Got Baggage? | When People Keep Hurting You | Part 3 | Senior Pastor Keith Stewart

GOT BAGGAGE? 
When People Keep Hurting You | Part 3 
Senior Pastor Keith Stewart
May 10, 2026

Few things are more difficult than forgiving someone for the same hurt twice. You thought the matter was settled. You prayed through it. You chose grace. You started putting the pieces of your heart back together. Then it happened again. Repeated wounds don’t just cause pain—they weaken trust, exhaust the soul and make us question whether reconciliation is even possible. So what does God say when forgiveness becomes a cycle instead of a single moment? This Sunday, we’ll talk honestly about repeated hurt, difficult relationships and the kind of forgiveness that seems almost impossible.

1. What is the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation? Why is that distinction so important?
 
2. The message distinguished between a “mistake” and a “pattern.” Why is recognizing patterns important in relationships?
 
3. Have you ever experienced any part of the “cycle of abuse” described in the message (tension, explosion, honeymoon, repetition)? What made it difficult to recognize or address?

4. Why do you think Christians sometimes struggle with setting healthy boundaries?

5. Which unhealthy responses do people most often use with difficult people?
• Reasoning with the unreasonable
• Excusing destructive behavior
• Cajoling and threatening   
• Reacting and retaliating
Which one do you tend toward personally?

6. Why can boundaries actually be an expression of love rather than rejection?
 
7. Pastor Keith shared how Brenda’s boundary became a turning point toward healing and growth. What does that teach us about truth, consequences, and change?
 
8. What does it practically look like to: forgive someone, release bitterness, and still wisely protect your heart?

9. Is there a relationship in your life where God may be asking you to establish healthier boundaries?

Close by praying for:
wisdom,
courage,
healing from past wounds,
and the grace to forgive without enabling destructive behavior.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Uh grieving uh the loss of your mothers, uh maybe they've died in the past year or in years past, and today's kind of one of those mixed uh days. You're very grateful for who she was in your life, but you no longer have her, so uh pray for you. And I pray for those mothers right now who want to be moms and for some reason they're just unable. Uh I know we've had a lot of friends here over the years that have struggled with infertility, and so today kind of lands differently in their heart, and we want to be praying for them as well. We just want to be aware that in this room there's this wide array of needs and different emotions and experiences that come with Mother's Day. So if you've had a really blessed relationship with your mom, just be thankful today. And if it hasn't, well, this message is for you because this is about healing for uh the hurts that can often come in relationship and other things. Uh, people that we're in long-term relationship with that uh continue uh to use us and uh sometimes even abuse us. I flew into Sacramento a couple weeks ago and I went to retrieve my baggage from the carousel, and I came across this art display. I think we have a picture of it, and I thought, man, this is the ultimate got baggage experience right here. I mean, so many. It looked like a Jenga tower. And uh but but for a lot of us, maybe that's the baggage we're carrying. We just carry a lot of stuff from the past, and throughout this series, we've been learning how to lay that down. So today, this is another aspect of baggage, uh, and that is how do we forgive people who've hurt us deeply? Uh or maybe even that we have an ongoing relationship with that as soon as the hurt begins to heal, they come along and they rip the scab off all over again. What do you do with repeat offenders? I mean, we learned from Jesus in this series already that there's not supposed to be a limit on the number of times we forgive other people, but does that mean I need to keep showing up for a beatdown? Does a battered wife have to remain in a relationship that's abusive? Or how about when you have a family member that constantly runs you down, belittles you, makes you feel like you're nothing? Do I just have to invite them over again and again to be at their beck and call? To keep showing up when I get nothing in return? These are real questions and the sort of questions that don't get answered by the average church. So we want to look at real answers to this. More importantly, we want to look at God's answers to what we do with relationships that are very hurtful to us. So as we get started, let's just pray. Father, we're thankful for what you've been teaching us in this series. We've been digging into your truth and leaning into it about how forgiveness can set us free. Now, God, we want to see how forgiveness works in our real life, especially in those relationships that have a world of hurt associated with them. I pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen. You know, there are a few things that are more difficult to forgive than the person who's hurt you twice in the same way. Uh you you think the matter's resolved in your mind, your heart just begins to heal, then it happens all over again. Maybe they use different words, but it's the same intent and it's the same sting. It's one thing to forgive a moment of weakness, it's another thing to forgive a repeated pattern that erodes your trust and makes you question whether you want to remain in the relationship. So, what, if anything, does God have to say about that? What do you do when you're forgiving, but the hurting doesn't stop? I mean, at some point you realize certain people aren't going to change. And they just adjust for you long enough to let your guard down one more time. And then they step into that space and break you in the way you've been broken before. So there's a lot of us we get stuck. We get stuck in this toxic cycle disguised as love and loyalty and maybe even Christian duty. God didn't