Living on the Edge

Chip Ingram: God taught me something a number of years ago that literally took my spiritual life to the next level. Quite honestly, I was a pastor, I was stuck, there were certain things that I just didn't see change. And then I was introduced to a concept. It was a concept called spiritual training. It revolutionized my life and that's what I want to share with you today.

Dave Druey: No one walks into a gym once and walks out looking like a bodybuilder. Chip Ingram learned that lesson the hard way and discovered it applies just as much to spiritual growth as it does to physical strength. Today he introduces the idea that changed his own life.

I'm Dave Druey, and here on Living on the Edge we're continuing our series called Free at Last: How to Break Out of a Destructive Lifestyle. Open your Bible to Ephesians chapter four, verse 25 as we get started with today's message from Chip Ingram titled "The Role of Spiritual Training in the Transformation Process."

Chip Ingram: Despite some of the radical transformation that happens early on in most people's Christian lives, there are these nagging areas. There are areas that you try and try and try and try, but they don't change. Some of the outer big stuff sometimes gets cleaned up, but those outbursts of anger, or the workaholism, or pleasing people, or codependency? Or there are just people that you really love God, you're sincere, you're actually reading your Bible, you're praying, you've joined a small group, but there are just pockets or closets in your life that you want to change and you have tried very hard and you're stuck.

We all have areas like that. The reason this is so important is because how we think about that and how God actually works to transform those things is different. Most people don't understand how that works. In fact, I would say probably the first ten years I was a Christian, I made some progress in some of those areas almost by random chance, but I couldn't articulate what happened or why.

Until I had a situation with one of my sons. My youngest son, Ryan, he gave me permission and this bench is going to tell a story. I can still remember sitting on the floor and my son had what an older translation says as a besetting sin. He was a young guy, loved God. At ten or eleven years old he's getting up and reading the Bible. He's leading worship by the time he's in junior high. Although he doesn't like school and he's not very disciplined, he's this young guy with a great heart.

But this besetting sin is every little kid goes through a season of lying. At least my four did. But they usually grow out of it. But Ryan, this shortcut, this besetting sin was whether it was homework was due or he was supposed to do that, he got into a pattern, he got into a habit of lying. In fact, for four years. I did everything you can do as a parent. I was just frustrated and it put a real breach in our relationship because then I never knew if I could trust him.

In one of three years of this, and I've done everything I can do, I'm literally sitting on the floor, he's sitting on his bed, and a breakthrough came. As I'm sitting on the floor and literally tears coming down my eyes, I said, "Ryan, you just keep lying and lying and lying." I remember him looking down at me and he says, "Dad, I'm trying as hard as I can. What do you do? I've prayed, I've memorized a couple verses, I've asked God. I can't stop. What do you do when you try as hard as you can and you just can't change?"

In that moment I thought to myself, number one, I'm his dad and he wants a really good answer from his dad. Number two, I'm a pastor, so I should have a good answer. And I'm thinking, I don't. What do you do when you're trying as hard as you can and you really love God and you're doing what you know to do? You're in the scriptures, you're renewing your mind, but certain things won't change.

As he said that and I'm feeling this overwhelming inadequacy as a father and as a pastor to give a good response, I'm praying one of those super quick prayers in my mind, "Oh God, give me wisdom." He's crying and bawling and he's looking at me like, "Well, Dad?" And God brought something to my mind. I'd been studying it privately but all the pieces came together in that moment. I said, "Ryan, relax. I've got the answer. Here's what I want you to do. I'll pick you up after school tomorrow. Load your gym bag, put a pair of sweats, your shoes, everything in the gym bag. I'll pick you up."

What I had to teach my son was there are certain things that no amount of trying harder, as sincere as you can be, will bring about change. Certain things are going to require training. So I picked him up after school and we started in the car. He goes, "Dad, we're not heading home." I said, "No, we're going to go someplace different."

At the time I had a good friend, he was Mr. Universe for a number of years, his name is Dave Draper. He owned World Gym there in Santa Cruz and he gave me a free membership. So we walk into World Gym and Dave is there. Now, please hear it, this is a gym, not a spa. There is no spandex anywhere. There are guys with big leather belts and there are not a lot of machines and there are just a few cardio areas. This is free weights, big guys, lots of grunting, probably a few steroids in the back room. They'd drop the weights and it goes boom, boom, boom.

