Ep 23 | Breaking Free from Toxic Cycles

If you're feeling trapped in a toxic cycle, constantly battling with guilt and shame, then you are not alone! Perhaps you've tried to break free through your own efforts, but the cycle only continues. Maybe you've even reached out for help, but still find yourself struggling. The pain of constantly falling short can feel overwhelming. But there is hope. Repentance and turning towards God can bring true freedom and healing. It's not about trying harder or doing more, but about surrendering to God's grace and receiving His forgiveness. Don't give up, there is a way out.

In this episode, you will be able to:

• Grasp the true meaning of repentance in Christianity and its significance in your spiritual journey.
• Discover how repentance can lead to inner healing from past sexual traumas.
• Find out the distinctions between the true nature of God and widespread misconceptions perpetuated by popular psychology and secular theology.
• Recognize the power of admitting sins and seeking forgiveness in achieving personal growth.
• Learn how to escape toxic cycles of sin by embracing repentance and turning towards God.

Examples of Repentance
The Bible provides us with numerous examples of repentance, illustrating the transformative power this process can have in our lives when we genuinely turn away from sin and towards God. Studying these examples can provide valuable insights into what true repentance looks like and the role it plays in our spiritual growth. In the podcast, Jemese LaChel discusses two specific examples found in Scripture: Psalm 51, which is a prayer of repentance written by King David after his sin with Bathsheba, and the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15. She explains how both accounts emphasize the importance of acknowledging our sins and turning towards God with a repentant heart, ultimately leading to freedom, forgiveness, healing, and a restored relationship with our Heavenly Father.

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Transcript

00:00:00
So no point beating around the bush. Today we're talking about repentance.

00:00:15
Hey, friend. Welcome to a new creation podcast where we're pointing women towards victory in Christ, one Jesus story at a time. My name is Jemese LaChel. I'm so glad that you're here. Let's dive right in to today's episode.

00:00:36
So no point beating around the bush today. We're talking about repentance. And it's actually a subject that I feel the world obviously shies away from in a sense, mostly because they don't know what it means. And if we're being honest, there's even believers, those in the faith right now who do not actually have a clear idea or understanding of what it means to come to the Lord with a repentant heart. We're going to get into that.

00:01:06
We're going to talk about the intersection of faith, repentance, what's that got to do with mental health? And I work with a lot of women who are coming to me with issues around sexual trauma. What is this repentance thing about? I didn't do anything wrong. We're going to get into all those things, but first we're going to pray.

00:01:28
Father, we just bless your name. We thank you for your Son. We ask you God, right now, in the name of Jesus to be with us. God, I pray over the listener right now. I pray that you would give them a hearing ear and a seeing eye, oh God.

00:01:43
And I ask that you would just bless me, Lord Jesus, to speak exactly what she would have me to speak right now in this podcast episode. Nothing more, nothing less. It's my prayer that this episode leads the listener closer to the heart of Jesus. Let them see you, God, not me. In the name of Jesus I pray.

00:02:03
Amen. So we're talking about repentance today because it's a core issue that just continues to come up and the work that I'm doing with women. So I'm a Christian trauma therapist in mentor. And regardless of where it falls on the spectrum, whether women come to me for work around specifically, like acute mental health issues or mentorship around their faith and they're trying to live out biblical truth and I guess need someone to walk alongside them and help them as they overcome trauma issues and things like this. Regardless, I find that beyond a doubt, repentance comes up.

00:02:46
Perhaps a struggle with repenting, not knowing what repenting is, being unable to repent. I think it's important to back up and state the obvious. Like the world, like the world struggles with repentance. And I feel like people outside of the faith can sometimes have a wrong view of what it means to repent unto God. And the Gospels, what do they say over and over and over again, repent and believe in the Gospel.

00:03:19
And frankly, a God that does not include repentance. Or how should I say? If you're serving a God who does not spur you towards repentance, you are not serving a God at all. You're serving the God of self. Because the Most High God Yahweh we must come to him with a repentant heart.

00:03:45
And you have to be humble in order to repent in the first place. So there's a lot of this misconception, I suppose, about what is repentance. What does that mean? Is it for me today? Yes, it is.