call us to endure abuse in the name of forgiveness. He called us to live in the light and to walk in truth. And when a cycle becomes a rhythm of a relationship, when a cycle of pain becomes that way, you have to ask yourself, is this what God intended for me? You see, the Bible does teach love is patient, love is kind. That's 1 Corinthians 13, 4. But also in verse 6 it says love is truthful. Real love doesn't cover up evil, it confronts it. There's a sacred strength in saying, I forgive you, but I'm not going to continue to subject myself to the same wounds over and over again. So forgiveness is never a license for someone to mistreat you. Think of it like this: there's a difference between a mistake and a pattern, isn't there? A mistake is something that someone regrets, they're eager to correct it. A pattern is something that's repeated as long as you tolerate it. Even Jesus knew the difference. With Peter, he was forgiving. With the Pharisees, he spoke of judgment. That's the difference between mistakes and patterns. There's a wisdom in withdrawing from certain people and even certain relationships or places that continually dishonor your worth. Because toxic people can drain your soul. They can confuse your mind, they can cloud your judgment, exhaust your spirit, they make you question whether you're the problem. You think maybe if I was quieter, maybe kinder, more forgiving, this would all stop. But it doesn't. And the issue isn't the grace in your heart, it's the lack of growth in them. So God sees your heart, and God sees what's going on behind closed doors. He sees how many times you've hoped things would change. He sees how many times you've chosen peace over resolution. But he also says this you know, forgiveness is still valid even when you decide not to return to the same battlefield. But I don't want to get ahead of myself. I want us to begin to look at these relationships that we have. I call it dealing with the difficult. I mean, do you have one of those relatives or in-laws? Whenever there's a family get together, you go with a sense of dread because you know they're going to be there. Now don't point at them. I'm just asking you right now just to think about it in your head, okay? There's a sacred strength in saying, you know, I like I say, that I can forgive you for those things, but I mean, every time you're together, uh you count on them, you can count on them to say something sideways that's going to get under your skin. They might even be passive-aggressive, or they might specifically belittle you or guilt you or shame you. Sometimes they're just downright caustic. I think probably all of us in this room can name at least one high maintenance relationship. Those people we call sandpaper people that just kind of irritate you, that kind of rub you the wrong way, it's abrasive. If they text you or they leave a voicemail on your phone, you're not eager to call them back. It could be that whenever you spend time with this person, you always walk away feeling drained because whenever you're with them, you feel like you're always on your guard. You're always waiting for the next shoe to fall. Someone said, difficult people are ordinary people who cause hurricanes in your emotions. So who is it in your life right now that can spin off that level of emotional energy? Who knows how to push your buttons? Who makes you feel like you have to walk on eggshells whenever you're around them? Who do you have to keep your guard up with? When you feel drained and you walk away from that relationship, who is that person we're talking about? So difficult people frequently fall into one of these three categories: either connected to you by blood, so we're talking family. These can be parents, in-laws, siblings, or even extended family. I want you to listen to this. This is from Mental Health America. This was based on last year's research. Based on current research, a significant portion of the population estimated between 70 and 80 percent identifies as having been affected by dysfunctional or toxic family dynamics. When narrowing the focus to more specific forms of abuse, the numbers remain high, with approximately 80% of Americans reported they've experienced emotional abuse at some point in their lives. That's the vast majority of us. Most people in this room. Some of you might have questioned, Pastor Keith, why would you even talk about this on a Sunday? This is why. The reason I'm talking about this is because this affects the vast majority of people sitting here listening to me right now. I can remember the first time I met Brenda's dad. They lived in Michigan. Her dad was a big-time executive with Ford Motor Company. I was driving a Japanese car. I pulled into their driveway. He came out of the house before he asked to be introduced. Before he said, How do you do? How are you? He said, get that blankety blank piece of you know what out of my driveway. That's what he said. And that kind of set the stage for the relationship I was going to have with her dad for some time. Now, I can tell you from the heart, he's mellowed with age, and I'm very grateful for that. And I do love him dearly now. But in those early years, those visits with her family were not things I looked forward to. I would be counting, we'd arrive and it'd be how many more days do we have to be here? You know, I just look forward to the time we could leave because it was always tense. It was always, what am I gonna say that's gonna trigger him and he's gonna let me have it all over again? Now, can you relate to that at all? Some of us have to live with this sort of thing within our family or within our kin on an ongoing basis. But there's another category of difficult people, and that's people who are connected to you by love. So this is a romance or a friendship. When it comes to romantic partners, listen to this. One in three women and one in four men have experienced physical violence by an intimate partner within their lifetime. That's staggering to me. One in three women. One in four men. As you know, abuse is not limited to physicality. There's also bruises that don't show. There's emotional