with and I certainly have in my life, is a deep sense of inadequacy and insecurity. So is it possible to deal with this personal and social disability?

Other people around us, well they seem so confident of themselves and their own abilities. Have you noticed? Especially young people these days. Look at them. They’re so talented. They’re so confident. While everybody else is busy putting their best foot forward, sometimes we’re dying a quiet death inside. “Somehow, I don’t feel as good. I’m not as articulate. I’m not as talented. I’m not as bright. I’m not as good-looking. I’m not as fit. I’m not as significant as they are. I don’t make as much difference in the world as they do.”

We can often have that sort of a view of ourselves. And the worst bit about it is you can’t easily admit that to someone. You look at a photo of yourself and you think, “I look ugly”. Or maybe you see yourself on a video and you think, “surely I don’t look like that.” Or you hear your voice recorded and you think, “I don’t sound like that. That can’t be me can it?”

It’s a quiet, lonely hell. Is this something you might relate to? Over 50% of all women in western society chronically suffer from low self-esteem. And it happens to men too. But in a sense it’s almost worse for men because the whole macho image thing, well you can’t admit that to someone.

So what are the symptoms? What does somebody look like who’s suffering from insecurity? Well the first thing is they’re really, really touchy. When you’re around them it’s like walking on eggshells. You have to be careful where you tread. Because you don’t know when they’re going to go off like a cracker. Someone who’s insecure worries about what other people think about me. What will they think when they know this? What are they saying behind my back? What are they doing to me? How does this impact on me?

Somebody who’s really insecure sees themselves at the centre of the universe. And they’re really hard people to be around. But what if that someone is you or me?

As we sit here talking about deep insecurity, I wonder how many people would love to be healed? To be set free. This week on A Different Perspective, I’ve called this little series of five programs – Time to Get Over It. Because I’d like to look at this subject of insecurity from a different perspective. Dealing with hurts from the past. Getting a right and balanced attitude towards ourselves.

Let me tell you something. I have a crazy notion. I have this crazy notion that Jesus died on the cross for me and for you, to set us free. And Jesus said:

If I set you free, you’ll be free indeed. You’ll be really free

Well … let me ask you a question. Do you like yourself? I mean, you strip off your clothes and you stand naked in front of the mirror and you look at yourself. And you think, “do I fundamentally like this person?” And there’s an emotional equivalent too. You strip off all the pretence and all the faces we put on when we go out in front of other people. And we look at ourselves as a package. Me inc or you inc. This package of physical; his package of emotional; this package of spiritual; of talents and strengths and weaknesses and limitations. You look at this package and let me ask you to give yourself an honest answer. Do you really like you? Are you happy with you?

Sadly, the answer for a lot of people is “no”. Sadly, the answer for me used to be “no”. Now I’m not asking any of us to have a swelled head. But Jesus said, “Love your neighbour as yourself.”

Now that’s great. We always focus on that first bit, of loving your neighbour. And there’s probably none of us that would say that’s a bad idea. I mean, to love, to be good to the people around us. Friends, family, work colleagues, people at church, people at the club, whatever we’re involved in. To love our neighbour seems to be a really good thing to do.

But just let’s think about this because it’s a two-part sentence. “Love your neighbour as yourself.”

Love yourself – now that’s an interesting thing. We don’t expect Jesus to say that. We think it’s all about loving your neighbour. But He’s saying:

Love your neighbour as yourself. (Mark 12:31)

Question: what if we don’t have a right attitude towards ourselves? What if we don’t like ourselves? What if we don’t love ourselves? Well in this two-part sentence Jesus is saying, “Well if you can’t love yourself properly, you probably won’t be able to love other people properly.”

Look around. Look at insecure people. They’re always feeding their insecurity. They’re never content with who they are. They’re never content with their lot in life. Me, I used to hate when other people succeeded. Others were in the lime light. When you’re in that space, how can you love other people? How can you be good to other people when the only thing that you really can deal with is this deep, nagging, painful, insecurity thing?

And then one day God switched a light on in my heart. I came to the understanding that this Jesus whom He sent, His Son, who died on the cross, died for me while I was still all those rotten things I knew I was. Just as I am, naked in front of that mirror, complete package – good and bad, beautiful and ugly, with all that rotten stuff in me. The naturally consequences of which are shame and insecurity.

Jesus said, “Give me all that bad stuff. All that stuff about you that you don’t like. Give me that black box full of all that rubbish. And I will take it and I will take it on me.”