00:03:59
It's for us today. And it's a gift. A lot of times people won't repent or they kind of shy back from it. They feel repelled by it for a sense of shame. There's shame going on under there and like a lie, honestly, if you're digging down beneath, there's a lie under there that's saying that I can't come to God like this, I can't come to Him this way, when that's exactly what he's asking us to do.

00:04:28
He's drawing us. He's not drawing us with condemnation necessarily. Now, the sin is condemned. The sin is condemned, but we in Christ, we're not condemned yet. We must repent because that sin cannot exist in the light of the Lord.

00:04:54
He doesn't want it operating in our life. That's why Jesus died on the cross and ministered to us salvation. We get to receive salvation by simply believing the Gospel, believing on Jesus. Salvation frees us from our sin so we can't confess our need for repentance. We're really creating this barrier between ourselves and the Lord.

00:05:22
I love how it tells us, the Scriptures tell us that there's nothing that can separate us from the love of God. That is so true. However, the unrepentant heart, when you are walking around with an unrepentant heart, you may know that's you right. Now perhaps because perhaps you're getting triggered by this conversation, or you want to click away. That can be the thing that makes you in the mind, feel like you're far from Hen when he's saying, Daughter, come home.

00:05:57
So I want to get into a few things. This is so important for healing. I work specifically with women who are healing from sexual trauma issues do more than that, of course, but I'm kind of going to tailor this conversation around that theme because I want to put tools in your tool belt. I want you to walk away and have some ability to walk out this faith that we believe in and also help you come closer to the Lord Jesus. Now, as I was praying in my own prayer time, the Lord kind of ministered something to me, the Holy Spirit, he revealed to me, because we were just talking fellowshipping together, meditating on repentance, and he said, you can't repent if you don't have a right view of God.

00:06:48
You can't really repent if you don't have a right view of God. And as I sort of thought about that, it's so true, because if you don't view God as holy, if you don't see Him as your Lord, then you fail to realize that you have something to repent for. And that's the reason why so many in the world are walking around unrepentant. When I had my first true come to Jesus moment in my living room, where the power of the Holy Ghost in the Lord Jesus just came upon me in my living room. And I didn't even know what any of that meant, but I was seeking God first thing.

00:07:35
The spirit of the Lord ministered in my heart was Jamise repent. And to repent, this is what God told me. To repent means to turn away completely, to turn away from it completely, not to dabble in it anymore. You're laying it down completely.

00:08:00
See, we need a right view of God in order to do such a thing. It's not in us in the flesh, and I'm speaking as a mentor here, it's not in our flesh to be able to do such a thing. Pop psychology would tell us to focus on our mindset and do all of these affirmations, law of attractions kind of stuff, trying to work our way into some being that is like some way of being that transcends. But the fact remains that whatever you do apart from the Lord Jesus does not stand and it doesn't last. And in fact, you might end up in a whole heap of worse trouble spiritually, and you must seek out the way that he really is, not the way that I understand Him.

00:08:49
I don't want the God of my understanding. I want the living God for who he is. And if you want to know who he is, find out in the Scriptures. He has chosen to reveal Himself to us through His Scriptures. And so if you're serving a God, if you're sitting in a church or in a room and they're preaching a Jesus who does not cause you or ask you or command honestly repentance of our sin, you are not serving the true and living God.

00:09:25
His name is Jesus. He's the Holy Spirit. He's our Heavenly Father. We must see Him as holy. We must see Him as who he choose to reveal Himself in the Word.

00:09:39
We must see Him as Lord of our lives in order to repent. Repentance is good, is nothing to shy away from. We ought to walk with a repentant heart that is not a heart full of shame and condemnation, which is what some people have made a synonym for repentance. But it's not true. That's a lie that the enemy wants you to believe.

00:10:05
A repentant heart is one that's turned away from the sin and the bondage and all of those things, and it's turned away from those things that kept you stuck in that cycle of shame, that cycle of torment, that cycle of repeating, that pattern that you hate. Having a repentant heart will change all of that. It will change all of that as you come to the Lord with a repentant heart and you cry out, I want to look at Psalm 51. It's an example. And I'm not going to read this whole thing, but go look it up.