abuse, and the number of people who've experienced emotional abuse is high. Get this. Emotional abuse in marriage is highly prevalent, with studies indicating that roughly 40 to 50 percent of adults experience psychological aggression, such as insults, coercion, or humiliation from an intimate partner. Again, you're talking nearly half. One in two of us have had to go through some level of emotional abuse in the relationship that we count on most for support. This is the reality for some of you. In your marriage or live in relationships, things have grown toxic. Your mate continually hurts you, demeans you, runs you down, makes you feel like you're nobody. Sometimes it gets out of hand. They apologize, they say they're sorry, they seem so sincere, but nothing permanently changes. You're the one who's constantly asked to be the bigger person. It doesn't even feel like a relationship anymore because you do all the giving, they do all the taking. So sometimes our difficult people are connected by blood, sometimes by love, but still others are connected by money. We're talking work relationship. Get this 75, roughly 75% of employees report on having worked for a toxic boss. Now, does that surprise anybody here? And if it's not the boss, maybe it's a coworker, somebody that you have to work alongside in your team, that these people just make it really tough to show up for work day in, day out. I want you to consider just the simple fact. If you entered the job market at the age of 22 and you retired at the age of 70, in those 48 years spent on the job, you would spend 22 of those years with co-workers. In that same amount of time, you would spend 10 years with your family. If you went to church for two hours every week during that same period of time, you would spend two to three years nurturing your spiritual life. You are going to spend a disproportionate, huge amount of your life with coworkers, with people who are not your family. And those people can make or break your life. You know, they found that we are more likely to bring work problems home than we are to take home problems to work. So what ends up happening is these people that you work alongside, they're going to help determine how fast you age, how often you get sick, your level of stress, and even when you die. So these are the three arenas: blood, love, and money. And they're powerful forces that bond people together. What I'm saying is for most of us, that difficult person who's in your life is someone who's important to you, not necessarily a stranger or an enemy, but a person under normal circumstances that you'd like to have a good relationship with. But what happens when those are the very people that you're asked to repeatedly forgive? Am I supposed to forgive them, then keep showing up for more abuse? How do I let it go when I know the next time we're together, they're just going to add to the pile of hurt? To answer that question, we have to ask the question: has this relationship crossed a line? In particular, I want you to learn to recognize the warning signs. So, in particular, I want to talk to you about the cycles of abuse, the cycles of relationship abuse. All abuse is cyclical, meaning it follows a predictable pattern. Abuse typically happens in four stages. Once you see this pattern in any relationship, boss, family, marriage, it begins to emerge, you understand it's not going to go away on its own. Someone has to break this cycle to seek help. The abuser, ideally. But if they won't, the victim has to get help not only to recognize what's going on in the relationship, but to do what's necessary to protect themselves. The other thing that's important to remember about the abuse cycle is that if it continues with every revolution around the wheel, the violence or level of toxicity only increases. What I'm saying is without intervention, unhealthy patterns tend to repeat themselves. So here's stage one, rising tension. All relationships deal with tension. Even the best of marriages have tension in them. You've got tension, you've got to learn to deal with it in a healthy way. In an abusive relationship, the level of tension increases until there's an explosion. Now here's what you need to understand: the way we behave from day to day is largely based on how we respect or disrespect the people around us. So the way that an employee behaves largely is based on how they respect their boss and how much they respect their coworkers. The way children behave is largely based on how much respect they have for their parents. The way married couples behave is largely based on the level of respect they have for one another. When respect decreases, there's almost always a corresponding rise in abusive behavior. So here are the three markers of abusive behavior: belittlement, manipulation, and control. They're the markers of disrespect. If I disrespect someone, this is the way I treat them. So when you experience those things in relationship, it's only a matter of time before it's going to take a turn to the worst. It will always escalate, which is stage two. Stage two is where the explosion or the abuse happens. So when the level of tension becomes unbearable, then there's a release valve and it's an explosion. The fact is, most battered women don't know what triggers their husband's violence. That's the terror of battering. The woman has no idea when the abuse will happen and what's going to trigger it. It's like a violent storm that appears on a cloudless sunny day. It seems to come out of nowhere. You never know what's going to set it off. And it leads to this thing called hypervigilance. Have you heard this term? It comes to us from the military. It's the way a soldier feels after they return from battle. In battle, they never know when an enemy might, an enemy sniper, might fire on them, a drone might drop an explosive, a missile might land in their compound, so they're forced to keep their head on a swivel. They become hyper-aware of their environment. They're always watching for the next thing that seems out of the ordinary, unusual, anything that might give them forewarning to take cover. Well, that