Richard Ellis Talks

Richard Ellis: When Jesus comes along and says, "Trust me, I am going to open your can of worms and I'm going to go fishing," you have to be willing to let Him do that. It doesn't mean He spills them everywhere, but your story is not your story anymore when it becomes His story.

Guest (Male): Welcome to Richard Ellis Talks with Richard Ellis. Richard is going to take the next few minutes to share some great words of hope and insight for you. In today's broken world, that is something everyone is desperate to hear. Richard shares unapologetically the truth of the Bible in a way that is clear, relational, and uplifting.

Thank you for taking this time to listen. We know it will bless you. When you have a moment, you might want to check out our website so we can stay connected with you at RichardEllis.com. But right now, let's go ahead and get things off and running with today's talk. Here is Richard Ellis.

Richard Ellis: The title of today's message is "Can of Worms." A minister decided that a visual demonstration would add emphasis to his Sunday sermon. Four worms were placed into four separate jars. The first worm was put into a container of alcohol, the second worm was put into a container of cigarette smoke, and the third worm was put into a container of chocolate syrup. The fourth worm was put into a container of good, clean soil.

At the conclusion of the sermon, the minister reported the following results: the first worm in alcohol, dead; the second worm in cigarette smoke, dead; the third worm in chocolate syrup, dead; and the fourth worm in good, clean soil, alive. The minister asked the congregation, "What can you learn from this demonstration?" A little old woman in the back quietly raised her hand and said, "As long as you drink, smoke, and eat chocolate, you won't have worms." That was her conclusion.

Does anybody know what a can of worms really is? Raise your hand if you think you know what a can of worms is. No one is brave enough to say it. We have a few people who maybe did old-school fishing before there was Styrofoam or plastic. You literally would go to a bait shop and it was a can with a top and a handle on it. It was literally a can of worms. The problem with a can of worms is that once you open that can of worms, you potentially had worms everywhere. In some ways, you were better off not opening that can of worms before it was time to open it.

The longer I do what I do, and maybe the longer you live and the more conversations you have, you get to the place where you realize in a conversation, "I better not ask another question. I better not go wherever I was about to go because if I do, I am just going to open a can of worms." We step away and we do not get involved. We do not ask those questions.

The flip side of this is sometimes we just go barreling into a situation and blow open cans of worms that we had no idea were there. We alienate people and make people angry and even harder to reach because we went meddling into stuff that we did not know about. We had no idea how serious it was. This is where I would like to go today. Throughout my life, and I think the younger I have been the worse this has been, you meet somebody and you say, "Well, that guy is not very nice." We just write them off.

I meet people every day, and they may be angry. Have you ever stopped to think that maybe in that moment they have a reason to be angry? You do not know what has happened to them. You say, "Well, what if nothing has happened to them?" Well, what if they have done something? This is something you cannot leave out. Sometimes bad things happen to people, and sometimes people do bad things. That is what they carry around the rest of their lives.

They cannot shake it and they cannot do anything about it. They do not know where to go with it. God saves your soul, comes after me, and offers me mercy, peace, forgiveness, love, and joy. This whole package deal of eternal life is a full package. I have got all this blessing and then I go out into the world and forget that there are miserable people, guilty people, and shame-filled people. They do not know where to go with this. He sends me into their lives and I say, "Well, you are rude." Is that all I have got?

Instead of going out every day and saying, "Okay, God, I am about to enter a world of darkness carrying a light, and what is this going to be about?" I would like to jump in the middle of a story in 2nd Samuel. There are some stories I go back to repeatedly, and I am going back to this story of David specifically, but at a very specific moment in his life.

If you know anything about David, he is the guy that saw Bathsheba on the roof and gets her husband killed in battle. He takes her as his wife, and it turns out she is pregnant. The problem with her being pregnant is that David was trying to get Uriah to come home from battle and sleep with her. He did not pull that off, so he gets him killed and marries her really quick. It looks like it was their baby. It was their baby, but if you do the math, it did not work out very well.

In 2nd Samuel chapter 12, David has been found out. If you read the first part of this chapter, the prophet comes to him and tells him a story and it turns out it is the famous phrase, "You are the man." The guy that did this should surely die and Nathan says, "You are the man. It is you." Then he realizes he has been caught. It is a nightmare and the consequences of his sin hit him. Look down in verse 13. David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the Lord." Nathan said to David, "The Lord has put away your sin and you shall not die." The consequence of this could have been David dying. Sometimes that is God's mercy.