We see that Jesus became sin. He who knew no sin became sin for us. He took all that rubbish that makes me feel embarrassed and ashamed and paid for it. Full payment. No more payment required. No more need for justice. He paid for it. So I became white, pure. A slate wiped clean. And it doesn’t matter where we are in our walk in life.

You may have been walking with Jesus for 40 years. You may never have accepted Jesus as yours and put your trust in Him. But let’s just contemplate that deeply. Just for a long time, try and wrap our hearts and our minds around that. And my prayer for you is, that as you do and as I do still in my life too, as we live our lives trying to come to grips with His grace, that it changes us. That it takes away our need to feel insecure.

I can honestly say today that I don’t have insecurity in my life. And it used to be such a cancer. I remember visiting a school friend just a few years after we had left school. And she was telling me how Bill, a friend of ours, was doing really well in his business and they were going well and it was like something inside me died. I couldn’t cope with someone else doing better than I was doing.

That’s gone. God’s healed that. And the whole source, the whole root of the healing is right there on that rough wooden cross on that hill, just outside Jerusalem, called Calvary. Where Jesus made a statement to you and me. Where He said, “I love you this much.” And if anyone loves me that much, if God loves me that much, it’s not a glib, trite thing. It’s not a “oh well, God loves you.” This is a profound statement meant to strike at the heart of my insecurity and yours.

“Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.” So the saying goes. But in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. When people call us names. When they hurt us. Or reject us. Or abuse us. Or talk behind our backs. Those things can really hurt us. And for many people, they carry those old injuries around with them. Often not really knowing it. And it robs them of the life that God always intended.

If your Dad didn’t encourage you, chances are you’ll have low self esteem. If you were abused as a child, chances are you’ll feel like a victim for much of your life. So is it possible to be set free from the hurts of the past?

There’s something really important that we need to know about the past. It’s past. It’s gone. There are lots of things out of our control. The past is one of the biggest ones of all. Doesn’t matter what we do. How much we wish we could change it. How much we try. What’s done is done. We can’t change the past. We can only change from hereon forward.

Well why is this so important? I mean it’s blindingly, glimpsingly obvious. Yet so many people live in the past. They live today constrained by the hurts of yesterday. “I didn’t have a happy childhood. I was abused. I was hurt. The kids at school weren’t nice to me. The teacher …”

I mean, recently I was overseas with my wife. We were in Canada and we were talking with our daughter who was staying with a friend for the couple of weeks while we were gone. Our daughter Melissa is 14. And there was one particular teacher who said something really hurtful to her. And so, of course, I rang the principal and I talked to the principal and dealt with it. But just one harsh word from an adult when we’re growing up as teenagers, just one, can leave a mental scar.

It can happen from parents. It happened to me when I was growing up. It’s just the way I am. And we look back and we lament. We wish it was different but it’s not. And we turn it over and over in our mind. Like a cow chewing its cud.

Here’s this crazy idea that I have. When Jesus died on the cross for me, He purchased for me a new future. If anyone believes in Him, they are a new creation. Everything old is passed away. Have a look. Everything else is new. And Jesus said,

If I set you free then you are actually free. (John 8:36)

You listen to the apostle Paul:

We are more than conquerors if we believe in Jesus.

I can do anything through Christ Jesus who strengthens me.

Okay, so there are some words on a page in a book called The Bible, that tell us some things but what do they really mean for life? Well, here’s the crunch. And if you are someone who is struggling with the hurts of the past you may not like what I have to say. But I have to say it to you anyway.

Here is the crunch. You can live your life with the hurts of the past and believe that you can’t change it. Or you can decide to believe what God says about you. You’ve got a choice.

I often joke. I mean I would not make a good counsellor, you know. It’s not my gift to sit with people. One of the people who helps me on this program, Max Harding, who is a great guy and as well as being a fantastic producer, he also works in a counselling ministry. And he has a wonderful job at that but that is not what I do. And I often joke that my form of counselling is to listen to people for 30 seconds then say, ‘that is great, just get over it’.

In a sense that doesn’t help. And of course when we have issues and hurts and problems from the past we do have to bring them out and talk about them and deal with them. But some people talk about them and talk about them and talk about them and talk about them for the rest of their lives.

They whinge and complain about some bad things that happened to them when they were children. Even people, let me say, who have said, “look I’ve seen what God did for me through Jesus Christ. I believe in Him.” And yet somehow, these same people still want to live in the hurts of the past.