These guys look like they were born on these weight machines. So I walked in and I said, "What do you think, Ryan?" He said, "They're really big." I asked, "Do you think they were born that way?" "No, Dad." I said, "Ryan, listen carefully. You have everything in your body to lift that weight. But no amount of trying hard will lift that weight right now. You have to go into training. You have to develop what God has given you."

We're going to talk about five habits that cultivate holiness from the heart. There are certain things that when you go into training, they literally become habits. You have spiritual, supernatural responses to certain things that right now are besetting sins. First and foremost, here's training station number one. The bench press of spirituality is this: be honest. Speak the truth in love.

Paul picks up where he had talked about in verse 15 where he says, "Speaking the truth in love, we're to grow up in all aspects into him who is the head, even Christ." Therefore, verse 25 then, he's going to make the application: "laying aside falsehood, speak the truth each one of you with his neighbor, for we are members of one another." Spiritual training station number one is honesty. Personal integrity. This isn't just your speech, but all aspects. Honesty, integrity, how you live, what you say, but especially you're going to put off falsehood. Your training command is to speak the truth in love.

Some of you are thinking, well, I'm an honest person. I don't do any big lies and I've actually reported everything on my taxes. Let me probe a little bit on some of the exaggeration and some of the white lies and some of the small ways. Luke 16:10—you might jot that in your notes—is a financial passage, but it's a timeless principle. It says, "He who is faithful in a very little thing will be faithful also in much. But he who is unrighteous in a very little thing will be unrighteous also in much."

How many times have you left late for something and there's a little bit of traffic and you walk into work and you say, "Oh, the traffic was really heavy"? The traffic was really heavy, but you're late not because the traffic is heavy, you're late because you left 15 minutes late. That's just a little lie. Or how many of us exaggerate? We just exaggerate a little bit here and a little bit there. Little lies, little exaggerations.

What I can tell you is we have all grown accustomed to doing that at such a level we just give one another a pass. When you don't ruthlessly say, "I'm going to go into training to be honest with God, honest with myself, and honest with others 100% of the time," when you do that, I will tell you, it will bring about transformation in those besetting sins.

What would happen if you were ruthlessly honest in every area of your life? How many times has someone said something to you and, "Hey, we really ought to get together and this is a great idea, I think you'd love to do it"? And you say something like, "Yeah, let's really get together sometime," and "Yeah, I think that's a winner." And down deep, the moment they walk out of the room, you think, "Man, I would never do that and I don't want to take that person's phone call in the future."

What you did is you did a little covering and you acted like you were interested because it would take a lot more courage to say, "You know, that's an interesting idea. I don't really think that is for me and I'm not really interested at this point in time with my other priorities of being involved in that." We lie all the time. We say things we don't mean. We present ourselves as better than we are. That's falsehood. But when you do that, I want you to know it's a disease and it grows.

Deception happens in your own heart and then pretty soon you don't see yourself the way you really are and you don't see God the way he is and things get more clouded. The problem with these kind of things is they grow and things that are little, 10, 12, 15 years later, they're big things.

Dave Druey: We'll continue in a moment here on Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. While you're with us, if you've never checked out the Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram YouTube channel, you're missing a whole other side of this ministry. It's full of teaching series you won't see anywhere else. Things like BIO: Three Essential Practices to Becoming Like Jesus, and the I Choose Joy series, just to name a few. It's a great way to go deeper with Chip's teaching or to send a friend something to watch. Just search "Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram" on YouTube and take a look around. Well, now here's Chip.

Chip Ingram: God says go into training. You put on truthful speech and authenticity. How do you do that? How do you make the break where that really occurs? In the same season, God hammered me on this and it was really life-transforming. When I said that I learned this sort of by random, God brought some circumstances into my life where I learned this training apparatus. The training apparatus here, literally, is practiced confession.

I made a vow before God that when I lied, when God made it aware that I lied in little things or in big things, to my wife, to another person, in a sermon, I would confess it and actually go to whoever I lied to and tell them. I'd like to say that was like 25 or 30 years ago, but I can tell you I've had to do that in the last two weeks. I'm in training and you're in training. But I will tell you what, by and large, I broke the power of deceit in my heart and I broke the power of lying because for 30 years I've been in training to be honest about exaggerating and white lies and presenting myself.

I was in a big meeting and I realized in part of this meeting I was posing and I had to tell the guy, "I'm sorry. I think I misrepresented myself. You guys think way more of me than is really true." Every time you confess and own it, I will tell you what, you will not want to do that. Here's how habits work. The cue is God shows me I'm being dishonest. The routine is I begin confessing. The reward is I get the peace of God. Your stock doesn't go down, your stock goes up because trust is built.