same dynamic happens in an abusive family. What that means is in a lot of families, kids and spouses feel a need to watch for things that might indicate things are about to take a turn for the worse. So they walk around on eggshells, hoping not to upset the abuser. They're super cautious. They may even begin to fear that a simple mistake would trigger an explosion. One misstep could become the abuser's excuse to take out their rage on them. Now, once an explosion happens, the tension dissipates. It goes away right away. An abuser might even feel a strong sense of relief and sometimes even guilt or remorse over what they've done, and that lays to stage three, which we call the honeymoon stage. Now, some of you know Grammy nominated artist Sarah Kelly. Sarah Kelly has been to Spring Creek several times. I met Sarah at a pastor's conference in San Diego years ago. She had just kind of made her beginning in Christian music. And she talked about, on the stage at this pastor's conference, about the abuse that she'd suffered in relationships. And I met her and I said, Sarah, you're our kind of people. I'd like you to come to Spring Creek. And so we were the first church to ever invite her to come and be a part of a weekend service. And Sarah shared how that she had been dealing with abusive relationships since the age of 12. She talked about having tables and chairs thrown at her, being locked in a closet for days on end. And she wrote songs about this, about what she'd endured and how God met her in it. But once in an interview, Sarah talked about this honeymoon stage that happens in the cycle of abuse. Listen to her explain it. To be honest, it's an addiction. That's why women stay. The men are so nice to you for four or five days after that. You go through what you need to in order to get through to the makeup period. See, abusers can be really convincing. Following an explosion, an abuser will often profusely apologize, make promises that'll never happen again. And they often work really hard to make up for the things that they've done. Usually a wife welcomes this phase and enjoys the special attention that's being given to her because she desperately wants to believe her husband is sincere. So she tends to overrate the genuineness of his remorse. That phase may last for a few days, maybe even a few weeks, but eventually the tension builds again and the cycle repeats. And that leads to stage four, which is repetition and return. Unless an abuser seeks help, the cycle will always repeat. If nothing's done to break the cycle, the honeymoon periods get shorter and shorter, and the abuse periods get more frequent and violent. Now, hopefully, if you're going through this right now, you're not at this level. And again, people say, why talk about this in church? Because I'd be a fool not to. Just because you're a Christ follower doesn't mean you're exempt from any of this. Now, it may be that you're not experienced violence in your closest relationships, maybe less severe forms of abuse like toxic talk and behavior and belittling, but you need to understand this cycle, tension, explosion, kindness, repetition, it characterizes all abuse, even work on the job, even amongst friends. You watch for that. Those are the telltale signs of abuse. But I also need to address mixed messages about abuse from the church. So in the first series, the first part of the series, we talked about Peter coming to Jesus and saying, Jesus, do I have to forgive somebody seven times? Now understand, in those days the rabbis taught that three times was plenty. After you forgave somebody three times, over with and done. And so Peter thinks he's being generous. Jesus, you know, two and a half times, seven times, is that enough? And Jesus says, no, Peter, seven times is not enough. Seventy times seven. That's the new limit. And he's not saying that there's a new limit at 491. What he's saying is there's no limit on the times we forgive somebody. So it's clear that Jesus puts no limits on forgiveness. But what we also learned last week is, even though there's no limits on forgiveness, there are definite limits placed on reconciliation. And we learned that forgiveness and reconciliation are two entirely different things. I can forgive somebody who never says they're sorry, but I can't be reconciled with them unless they're genuinely sorry. In other words, there's certain things I need to see before I can be reconciled in relationship. Like for one, they have to repent, which means to take full responsibility for their actions. But they also need to make restitution, which means they need to own the damage they've done and take responsibility to write it. And third, I'd be foolish to reconcile without evidence of rehabilitation. That is that this person knows what their issue is, has sought help for this issue, and is making progress to make sure they don't do it again. Repentance, restitution, rehabilitation are essential in reconciliation. Now I want to tell you something. A couple of churches here in the Metroplex, really big churches, got in the news and made headlines for all the wrong reasons a few years back. They failed to understand the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation. One involved a couple where the husband was a serial abuser. The other involved a couple where the husband was convicted pedophile. In both of these cases, the wife wanted out of the marriage. They'd endured too many lies, witnessed an unbroken pattern of bad behavior, and had been treated so terribly they filed for a divorce. But in both of these cases, because the husband told the church that they had apologized, the churches put the wives under church discipline and threatened them with excommunication for seeking a divorce. The churches sent out multiple letters detailing and saying just that. Both of these women were chastised for not wanting the marriage, even after an abundance of evidence that their spouse. Was unchanged. So in both cases, the husband knew how to talk the talk. They knew how to say the right words to the church, the words the church wanted to hear. And as a result, the spouse who