The past is past. It’s over. It’s gone. Can’t change it. Can’t undo it. Can only come to grips with it and leave it behind. If it’s past, shouldn’t we leave it behind?

Do you have some hurts? Let me ask you really kindly but yet very directly, are you still wallowing in those hurts? If that’s you, I have a word from God for you today. And that word is this: get over it! It is time to move on. I don’t say that lightly, I don’t say that with a smile on my face. It is time to move on. Let it go.

Jesus bought you and me an eternal future. And it doesn’t matter where you go in the Old Testament or the New Testament, what you see is a God who wants to bless us. Now, a lot of Christians in the New Testament went through a whole bunch of persecution, and you could say that they were victims in a sense. But when you look at Paul, locked up in jail, singing and praising God, writing letters of encouragement to his friends in Philippi, you think, I don’t think Paul was really a victim here.

Would he have preferred to be doing something else? Probably, Paul would probably have rather not been in jail. But there was no way that the Apostle Paul was living his life as a victim. He’d come to grips with what was happening to him very, very quickly. And quickly he got over it.

When we have hurts from the past sometimes it’s time to take the garbage out and let it go. If the past is past maybe we need to get over it! If Jesus bought us a future.

Of course the devil, well he’s happy for us to live wallowing in the pains of the past. He’s only come to steal, kill and destroy. But Jesus said

I have come that you would have an abundantly blessed life. (John 10:10)

So which one will it be? Will we continue to wallow in the pain and the hurts of the past or will we decide to believe what God says about us and get over it? But hang on Berni, you don’t understand my past. You don’t understand how much it hurts, you just don’t understand. Well maybe I don’t, but here are the things that I do understand.

You are an incredibly beautiful person in God’s eyes. And when he sent Jesus to die, he had you in mind. He had me in mind. He had his love focused on us. And maybe some tough things have happened in our lives, but listen, show me just one person, just one person, who’s had a perfect life. Without any hurts, without any disappointments, without anything to look back on and regret. I don’t know anyone like that do you?

Now look at this Jesus on the cross. The price that he paid to purchase a future for you and me, and tell me that there is something to be gained by hanging on to the past that he dealt with on the cross for us.

Today I believe you and I are together for one reason, Jesus has an invitation for you to live this abundant life. We all have decisions to make, and today I challenge you to make a decision. Either choose to wallow in the past and let it rob you of your future, or choose to accept once and for all the abundant blessed life that He came to give us.

The decision is yours. Which one will it be? And if you’re tempted to hang on to those past hurts, if they’re hard to let go, give me just one good reason for you to hang on to them. I believe we’ve each been made to live an incredible life. Maybe today you can take that simple step of faith, and say that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

It’s a funny thing, but a relationship can be going along just fine, work, home, friends, just ticking along. And then all of a sudden, out of the blue, this person comes out punching.

Whoa! I didn’t see that coming. Like a curve ball to the solar plexus, they just attack us or spit out some angry words or say something that just blows us out of the water.

And as we pick ourselves off the floor we are thinking, “I just didn’t’ see that coming. What was that about, I mean what did I do to deserve that?” And sometimes it’s the other way around we just lash out at someone and afterwards we think, “Why did I do that?” you know what I mean.

I was visiting a radio station recently, an executive in a different country. And I had a morning meeting scheduled with him to talk about a few issues. And while I was on the way in, in the car, and he range me and he said, “Look, I still really want to meet with you but I have this problem, there is this really big human resources problem that has blown up in my face at work. Can we meet at a little bit later?” Well I had some flexibility that day, my plane had been delayed so we were able to meet later. Turns out that he was having some real conflict with one of the staff there. Something, it just exploded, and if I told you the issue you would fall of your chair, so I won’t. It seemed so minor, so small, so insignificant and yet there was a huge conflict over the issue.

Do you enjoy conflict? Most of us don’t. I certainly do not enjoy conflict. Yet so often it is a bit like that movie, “The Truman Show”. You would be walking along on a sunny day, along the road and someone movie director somewhere presses a button, and without warning a bomb goes off right next to us!

Have you ever wondered why? Well there are a lot of reasons, but one, one happens time and time again. It is the issue of insecurity in peoples lives. This week on A Different Perspective I have called this little group of messages, “Getting over it!” we are looking at the subject of insecurity. Have you ever asked yourself, “What is it? What is insecurity? We need to stop and thing about that.