The foundation of all spiritual training is: be honest. Go into training. Put off falsehood. Have your mind renewed and realize that trust is the commodity and you want to be close and connected to people. Put on truth. The practice is every time you lie by thought, word, or deed, if it doesn't hurt another person, own it. Where appropriate, confess it. And when you do, trust develops and the power of evil will be broken.

The second training station is over here. If you go to the gym, they always say, "Okay, we're going to work on your bis and tris," and we're going to do some curls here. This is emotional control. If there is any area in the world that destroys our relationship with ourselves, with God, and others, it's anger. It's when we either blow up, or when we stuff it, or we leak it out. The emotional side of anger can absolutely destroy our journey with Christ. So training station number two is: be angry.

Deal with anger appropriately. Verse 26 and 27, it says, "Be angry"—that's a command—"yet do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger." Why? "And do not give—or lest you give—the devil an opportunity," or literally it's a foothold, or a crack, or an opportunity in your spirit and in your life. Put a box around anger or angry and write number one above it. Where it goes on, "do not let the sun go down on your anger," put a box around it and put a number two. These are two different words.

There are two different kinds of anger. Our spiritual training session number two is the goal: emotional control. We all deal with anger. How do we learn to go into training to appropriately deal with our anger? Our training command is to be angry and yet do not sin. The first word for anger here is the idea of anger which is a settled habit of the mind that is aroused by certain conditions. A settled habit of the mind, there are certain conditions that would cause you to be angry. Injustice. Evil. A child abused. Graft or greed that hurts other people. Someone abuses their mate and you find out about it. Disharmony or disruption in a small group or church that is unrighteous that's bringing division. The present sex trade.

Or in my case, when Christians don't live like Christians and people outside of Christ look at the general body of Christ and say, "You guys don't live any different than us," and they then think that God isn't really God and they turn away from him because of how we live, it makes me angry. By the way, anger is a healthy, positive emotion to motivate for life change.

Jesus was angry with those in the temple because of the evil and the injustice and the graft. He was angry at the Pharisees because of their hypocrisy. He wasn't Jesus meek and mild when he said, "You brood of vipers! You snakes! You whitewashed tombs!" And his disciples turned and said, "Jesus, are you aware that you're making them very upset?" They didn't know the half of it. You're to be angry. When we're supposed to be angry, we're often not, we're passive.

When we're inappropriately angry, the second word for anger here means irritations, exasperation, bitterness, resentment. This is the unhealthy anger. This is the kind of anger that you have when you don't get your way, or people cut you off in traffic and you start down this process in your mind. This is the anger that you have when one of your kids isn't responding in the way you want them to, or you don't get the promotion and all of a sudden you start brewing and there is this resentment and anger. This kind of anger when you have X amount of dollars and the stock market does that and you just start getting bent out of shape and you're mad and angry and exasperated and resentful and it begins to eat at your soul and you become a negative, critical person.

We all have anger issues, but most of us think only people that blow up have anger issues. Anger's expressed in three primary ways. Some people I call spewers—they explode. We've all been around people that have exploded. It creates distance, we're afraid of them, we withdraw, we don't have trust. A second way that people express anger—some of you learned even from some of our churches, unfortunately—that all anger is wrong and all anger is bad. Whenever you had angry feelings about something that was unjust or wrong, like, "How come my brother or sister's being treated like this and I'm being treated like this?" you learned you don't say that, you stuff it, you stuff it, you stuff it.

Experts tell us that about 90% of all depression is anger turned inward. So much of the depression that turns to migraines, that turns to ulcers, is anger that is unresolved that's stuffed down in here. Then there are other people—they are called leakers—passive-aggressive. This is when you deal with anger and someone hurts you or does something wrong and you're angry, but what you realize is you don't have the courage or the tools or the skill to deal with, "I feel angry right now about what you just said or what you just did." You take it from this sort of unsafe playing field that causes conflict and you bring it over here to what you think is a safer playing field.

You use sarcasm and jokes and you're passive-aggressive. If you know this person wants everything done neatly and on time, even unconsciously, you do it in a sloppy way and you're late. There's just something satisfying about watching them get all frustrated. Everyone in this room, we deal with anger. Anger is destructive in your relationship with God. Notice what we're to put off? We're to put off anger that leads to sin and offense, and then we need to renew our minds and recognize the dangers of unresolved anger.