However, because by this deed you have given great occasion to the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme, the child also who is born to you shall surely die. Part of the tragedy of his sin, and you say, "Well, now are you equating losing children to sin?" I am not saying that. But in his life, it is even worse. Not only did he lose a child, but the prophet comes to him and says that because of this deed you have given great occasion to the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme, and the child also who is born to you shall surely die.

Nathan departed to his house. David pleaded with God for the child. David fasted and went in and lay all night on the ground. I know even talking about this, there are people who say, "You have not gone through this. You should not even be speaking of this." Sit down. If you live long enough, someone will tell you their story. When you are in that space and you are fasting, praying, and weeping from your innermost being, crying out to God to do something, it is a horrific place to be. If the child dies anyway, you might be mad at God because He did not answer your prayer the way you asked Him to.

Go to Job chapter 1. I do not want to assume that everybody knows these stories. The short version is that God gives Job up to Satan himself. He comes in and says, "Have you considered my servant Job?" I do not pray this because if I pray it, it will happen. Whenever y'all have your board meetings up there, do not bring my name up. I know you love me and everything, but do not bring me up in these meetings.

Satan comes in and God says, "Have you considered my servant Job?" He says, "Well, he only trusts you because he has got all these kids and all this property." God gives Satan permission to take everything, all the possessions and even his kids. All of his kids are killed. I am done there. If that is not enough, you go into chapter 2 and Job is still trusting God. Satan says, "Well, he still has his health." God says, "You can do anything you want to him. You just cannot take his life." Now he is covered with boils from head to toe, scraping the skin off of his body and he still will not curse God and quit.

What a crazy story. If you jump down the road, and I would like you to turn to Job chapter 42. His buddies show up. They sit there with him for a week, which is what you have got to do. They did that wisely. Then the entire book is back and forth from chapter 3 all the way to 41. It is this conversation back and forth between Job and God, and Job and these buddies of his. Everybody thinks they have got an answer.

If you jumped down the road to where God restores everything, here is the other thing that we miss. You meet someone and they are not mean or rude; there is just something a little bit off. Something is missing. They may even be a Christian, but there is a weight and a heaviness. There is a distance and something that is just not right. You go, "Okay, Lord, what happened?" In the case of Job, let me read you what happens in verse 10.

Job 42:10. If you have ever wondered where everything turned around for Job, look at verse 10: "And the Lord restored Job's losses when he prayed for his friends." These buddies had shown up and basically accused him of sin. When he prayed for his friends, everything turned around. Look what happened. The Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before. You say, "Well, what difference does that make? God blessed him." You know what? You keep your twice as much. Just leave me alone in the first place. My kids died and you took all my possessions and you almost let the enemy kill me physically. You say, "Well, this is a wonderful thing. He blessed him twice what he had before."

I get it and I hear it, but part of me wants to say, "God, why don't you just go bother someone else? Why don't you turn someone else into Satan and let him bother them and prove your point?" I do not want to show up in Scripture as an example. But that is the deal. If you are born and you have no problems and God does not allow anything to happen to you, it is not realistic. He did not even do that for Jesus.

When you meet someone who has had real tragedy, real catastrophe, and real heartache, and you haven't survived or thrived through it and gotten to the other side to have joy and peace, they look at us and say, "Dude, you have got nothing. You don't know what I have been through." I do not know what it's like to lose a child or a spouse. Losing a mom, well, people say she is in a better place. That does not count.

You take a person who has lost a child, and I do not know this firsthand, but I have heard this repeatedly. Someone in the community loses a child and people who have lost children will literally just go park in front of the house or go stand in the yard and not even ring the bell. They just get as close as they can to say, "You are not by yourself. We can't fix it, but we have been where you have been." What do you do? What do you say? You try to help that person climb out of that dark place and see that there is hope.

You say, "Wow, this is going really, really heavy." Life does not have to be heavy all the time, but I am telling you that you are surrounded by a world of people who are in a lot of pain. Instead of being self-righteous and wagging that finger, think about that. You meet someone and they are a drunk or a drug addict. You go, "Wow, what a waste. Why is that person living that way?" Ask some questions.

If you have enough heartache and you do not know how to deal with it and somebody offers you something to drink and it works for a little while, you might try it for a long while. Then you get addicted to your medication that helps you numb the brain pain. Stop judging people. You say what they are doing is wrong. Find out why they are doing wrong and offer them a Jesus who has the power to come into their heart, into their life, and into their mind and show them how to live the way He intended and overcome these things.