was the victim ended up being the scapegoat and ended up being blamed as if they were the ones at fault. Now, these two women both went to the news stations with their letters from the churches. And I'm really proud of them for doing that. And they exposed these churches and for what they were saying about them and trying to see a way out of the way. So the church, far from being an ally of victims, has often taken the wrong side. Too many Christians are unaware of how strong the Bible is about the truth of how we deal with difficult people in a straightforward way. That love does set limits. Look at this verse. If anyone's causing divisions among you, give a first and second warning. After that, have nothing more to do with that person. So this verse is talking about divisive people, the person who's out there creating conflict, dividing teams, getting in between people. Now notice the Bible doesn't say just nuke them without any warning. God is into giving everybody a chance. We're not talking about being mean. We're talking about dealing with something that's toxic. So he says, warn them, then warn them again. And if they don't listen to those warnings, have nothing else to do with them. Now here's the thing about the Bible and limits. The Bible never gives limits and then says, well, if they're ignored, that's fine, just give them another lollipop. If it says it enforces the limit. Or how about these verses and limits? Short-tempered people must pay their own penalty. If you rescue them once, you'll have to do it again. Or this, do not make friends with a hot-tempered man. Do not associate with one easily angered. When it comes to disordered behavior, we impose limits because limits work. Limits teach people that they can't behave in toxic ways around healthy people because healthy people don't put up with it. We're told to speak the truth. Forgive them for sure, but they have to endure the consequence for treating other people poorly. That's how limits are supposed to work. And if they don't work, you don't just blow off the limit, you increase the dosage. I mean, imagine going to a doctor and you have an infection and it gives you an antibiotic, sees you again in 10 days, and the antibiotic hasn't worked. The doctor's not going to say, well, let's give this infection a little more time to work in your body. No, what they're going to do is they're going to say, let's try another antibiotic. Let's do something else because we've got to stop this disease. Same thing's true about limits in the spiritual life. Sometimes you have to put a limit on what you're willing to brand as acceptable. Christians tend to struggle with this more than the average person, especially when it comes to dealing with difficult people, because it seems like we're caught between two truths. We're taught to be loving and forgiving, and sometimes that we make we make that say, you know, I'm supposed to put up with jerks and let them just run all over me. But repeat offense leaves invisible bruises. You may be smiling on the outside, but on the inside, you're broken, you're sad, you're exhausted. But you keep showing up because you think that's what a good Christian does. So when I tell you you need to place limits, that idea seems to conflict with your idea of forgiveness and reconciliation because you don't understand either of those concepts. Loving people doesn't mean being a doormat. Love sets limits. It loves people enough to protect ourselves from the people we love if that's what's necessary. So God gave you a heart to protect, not just a heart to give away. And while forgiveness is commanded, so is wisdom, so is discernment, so is guarding your soul. Remember this: God is not asking you to be weak, he's asking you to be wise. So this is that leads us to this when what you're doing doesn't work. I want you to think about how you have dealt with a difficult person in your life thus far. And here's the question: what's the normal way I deal with that person? And the second question is, is it working? I mean, once you finally get your eyes open and you see I've got a problem, whether it's at work, whether it's in my family, whether it's in my love life, and you see it needs to be addressed, if you keep on trying to solve the problems in the old ways that don't work, you're never going to get near to a solution. So let me give you four ways we typically approach difficult people and why they don't work. We try reasoning with the unreasonable. It's probably the most common thing we do. We think if I just have a meeting of the minds and I explain it all really well to them, they'll get it and we can move forward. The problem is you're trying to reason with unreasonable behavior. They don't do what they do out of reason, they're doing it out of wounding. Second thing, sometimes we try excusing destructive behavior. You know, most difficult people don't experience a lot of difficulty when it comes to the problems they're creating. Here's the deal: a hot-tempered man who won't listen to other people should encounter problems at home and on the job. A mother who's invasive and manipulative should annoy people so much they avoid her. Don't make the mistake of becoming of coming between a difficult person and their consequence. In other words, don't be a part of the problem yourself. When you rescue people from consequences, what you do is you enable them to keep making bad choices. Other times we try cajoling and threatening. So threats are always acts of desperation, especially when we don't see hope of change. It's our last straw. It's an attempt to shock them and get their attention. Now, warnings can be a good thing. That's why we have yellow lights, and that's why we have blood pressure checks. They say something bad's going to happen if you ignore me. But warnings without follow-up are ruinous. If you deliver a warning to someone in relationship that this has to change and that you don't mean that, like they say, if you bark, be prepared to bite, and if you aren't, then get yourself a muzzle. I mean, you really have to make a stand sometimes and mean what you say. The final thing is we try