00:10:39
Psalm 51 is a wonderful example of a prayer of repentance. And in my Bible, that's actually what the headline description calls it, a prayer of repentance. We're going to talk a little bit more about that popular psychologist. She puts a lot of emphasis on us feeling good all the time, or self esteem. The way that I feel about myself when I wonder, in reality, if we ought to be more rightly esteeming Christ, that is, esteeming Jesus to his rightful position.

00:11:16
Remembering that he is our holy God. Remembering that he said all we have to do is come. Remembering that he has the highest esteem, he's the most exalted. It's not wrong to value oneself. Don't hear what I'm not saying.

00:11:34
It's not wrong to want to feel good about who you are, you know what I mean? Because the Lord made us. He doesn't want us walking around feeling like a piece of trash because that's not true either. Your daughter, your daughter of abba would any parent with their kid walking around feeling like a complete total moron or piece of trash? No.

00:11:57
See, there's lives operating, functioning that are keeping so many women trapped and stuck, keeping them from repenting, keeping them from coming to the Lord. He's the only one who can heal us and help us. So it's not wrong to esteem yourself per se. But I don't want to boast and feeling good about who I am on the inside when I know that if I focus on Jesus, if I esteem Him, if I exalt him and spirit and in truth worshipping him, not in some religious way or legalistic way, rather, then all those things are added to me. See, the Bible presumes that we love ourselves.

00:12:44
That's a whole nother discussion for another day. The Bible presumes of the way we view ourselves is of love. We love ourselves, we love our neighbor as we love ourselves. The Bible kind of presumes this. So that's the thing about Christian trauma therapy, it could be counterculture because society is not going to tell us that.

00:13:11
Society is going to say, I need to focus on me, me in reality. A lot of that is the reason that's caused us to be so bound up to the point where we must turn away completely from that thing, that sin, that pattern, whatever.

00:13:28
Maybe I took a little detour. That word is for somebody I want to look at. So we're talking about Psalm 51 a little bit. I also want to contrast that, though, with another story of repentance in the Bible, and that's the parable about the prodigal son coming out of Luke 15. Yeah, Luke 15.

00:13:51
The parable of the lost sheep or the prodigal son. So again, I'm not going to read this whole thing, but I encourage you to.

00:14:02
What it talks about I'm going to read up to a certain point, a certain man had two sons, and then the younger of them said to his father, father, give me the portion of goods that falls to me. So he divided them to his livelihood. And not many days after, the younger son gathered all together, journeyed to a far country and there wasted his possessions with prodigal living. But when he had spent all, there arose a severe famine in that land, and he began to be in want. Then he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed the swine.

00:14:41
And he would gladly have filled his stomach with the pods that the swine ate, and no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself, he said, how many of my father's hired servants have bred enough and to spare? And I perish with hunger. I will arise to go to my father and I will say to him, father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.

00:15:08
And it goes on. He goes back to the father's house. Verse 20 and he arose and came to his father, but when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and he ran and fell on his neck and kissed him. Now, that's a story of repentance. There's a difference in that repentance that happened in the Prodigal Son parable and the repentance that is spoken about in Psalm 51, which I really am not going to read that whole thing, but there's a pattern there and I'm going to outline that to you a little bit so that you can take it away and kind of meditate on it for yourself.

00:15:53
Well, I want to speak about how the son came to himself. He came to he came to himself when he realized that here he was, he ran off. The father gave him his inheritance prematurely because he's a good father. He said, okay, gave him his inheritance. The son went off squandered.

00:16:12
It ended up in a pig pen, so desperate, so hungry that he would have ate the pig's food. And he came to himself when he came to and remembered that he was his father's child, he knew he needed to come back. And then that way there was repentance. He knew he needed to turn away completely. Now, in Jesus, we don't need to necessarily rehearse a great big speech.

00:16:45
We don't necessarily need to do that because this son, he kind of had a wrong view of his dad. He said, well, maybe he'll let me at least be one of his slaves, basically one of his servants and like, low, low. But what did the father do? He saw his child and he ran. And if you continue on to that parable, maybe you're familiar they end up having a big party.