This kind of stuff you are not going to overcome without God. You can take medication and go see all the psychiatrists you want to go see. Some of this stuff no one can heal but Jesus. Keep reading with me on this Job thing. Restored twice as much as he had before. Then all his brothers and all his sisters and all those who had been his acquaintances before came to him and ate food with him in his house. They consoled him and comforted him for all the adversity that the Lord had brought upon him. Each one gave him a piece of silver and a ring of gold.

The Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning for he had 14,000 sheep, 6,000 camels, 1,000 yoke of oxen and 1,000 female donkeys. He also had seven sons and three daughters. He called the name of the first Jemima, which I love. That is a whole another study. Verse 16: "After this Job lived 140 years and saw his children and grandchildren for four generations." Job died old and full of days. No matter what God restored to him, the coolest thing about Job is that he did not curse God and die. Probably nobody is going to come along and meet Job and say they had more trouble than he had ever had. We get to read about the guy and say that if he could do it, I can do it.

You have got to read your Bible. If you do not read your Bible, you do not know what is in here and you get overwhelmed and think, "Woe is me, I am the only one. Nobody gets it." God gets it. Even God gets it. You say, "Well, He is up there turning people over to Satan to make a point." What about the Father Himself who lets His Son come down here born of a virgin? Everything is going well. Then a king is trying to kill everybody within two years trying to wipe out Jesus.

Jesus had a hit on him from birth. God protects His life for 33 years and then on one weekend lets them kill Him. You say, "Well, He doesn't understand what it is to lose." The Father had to turn His back and His face away from Jesus because all of our sin got dumped on Him. He could not have anything to do with sin. God literally has to abandon His only begotten Son to rescue you. Do not talk to God and say, "You don't understand." He understands more than you will ever understand. It cost Him His Son. He understands.

Go to Psalm 34:18. Sometimes you need to read one verse: "The Lord is near to those who have a broken heart and saves such as have a contrite spirit." I have got some things in my life that I am not proud of and I deal with them with the Lord. Every once in a while the enemy throws them back at me. But I sit with people who carry massive loads around. Women who have been raped. Men who have raped a woman. You say, "Well, which is worse?" They are both horrendous.

At least one of them happened to you. When you are a man and you have perpetrated something like that on a woman, I do not know how you get over that if you are a human being. But if you decide you are going to deal with that sin God's way and figure out a way to live past it and get forgiveness, you will never get there without the blood of Jesus Christ. You will not get there.

The enemy will beat your brain in until the day you die telling you what a loser you are. He is the very one that got you in the situation to do it in the first place. He pushes and gets us to do these stupid things and then he says, "Now I am going to beat you to death with it for the rest of your life." That is the kind of guy you want to serve. But you say, "God, I can't live this way. I don't want to live this way." There is not any amount of alcohol or drugs I can do to fix this. So you go to Jesus.

When you meet someone who has committed heinousities—it is not a word yet, but I am working on it—and that person tells you what they have done, where they have been, and what they have participated in. We don't have to leave the room for this. Right here. Maybe some of you could outdo others, but we got enough right here to make it hard on Jesus dying on a cross.

Then that person gets some relief, some forgiveness, and some mercy. Those people are on fire for Jesus a lot of times. Unfortunately, not enough, but someone who gets past that and gets forgiven and understands that their sins have been washed away—you say, "Well, they don't deserve that." You do not deserve it either.

I had a couple of more stories here and you can go read them on your own. One is out of Luke chapter 4. The other one I was going to read is Psalm 51 if you want to read someone speaking to what it feels like after they have had someone's husband killed, after a baby has died. Psalm 51. David was being crushed by his sin and God comes along and has mercy. It is possible to get past it.

Let me read you a little bit out of Luke chapter 4. This is Jesus quoting Isaiah. Luke 4:16. "So He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up. And as His custom was, He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day and stood up to read. He was handed the book of the prophet Isaiah. When He had opened the book, He found the place where it was written: 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because He has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.'"

He closed the book, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all who were in the synagogue were fixed on Him. He began to say to them, "Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing." That is what Jesus was sent to do. He is the fulfillment of that passage. Now where does Jesus live? If you are a Christian, He lives in you. What is your job? It is to let Him live for you.

The job hasn't changed: to preach the gospel to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. That is not your job; it is His job. It is your job to let Him do His job through you. That is the deal. If not, you should be dead.