reacting and retaliating. Now, being reactive with a difficult person is really the last thing you should ever do. Because when you react to a difficult person who's manipulating you, it's like you prove what they're saying is right. They take your reaction as evidence that I'm making headway here. So the least effective way of responding to a manipulative person is to defend yourself or make excuses. Because when you defend yourself, you put yourself at the mercy of their judgment, like what they're saying is true. You end up giving this person way too much power over you. So all of that to say, if you keep applying the same solutions to the same problems and it hasn't worked before, there's a name for that. It's called insanity. Okay? If I keep working the same solutions over and over again and it's never worked before, but I'm expecting a different result, that's insane. There's a great illustration from history, John Henry Fabray. He's a French naturalist. He studied insects all of his life in the 1800s. He wrote a 10-volume set about all the things he learned about insects. But his most fascinating study was processionary caterpillars. These caterpillars follow their leader head to tail, all the way through a forest, all the way through vegetation, just eating everything in their path. So what Fabre did is he took these caterpillars and he put them on the edge of a crock pot. You see that? So within inches, there's all the leaves. They could devour, they could eat all those leaves and have a full belly. And when he lined them end to end around the rim of that pot, you know what they did? They followed each other and didn't stop until they all fell off dead. They were literally inches away from all the greenery they could eat, but they just kept doing the same thing over and over again. And people are a lot like that. We get our way of dealing with difficult people. It's never worked in the past, but we keep applying that solution. We're just in our well-worn groove. If you want something to be different, you have to do something different. Because if you keep on doing what you've been doing, you'll keep on getting what you've been getting. So that leads to better choices for a better life. How do we deal with difficult people? Regardless of what they do, get healing for you. I love the way the Bible says this. You're blessed when you're content with just who you are. No more, no less. That's the moment you find ourselves proud owners of everything that can't be bought. Being content with who you are is the best advice I could possibly give to you when dealing with difficult people. When you're content with who you are, you've got nothing left to prove. And people can't push your buttons anymore. Emotional instability is what makes us react the way we do. This is why we get flooded with feelings. It's why it becomes so reactive. If I'm not content with who I am, then everybody has the power to push my buttons and get a reaction. Alfred Adler said something worth thinking about. Exaggerated sensitivity is an expression of the feeling of inferiority. So think of every relationship like a duet. It's never a solo performance. And it can't work without your participation, without your help. I'm not saying you provoke it. I'm not saying you cause it. I'm not saying that you are responsible or the cause for abusive behavior, not at all. You're never responsible for someone else's sin. But unresolved wounds in us can keep us trapped in unhealthy relationship patterns longer than we want to remain there. Remember, our first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, once said, no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. Her point is that nobody can make you humiliated, can demean us, unless there's a part of us that either gives agreement to that or fears that it's true. This is why we're so reactive at some level. I'm giving permission to that to affect me. But when I'm healed, it no longer affects me like this. Difficult people are good at reading your insecurities. Difficult people know what buttons to push. Difficult people know what has worked in the past. And they will continue to do that in you. What you gotta do is remove the button. The key is to heal, not to close yourself off, become so defended, nobody knows you enough to hurt you. The key is to become so content with who you are and knowing God's estimate of you that nobody can knock you off that understanding. Think of it like this: the difficult people in your life are like fishermen. They're constantly throwing lures into your life to see if you'll take the bait. And you know what makes us mad? Is we get hooked. We get hooked. We get hooked into the same old arguments, the same arguments we can never win. We get mad, we sink to their level. We have to call that what it is. That's an issue in me, not in them. Because there's always going to be difficult people in your life. It's a part of life itself. I mean, I have them. I have people that will reach out to me and they're just being difficult. And it'd be easy to get sucked into that vortex over and over again if you're not in a good place. Listen to this. Healthy people can hear a difficult person respond wisely. If what they're saying is untrue, they disregard it. If it's ignorant, they just smile. If it's true, they learn from it. But they don't get caught up in it. And they don't give away their self-control to the difficult person. Once you heal in that area, you truly know who you are and whose you are, then what Fred Leskin said will be true of you. Forgiveness is becoming a hero instead of a victim in the story you tell. And then the final thing, we need to learn to set boundaries. Now, boundaries are all around us. I mean, this building has walls, that's a boundary. There's hedgerows, there's curbs, there's signs, there's guardrails. These are physical boundaries. And most boundaries delineate property. This belongs to me. What's outside of this does not belong to me. If you look up the word boundary in the dictionary, here's how the Webster defines it. It's something that indicates a limit or extent. Pretty