00:17:08
He puts a ring on his son, they have a feast. It's awesome. It's party time. Because the father is rejoicing because his son was dead and now he's alive. He came back.

00:17:19
That's repentance. That's repentance. But we don't have to go wallow in the pig pen and beat ourselves up and Come to God is like, oh, I'm so DA DA DA DA. Not that we ought to be prideful. We definitely want to be real with the Lord about the things that we've done that we know are displeasing.

00:17:41
You'll know, it's displeasing to you because it makes you feel some kind of way. It's what's preventing you from feeling like you can go talk to Him right now. But you don't have to rehearse that with speech to try to win the Lord's favor. He already favors you, daughter. So study that out in your own time.

00:18:00
Psalm 51. Study that out. Just read it and remember that God is a good, good father. A good father is someone who it's easy to go to them and tell them that you messed up. I don't know what it was like when you were growing up.

00:18:16
I kind of experienced this a little bit in some ways. I knew that I could always go home, and so when I was in my party girl days, I would mess up and I would call my mom, and I would go home, and my dad, he would kind of be kind of quiet about it, but I knew that I had their love. I may be messed up, but I knew that they accepted me. I knew that that was the secure base for me. That was the place where I could return to.

00:18:50
You have to know that God is good and he wants you to come to Him rather than you wallowing with the pigs. He would rather you come to Him dirty, stinking, a mess, crying. He would rather you come to Him like that than you trying to rehearse some kind of speech to win Him over. Come to Him as you are, as people like to say. Come to Him like this, come to Him.

00:19:17
When you're in your mess, come to Him every pence of your sin. So if you're in a toxic pattern, you can't stop having sex outside of marriage. You can't stop smoking cigarettes or weed. You can't whatever your thing is, whatever you're doing to cope with the trauma that you've been with, whatever you're doing to cope, but you know that it's like eating you up on the inside. Come to your father.

00:19:44
Come to your father. This is a topic I speak on regularly in my work with women, because so many of us, so many women had a bad relationship with their earthly father. And when that happens, without realizing it, without meaning to, we can often kind of slide that belief system over onto God. If my own father treated me worse than a dog. Then of course I'm thinking that God has some big fly swatter in the sky ready to whip me.

00:20:13
He's got a belt in heaven ready to slap me down with his belt.

00:20:20
For someone who doesn't have that worldview, that may seem like weird, but you got to understand the Lord knows that this is a fallen world. That's why he sent us. Jesus. That's why he's so good. That's just who he is.

00:20:35
So rather than us attributing what our earthly Father did to us, we must remember that we have a Father in heaven who said that when my mother or my father forsakes me, then the Father Himself, God Himself, will take care of me. He will take me up. We have to have a good relationship with repentance. We just have to. When we don't deal with our trauma, let me tell you what happens.

00:21:01
Telling you from experience and professionally I'm talking about experience, though I'm someone who has a history of trauma, sexual trauma, and we don't deal with that. We stuff it down and you kind of put a bandaid all over it of having a good job. You look good on the outside. People think that you're great, whatever. You're basically living a facade.

00:21:27
You stuff the trauma down and you move on and you think, okay, I'm fine. Time will heal. But guess what? Time does not heal all wounds. Time does not necessarily heal the trauma that you stuff down for the last two decades.

00:21:40
What happens is it comes out in little ways in other areas. It comes out in the way that you show up with your kids. It comes out in the way that you're drinking and boozing. It comes out in the way that you're seeking unhealthy relationships with men. It comes out in a variety of ways.

00:21:55
These are just some examples. It is we don't deal with that pattern. It's like a cycle. It's a cycle. We stay stuck in that.

00:22:07
And that's what the enemy wants you to do, is stay stuck in the cycle of sin that has you out here drinking, has you out here treating people like garbage, has you out here treating yourself like garbage. When the Lord says, daughter, come home. Just come home. You don't have to figure it out. You don't have to know the answer to how you're going to get through this.