If it cost God so much to get us into heaven and Jesus died, was buried, and was raised from the dead to get us into heaven, you would think that the millisecond you become a Christian, you just get beamed out of here. You would just drop dead on the spot the second you get saved. If heaven is so great, and it is, and it cost God His Son to get us there, and it did, then what are we doing here? Do you ever ask yourself that question? "Oh, I am trying to live a long life." For what? "I am working hard accumulating things." For what? "Well, I am enjoying these things." Really?

That is how the devil is going to eat up however many years you have got left, just doing nothing and saving up and trying to avoid hurting people so you do not have to get involved. You have got that rubberneck Christian thing going. It drives me insane. I almost have accidents trying to get past accidents. I am so frustrated. They had a wreck. Stop looking at the wreck!

Someone tells me the other day they came upon a scene. It was in the news about a car that had a wreck and burst into flames. Someone stopped and was trying to get these three people out of the car. There were people who had pulled over and had their phones out, shooting video of the people dying in the car. The guy who was trying to get the people out could not get them out of the way to go help the people. We are just shooting video. What a terrible thing.

Jesus is saying, "Could we please go over there and get involved and see if we can help? Because I can help. I got answers. I got power." "Oh no, Jesus, we will be late." No, we are right on time. This is where I was trying to get, right here.

Back to the can of worms. You say, "Okay, let's say I let you open my can of worms and we look at all my junk and we process it. Then what is the point?" Even when Jesus goes fishing, a can of worms is a pretty powerful thing. Sometimes He uses all those worms to catch somebody else because you are finally willing to deal with your can of worms. He says, "Okay, well, let's don't let this go to waste. Let's go fishing with your worms."

There was a specific woman who came through our church. She had a lid on a can of worms that she would never open. It limited her ability to interact and reach people. When Jesus comes along and says, "Trust me, I am going to open your can of worms and I'm going to go fishing," you have to be willing to let Him do that. It doesn't mean He spills them everywhere, but your story is not your story anymore when it becomes His story.

I am not saying go blab all your stuff, but if you want to see Jesus show up, you get in a conversation and someone has survived any of these things: abortion, rape, any of these things. You are sitting there and Jesus says, "I know this is going to be painful, but we are going there. We are going to open our can of worms so they know their can of worms is fixable." Then you tell your story. Whatever He tells you to tell, it is His story. Sometimes it is as simple as, "I once was blind, now I see. I once was lost, now I'm found."

Guest (Male): Richard will be back in a moment to wrap up today's talk. But first, I want to share a couple thoughts with you. Let's be honest. Real life isn't about living some highlight reel for others to see. Most people have deep hurts, questions, and struggles. We get it and want to help you in any way that we can.

Let's keep this conversation going. Give us a call at 855-6-RICHARD or connect with us at our website, RichardEllis.com. You can even put in your prayer request right there on the prayer wall so others can pray for you as well. Call us at 855-6-RICHARD or online at RichardEllis.com. Now, let's get back to Richard with a final word on today's show.

Richard Ellis: I am going to read you this word for word. This is Pamela Anderson speaking: "I did not have an easy childhood," Anderson said. "Despite loving parents, I was molested from age six to ten by my female babysitter. Six to ten." The mother of two boys noted that her father was an alcoholic and her mother worked two jobs but said that they had tried to keep her safe.

"I went to a friend's boyfriend's house," she continued. "While she was busy, the boyfriend's older brother decided he would teach me backgammon, which led into a back massage, which led into rape. My first heterosexual experience. He was 25 years old. I was 12." Coincidentally, at this film festival event which raised money for Cool Earth, the group that works with indigenous villages to stop rainforest destruction, was a backgammon tournament going on.

"My first boyfriend," she went on to say, "my first boyfriend in grade nine decided it would be funny to gang rape me with six of his friends. Needless to say, I had a hard time trusting humans. I just wanted off the earth." That is who is walking around.

Either people who have had something happen to them or they have perpetrated something on someone and both groups do not know what to do with their can of worms. I have got the answer. Not flippantly, not casually. It may take time, but the answer is a Man and His sweet name is Jesus. Sometimes when you are willing to open your can of worms and weep with someone that weeps, you get a shot at rejoicing when they rejoice because He can turn it around.

Guest (Male): You've been listening to Richard Ellis Talks. We really appreciate that you spent this time with us, but we want to keep the conversation going. So give us a call anytime at 855-6-RICHARD. That is 855-674-2427. Or through our website, RichardEllis.com, by sending an email to us so we can stay connected with you.

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