straightforward, right? Limits or extent. So here's the deal. In your emotional life, you have to have good boundaries. If you want successful relationships, you've got to have boundaries. If you want to be happy in life, you have to have clear boundaries, or else other people will violate your boundaries and you'll end up feeling used and abused. Boundaries are limits, what you will tolerate and what you won't. Where you say yes and where you say no. If you want a great book on boundaries, this is the book. It's called Boundaries by Cloud and Townsend. It's a best-selling book, it's one of the best books you'll ever read. If you have problems right now with a difficult person, you need to get this book. It teaches you when to say no and how to say no. Here's the deal: the more severe the dysfunction you experience growing up, the more boundaries are going to be hard for you, the more difficult boundaries are for you. Which is why boundaries are the litmus test of relationship. You know, a litmus test in science, we use it to test for acidity or alkalinity. You dip that litmus paper into it, and it's an unequivocal test. As soon as you dip it in, you know whether or not there's acid in that container. Boundaries are like that in relationship. Because what there's there's there's no difference. You're gonna either have people respect your boundaries or they won't, and there's no in between. Some people only love your compliance. In other words, they love your yes, but they don't like your no. That's why boundaries are a litmus test. It's what happens in a relationship when you tell somebody no, no more. You can't do that. You can't say that to me, you can't treat me in this way. If the person loves you and respects you, then you will have a greater and more satisfying relationship because of that boundary. And if they refuse to respect your boundary, you'll quickly learn that you didn't have a relationship with that person. You had an entanglement. Now I want to tell you something really personal because you may feel like I've been really hard on this issue. I've been just trying to be honest and as truthful as I possibly can be. Brenda and I have been married for 43 years. But 33 years ago, Brenda drew a really hard boundary with me. She said, no more. She said, get help or we're through. That's what she said to me. Get help or we're through. Because what was happening at that time is Brenda did not like the way I was treating her. She didn't like being made to feel like she was my last priority. She didn't like the way I would get angry and I'd take it out on her, and who could blame her? She was right. I had a problem and it was becoming a problem for us. Now please understand, we understand as a couple that we both had issues. It's not my job to get up here and tell Brenda's story. I can tell my side of the story. I can tell what I was doing that was wrong. I'm not here to give up her side of the equation. You can talk to her about that. If she wants to share it, she will. And if not, she'll say no. And that's a good boundary, right? But but but I'm your pastor and I don't mind what you think of me about this because I know number one, it's been healed, I know it's been forgiven, I know what's happened in my marriage as a result. But here's the deal. She didn't want a whole new round of promises. She didn't want to take a class together. We'd been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Our help wasn't going to be found in a new marriage book that promised a quick fix. I needed to figure out what was driving my anger and get to the bottom of it because she'd had enough. And that's what I did. I first went to 12-step recovery. Shortly after that, I found a therapist and I went to him for two years. His specialty was anger therapy. I got to the source of my anger. I faced the junk that was in my life. I've told you before, anger is never the first emotion you feel. Anger is a secondary emotion. It always flows out of hurt, fear, or frustration. This therapist wanted to get me to the source of my hurt because my hurt was driving my anger and I was taking it out on all the wrong people. And so he helped me over two years to do that. My journey of recovery didn't happen overnight. As the hurt began to come forward and God had access to it, he could heal it. But there were setbacks along the way. Anybody in recovery will tell you it's never a straightforward path. But if you get serious and you make a decision that I don't want to be the same person next year that I am today, and you come to God and you say yes to God in that path of healing, he'll unlock the resources of heaven for you so that you'll have what you need so that you can be healed too. Now, Brenda had heard me apologize plenty. She heard me make apologies and break them all over again. So what she did was set a limit with me and said something entirely different. And when she saw what was happening in my life, she saw a totally different behavior. Because I wasn't just reading the book and I wasn't just making excuses. I was going to therapy each and every week. And I made the mistake of telling my therapist, I'm going to keep coming until you say I'm done. Because he thought I was a special case and I was messed up and needing a lot of help. And so literally two years every week, I went to see this therapist until he finally said, okay, you're healed enough to be out in society. I mean, it was it was that kind of deal where he just, he it took two years of that. But Brenda never seen that behavior in me. She'd seen me make excuses. She'd seen me rate books. She'd seen me offer spiritual advice. She'd never seen me take serious the problems in my life. And that was serious to her. And we, you know, for those of you who know us at the time, you know, what we end up doing is uh I didn't have the money for therapy every week. So we put a whole lot of living on the Visa card so that we'd have money to pay that therapist because he wanted cash, he wouldn't take Visa. And so I could do a commercial for Visa. Visa card saved my marriage because it let me put money over here for therapy and put my living expenses