We bandied the word around, but what exactly, what is it? We all have as people a life preservation instinct. If we are driving along in a car and all of a sudden a car pulls out in front of us. We slam on the brakes and the adrenalin pumps through the veins. And we try and save ourselves. And the same is true emotionally. When something comes out of the blue that we find threatening, we either decide to fight it and come out punching or we’ve run away. We avoid it, we don’t confront it. We just stew inside and it eats away at us.
There is something built into each one of us. Which is about self preservation. And that’s ok, that’s normal, but sometimes there are things inside us that create irrational fears. Fears that don’t make any logical sense.

I don’t so much as have a fear of heights, but I know that when I am standing on a balcony several floors up, if there is no roof above me and I look up at the sky, I find that really scary, unsettling thing. I feel as though I am about to fall off the balcony. It doesn’t make sense, it is just there.

Some people have an irrational fear of spiders or sharks. We all know that there are far more chances of being run over by the proverbial bus than there is by being killed by a spider or a shark or a snake. Some people are petrified about flying in planes. None of those fears are rational. But they are very real. And these irrational fears can go into our emotional dimension as well. We can be unduly concerned about what people think of us. What they say of us. We can be really touchy about people stepping on our turf. Maybe we are bucking for a promotion. Maybe we are worried about job security. Maybe we are a bit touchy about being overweight. The list goes on an on.

Whatever it is outside when people look at us they don’t always know what things we are precious about. Where in our lives we are insecure. Either that or they know and they think it is stupid, I mean, they just dismiss it. “Ah she’s just worried about what the boss will think.”

Insecurities in other people well they are like a minefield. We can be walking along through this field, through a relationship, everything is ok. BANG! And there is no sign to say, “Don’t put your foot here, there is a mine under this bit of dirt.” So what can we do about it. The minefield picture is a useful framework to have in our hearts and our minds. One of the things that we can do is to watch people, to observe them, to get to know them, to start to figure out where their insecurities are.

I was doing some consulting work as I used to do over many, many years, with a government department. And the man that I was working with was a really cool, balanced, intelligent man. But as I saw him in meetings and working with other people in the organisation, there are a couple of things that he reacted really badly to. I thought, “That’s really interesting” I mean on the surface he is so competent, he is so intelligent, he is so well collected and has himself sorted out. He has been around this organisation for a long time. He knows the people, he knows the terrain, he knows the issues. Why did he react so badly to those issues in those meetings? As I got to know him and had coffee with him and worked with him, one day it came out. The organisation had just had a restructure, and as a result of that restructure the one job that gave him a promotion after all these years in the organisation, had been restructure right out of the organisation. So his career path was gone. After 25 years, his hopes, his dreams for promotion were gone.

Well would you be cheesed off at that, I would. That would get me going I think. And so I just found a land mine. And once I knew where it was not only could I avoid stepping on it, but I could also behave and act and help through that little bit of insecurity.

Because it’s not always possible is it? Sometimes you are just walking along and … BANG! This person blows up in your face. And then we go, “Alright, now I am threatened.” I remember once having a client yelling down the mobile phone, yelling abuse down the mobile phone at me. Well what do we do? We can either, run and hide, or we can go BANG right back. There is actually a third option. We can not react at all. We can just let them go, take it on board and resist the urge to rip their heads off their shoulders.

The apostle Paul in a letter that he wrote to the church in Corinth, almost 2,000 years ago. It’s a verse that is really well-known, often quoted at weddings, he wrote this:

Love is patient and kind, it is not rude, it is not self interested. It is not easily angered. And it doesn’t keep a list of wrongs. (1 Corinthians 13:4-5)

Elsewhere throughout the bible in fact throughout the whole of the Old Testament, 8 times it says that God is slow to anger. And each of those 8 times it finishes the sentence with this, “and He is abounding in love and faithfulness.” God is slow to anger and abounding in love and faithfulness.

The flip side of that is being quick to anger. And when we get angry quickly at people who have reacted badly to something we don’t understand we are doing the opposite of abounding in love and faithfulness.

I wonder if the next time someone blows up in our faces, I wonder if we remembered, “Hmm maybe something or someone has just trodden on some insecurity that I can’t see. How about I just let it wash by me. And then try and understand it a little bit later.”

I wonder if we responded that way if we were slow to anger when someone goes off in our face like a cracker. I wonder how much better life would be.