It's that you get angry because your spouse didn't respond lovingly or kindly or there was a sharp word said. Because you don't know how to resolve it and you don't resolve it, then pretty soon bitterness happens. In my case, Theresa and I had no idea how to do this. When I was angry, I want to verbalize, I'm going to talk until we get it done. She came from—she withdrew.

We argued a little bit and we hurt one another's feelings and we didn't know what to do. I would put my hands behind my head as we're ready to go to sleep and I'd bounce on the bed like this—this means, "Theresa, you still have time to apologize, the day's not over." What I would hear from her is heavy breathing, which means, "I completely withdraw and don't like conflict because I learned that early on." I realized that after the "behind the head," I need to go to what I called the bounce and roll. You sigh deeply and loudly, you bounce and then you turn this way so that your posterior is next to her posterior with a slight bump that wakes her up enough to understand things aren't right and we can deal with this and you can now apologize.

Dave Druey: This is Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram, and a message titled "The Role of Spiritual Training in the Transformation Process." It's part of our series called Free at Last: How to Break Out of a Destructive Lifestyle. Stay with us because there's more from Chip in just a minute.

Honesty sounds simple until you actually try to practice it for a week. That's the kind of practical, uncomfortable truth Chip's book, *Yes, You Really Can Change*, is built around. Not just knowing what's true, but training yourself to live it out through the power and process only God provides. It's a powerful, practical companion for anyone who's tired of trying hard and failing. Right now, every order includes a second copy so you can bring someone else into training with you. Look for the book *Yes, You Really Can Change* at livingontheedge.org/offers.

If Living on the Edge has been part of your own spiritual training, we'd love for you to help someone else get that same training. Your gift is what puts teaching like this within reach of the next person who needs it. Give online at livingontheedge.org or call us at 888-333-6003. Or mail your gift to Living on the Edge, PO Box 3007, Suwanee, Georgia, 30024. Training doesn't stop when the program ends. Keep going on the Living on the Edge podcast with new episodes waiting for you daily. For the unedited version of today's teaching, find the Chip Ingram sermon podcast on your favorite app. Well, now here's Chip.

Chip Ingram: As you ponder today about where and how you need to go into spiritual training in the area of honesty, let me take just a minute and share a little story about how God put me into training long before I knew what it was. Very first pastorate, was a very small church, wonderful group of people in rural Texas. I'm 28 years old and the first two or three weeks I'm preaching my first messages, and then the church starts to grow a little bit and we started a little Wednesday night group.

I say in my sermon, "You know, last Wednesday was really great, we had about 68 or 70 people." We go on with the message and I'm in the car on the way home and my wife is strangely silent. We drive a little while and I say, "Hey, honey, something wrong?" "Well, yeah." "What's wrong?" "Why'd you lie today?" I said, "What?" "Why'd you lie today?" "What do you mean? I thought it was a pretty good message, actually." "Hey, I watched you count on Wednesday night, there were 64 people." I said, "I was just rounding." She said, "Well, how do you round from 64 to 68 to 70?" I said, "What does it matter?" and she said, "Isn't that the point? What does it matter?"

I thought, she's very detail-oriented, I'm a big picture guy, it's a small misunderstanding and she just doesn't get it, but I said, "Okay, you're right, I exaggerate a little bit." She said, "No, you lied." Okay, so I'm thinking, forget it, I'm sorry, I didn't really mean it, but I'm not going to go there. Next week, I tell another story, I use a figure again. I've got icicles coming home in the car in round two. I'm thinking, this pastorate may not be very fun if this happens every week.

I said, "What's wrong?" she looked at me with that same look, she goes, "Why'd you lie again this week?" I went, oh no, this is a royal headache that's not going to go away. I said, "What do you mean?" I exaggerated again and I thought, this is going to be a long journey being a pastor. What happened was I realized down deep that I liked exaggerating because somehow out of my own insecurities, even though it didn't mean anything, I wanted to make myself look better than I really am.

When you're unfaithful in a very little thing, then you're going to be unfaithful in much. God used my wife and I went into training. I don't have it licked, but I want you to know that integrity has been a foundational issue in my life after that first pastorate and those early years because I went into training to be honest down to the little things. Let me ask you: what would it look like today for you to go into training in the area of honesty? Put on honesty that your life would reflect the very purity and truthfulness of Christ.

Dave Druey: Well, that's all our time for today. Coming up next time, Chip Ingram continues our series Free at Last as he tackles one of the toughest emotions to manage well: anger. Don't miss the message next time here on Living on the Edge. Today's program is produced and sponsored by Living on the Edge.