over here. And we had debt after that, but I'll tell you what, it's the best debt I ever took on. Because that debt has wreaked dividends, huge dividends in our life. And just six weeks from now, we celebrate 43 years of marriage. What it took, okay, what it took to get there was Brenda looking me in the eye and saying, get help or we're through. It was a boundary, an important boundary, a wake-up call. But by the grace of God, it led to a first step that eventually turned our marriage around and made it into something I never dreamed it could be. And we can show other people the way. I hope you like it. This is stuff I've lived. This is where I've trafficked. This is what it took to wake me up from being emotionally abusive to my own wife. I'm so grateful that she had the courage and the love to draw a limit with me. And she loved me back then, even when she said, get help or get or we're through. Her love was expressed in her refusal, refusal to participate in my self-destruction. That was real love. That was tough love. But we've learned to love each other in a new way now. She loves me for who I am and as I am, with a love that takes real delight in what we become. When people keep hurting you, you're not being loving by putting up with it. The most loving thing you can do is tell them the truth. Forgive them. Turn them over to God. Change is possible. It really is. Even with people who've hurt you repeatedly. But you need to see evidence that that person takes real responsibility for the things they've done. Not meaningless words, not spiritual talk, but real evidence that they take seriously the hurt that they've caused and that they're going to get help. And if you're not seeing that, you're not seeing any evidence that they're taking responsibility for this, then my prayer is that you learn how to forgive this and set a strong limit and say, I can't participate in this anymore. I can't take this anymore. And I'm going to love you so much, I'm not going to enable this in you anymore. But sometimes it takes that. And hopefully that results in the wake-up call that will change your life. But you know, if you're a victim of that, if you've been through that and you've been beat down and you've been made to feel like you're nothing, I want you to know that in the eyes of God, you have a value and a worth that should be denied you by no one. You really do. No matter what label somebody stuck on you, no matter what people have said that have beat you down and make you feel worthless, that's not God's estimate of you. And this is why God wants you to learn to value you. Because he loves you so much he sent his son on the cross to die for you. That's your worth to God. Do you realize that? You are worth Jesus Christ to God. And because you are worth Jesus Christ to God, because he loves you in the same way he loves your son, he wants you to be protected. And he wants you to be valued. And he wants you to know that you're loved in an indescribable way by him. Learn to love yourself in the same way. Let's pray. Father, I just thank you that we've had this time together. This is the kind of message that doesn't get talked about in church, but it's right here in the pages of your word. Love sets limits, especially when it comes to the kind of behaviors where people continue to cause wounds, whether on the outside or the inside. When we're constantly belittled, when we're made small, when we're manipulated, when we're beat up emotionally, I pray. God, that you would just help those people who are in this place who fall in the statistics of one in three women and one in four men, of 50% of all marriages that have experienced some level of emotional abuse. All the people who are in this room who've never talked about it, who've never shared that with another soul, God, you see their heart cry and you are for them. You're always taking up the side of the vulnerable. You're always taking up the side of the victim. This is something we see repeatedly throughout your word. So, God, I pray for anybody who's been on the receiving of that end for so long, who've begun to believe the lies that have been said to them. Help them to first realize their value and their worth to you. That you love them incredibly, that you their worth Jesus Christ to you, that God, you sent your son to die for them because that's their worth. And I pray, God, that they would see that through your eyes. And because of that, that they would take precautions, that they would make limitations, that they would set boundaries around their life where they're respected and treated the way they deserve to be respected. I pray also, God, for anybody who, like me, has made terrible mistakes in their marriage, have taken out their anger on the wrong people, on the people they're sworn to love and care about most. God, it's a shameful part of my past, but at the same time, God, it's a part that I've seen you heal incredibly. And I've seen you create in Brenda and I a new marriage that is unlike anything we ever had before, that is totally satisfying to us both, that that has healed our hearts, that has drawn us so close that we know today that we're one another's very best friend in the world. I thank you, God, that healing is possible, even, God, when our lives have gotten off track. That God, you see in the heart of the one who's causing the harm, the ability to heal, if they'll say yes to you, if they'll go down that path, if they'll make themselves accessible, their heart, their life, everything, that they will be vulnerable with another soul and open up so that God, your healing can flood in. I just thank you, God, for this day, and I ask you, God, that anybody who's in this place who just needs your very special touch, especially after this marriage, this message, that God, you would just truly meet with them and help us, God, to be open to them, to be able to talk with them and pray with them after today's service. In Jesus' name, amen. Before you leave, I just want you to know we do have chaplains around here. And if you have a special prayer need, you'd like to talk to somebody, please by all means go see them.