00:22:32
You just need to know. Jesus, somebody listening today needs to cry out and say, lord, give me a heart of repentance. I want a repentant heart that is a heart that is forever turned away completely from the ways of this world, completely from the sin of this world, the sin that I've done. And I want it to turn towards you forever. Psalm 51 is a great example of how to do this.

00:23:04
I really encourage you to study it, and as you study it, I'm just going to share like I said, I'm not going to read this whole thing, but I do want to highlight the pattern, the pattern that David uses as he comes to God in repentance. Now this is a psalm that is written after he had gone into bathsheba and committed adultery. So he comes to God the first couple of verses, the first thing he does is acknowledge his need for mercy. That step one, cry out for mercy. Two, he acknowledges his sin.

00:23:45
He identifies it by what it is. He calls it a sin. We need to stop tippy toeing and trying to use this politically correct language and call sin what it is. It cannot have power or authority over you in Christ Jesus. But the more that you tippy toe around it and try to call it by these fluffy words, the more it tries to create a stronghold in your life.

00:24:09
So David, the next couple of verses, he calls it what it is. He says, Lord, I need you to blot out my transgressions. He says in verse three, for I acknowledge my transgressions and my sin is always before me. The next thing he does is he keeps the right view of God. Psalms 51, verse four.

00:24:28
Against you, and you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight. He recognizes that he has sinned against the people involved, of course, because sin always affects somebody. But when we're affecting somebody with our sinfulness, we're truly affecting God. We've sinned against God, by sinning against our neighbor. And so he keeps the right view of that.

00:24:55
The next thing that he does is he keeps the right view of himself. Verse five, he speaks, behold, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin my mother conceived me. He recognizes that he was brought into the sinful world. He's not out here preaching some progressive Christianity message that, you know, we're all good people. At the end, Christ makes us good.

00:25:23
He recognizes that without the Lord, he will die in his sin. The next thing he does is he asks for the cleansing renewal. He asks for the restoration and finally he asks for the deliverance. Come on. This is a pattern that we can use as we come to the Lord and repentance.

00:25:47
I share this with you because I know that there's women listening. They don't know how to repent. You don't know how to do it. Just read Psalm 51 and let the Spirit of the Lord speak to you. Don't come to it with some kind of formula in your mind.

00:26:03
I'm not suggesting that we have to say these perfect words. The Lord sees the heart as we've heard over and over. But I am imploring you that if you know that there is it feels like a weight, it feels like a wedge between you. If you know that you are carrying some reason to repent, you must come to Him because he is the only one who can free you, and he will. He tells us that he casts our sins away into the sea of forgetfulness.

00:26:37
He does not even remember them anymore. But how can that happen if we don't come?

00:26:50
I want to take this opportunity to invite you to the Lord Jesus. If you don't know Him already, if you want Him to wash you, if you want to be free of this weight of these chains, if you want these chains to break off. Somebody out there is dealing with some chains right now. And you know that. You have tried everything on your own to deal with it, to heal it, and nothing has worked.

00:27:17
You need to know that your Lord Jesus loves you. He is the Lord and he saves. Confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord. Believe it in your heart and you shall be saved. You can simply say, father, I confess that I am a sinner and I am in need of salvation.

00:27:38
I ask you, God, to take me. Lord Jesus, do something with me. Change me, God. I want to live my life Your way. I don't want to live it my way anymore.

00:27:49
I repent god. I turn away completely. And I trust you. And I'm asking you to help me live this out. Lord, don't leave me.

00:27:59
Don't forsake me. And he never will never leave you. He will never forsake you. It's a promise that he made. In the name of Jesus, I pray.

00:28:10
God bless you. You said that prayer for the first time. Please send me a message at Jamie's Lachel on instagram. You can DM me there or you can email me, Jamiece, at a newcreationpodcast.com. I would love to pray with you.

00:28:26
I would love to connect with you as you said that prayer for the first time. Of course. Welcome to the family, like I always say. And that's it for this podcast episode. God bless you all.

00:28:39
And yeah, that's it. Leave me a review wherever it is that you're listening. And we'll be back in the next episode. I'll hang out you guys then. God bless.