Gregory Dickow - Redeemed From the Control of Your Emotions
We don't realize that we're redeemed from the curse of being emotionally ruled people. This is also something we're redeemed from. We're redeemed from being overtaken by our emotions. And this is what emotional intelligence is. It's it's being able to have emotions. It's being able to express emotions but have but have a harness on them and have control of them. And if you if you think about anything in life, what relationship, your health, your your dreams, your desires, the goals you have in life, everything is driven by the degree of of how you can control your emotions. Like in a relationship you're in any relationship.
There are going to be tension. There's going to be tension. There's going to be there's going to be things that happen that go against your expectations and go against your what you what you were hoping for and how you process and how you handle those emotions are what determines the quality of your life. The quality of your life is not determined by what happens to you, but the quality of your life is determined by how you respond and how you relate to what happens to you. Right. And so we see as soon as Adam and Eve sinned and realize they were naked and they were ashamed, they immediately went into this emotional, emotionally ruled lifestyle like God created us to be ruled by his presence and ruled by love. Our emotions should not be ruling our life like I'm so mad I could do this. And I'm so depressed and I'm so sad and I'm so angry and I'm so this and I'm so discouraged about this. And our emotions begin to overpower us and oppress us and control our lives.
And it all started in the garden. And so if I can just kind of unfold how this controlled them, we can then dismantle it and reverse it and truly elevate our emotional intelligence. Because life is life is lived. We live in an emotional world. We live on in emotions, and we have them. And they're not something that we should try to get rid of. There's something we should try to enjoy and employ and not have them controlling us with me. So so now in verse eight, so they hear the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of God among the trees of the garden. And the Lord God called to the man and said, Where are you? And he said, I heard, where are you? And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden. And I was afraid. And he said, Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat? And the man said, the woman who you gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree and I ate like this guy is immediately fallen.
Now you can see how falling he is. Like he was made in the image of God. But he's not acting at all like that now. He's no longer in the image of God. You do understand, right? That man is no longer Adam has just changed his nature. Adam has just become Adam has taken on the nature of Satan at this at this point in his life. Adam and Eve has have taken on the nature of Satan. They have become children. They have become sons of darkness. They have literally given Satan authority in the earth because they were given authority by God. And then Adam and Eve ended up giving the authority to Satan by listening to him and submitting to him. And of course, Jesus comes, hallelujah. Jesus comes and takes the authority back, but pays for it in his blood.
So Jesus didn't just come to he didn't just come to just wash us of our sins. He came to take back the keys of of hell and death. He came to take back the keys, the authority of life, the authority of the universe. He took it back from Satan. Satan doesn't rule this world anymore. He's the God of this world system. But he is not your God, right? Your God has given you authority and you have the power over your life, over your soul, over your choices, over your emotions, over how you react and respond to how you're treated at work or how you're treated at home or how you're treated by a family member on the holidays or how you're treated, how you respond to whatever life throws at you. Like you like we're masters of life. We're not mastered by life. We're the masters of life.
We have to wake up to the reality of of who we are. Like you. You no longer sit around and have pity parties when. You understand the kind of authority that you wield with your tongue and with your with your words, with your with your prayers, with your faith, with your love, like the authority we get to walk in, the power we get to walking is all the power that Adam and Eve walked in before they send what Adam what Adam became is what we were born as. But what but what Adam was before he sinned is what we're born again as you follow what I'm saying. What what what what we we are what Adam was like. We went we are born as the seed of Adam. We are born as sinners. We are born as blamers. We are born as victims. We are born as as people who have a chip on our shoulder. From the moment we come out of the womb, we're whining.
I think about it. You don't have no baby comes out of the womb rejoicing, happy, full of life, full of, like, good attitude. Like he's crying, bleeding, angry, hungry, demanding, feisty. And you're attached to him. You've got to cut that thing like. Adam, we have like we have to grab a hold of I know this is you might be thinking like, come on, Pastor, are we ever going to get out of Genesis like you happy? Yeah, I guess. But you got to go. You got to you got to see how far man has had fallen so that you can appreciate how high God has raised you up in Christ. Like we have been like the kind of the quality of life that Adam and Eve live before they send was they ruled the earth. They they were masters of the Earth. They had dominion.
God said, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, subdue the earth and rule the earth. Adam and Eve named all the animals Adam and Eve had of complete authority over everything. And he said God told them in Genesis in Genesis one over every creeping thing, you have authority over everything that creeps every creeping thing. And here comes the creep, the devil himself, the creepiest of the creeps. He comes creeping in the form of a serpent, and Adam and Eve had total authority to kick him out of the garden or to kill him or to tame him or to do whatever they had to do. They had authority. They were masters over all of creation. They had command over all of creation. They acquiesced that they abdicated their authority, but they had it. They abdicated, abdicated their responsibility, but they had the authority to drive the devil out of the garden.
All they had to do was say, hey, get out of here. You don't belong here and you don't get to be in our garden. You go out over there in the field. We're not letting you in here. You we are in charge of you. But what they did was they they they held a conversation with the enemy and therefore they eventually he won the conversation. He won the argument. They God didn't call us to talk with the enemy. He called us to talk to the enemy. He gave us authority to talk to resist the devil. And he will flee from you don't have a conversation with him. Resist him firm in your faith. And we have to think like that, like we have to we have to start living like we're in charge. We're in charge like I'm in charge of my choices, I'm in charge of my life, I'm in charge, and as I started to share on Sunday, I will pick this up on Sunday.
But that the idea that somebody else has control over your life, that's oppression. And that's what Satan is. He's an oppressor and he wants to rob you of your power to control your own life. And God wants to give you the power to control your own life like God doesn't, that God doesn't even want to control our lives. God's not a controller. He he put Adam and Eve in this garden. He said, you guys, hey, do it, take it, multiply ten the garden, enjoy each other, enjoy the fruit, eat from any of the trees, eat freely, eat all you want. By the way, that one in the middle don't eat from that one. There's a tag on that. Don't remove the tag, you know, like the mattress that you're not supposed to remove the tag on the mat.
Don't eat from that one because you know, who knows what? You get arrested if you remove the tag from the mattress, I guess, I don't know. But if you eat from that tree like loop, you're going to die. Don't eat from that one. You're going to die. And I believe in I believe in the God. I believe in a yes God, not a no God. There's way more yeses than there are no's. And the fact is, is that if you fill up on the yeses that God says yes to, you'll lose your appetite for the nose that God says no to. It's not about us being so strong that we can resist the devil. It's about us being it's not about us being so strong that we can resist temptation. It's about us being so full that we can't eat another bite. That's really the Christian life, the Christian life, he said. Jesus said the thief comes to steal, kill and destroy. But I have come that you would have life and have it in abundance to the full till it overflows. Will we get a hold of this kind of authority?
We start mastering our feelings and our emotions and like the first place to exercise this God given authority is over your self. The first place we exercise our authority is not over the devil. The first place we exercise our authority is not over things. The first place we we exercise our authority should be over our attitudes, our emotions. This is what I'm talking about. When I talk about emotional intelligence, it's like this is the first thing to get control of. Look, we are trying to control everything else in life. My God, we could get a hold of this. We try to control we try to control people. We try to control. We try to control our situation. We try to control the weather. We try to control we we try to control the temperature. We try to control. And not that you can't, you know, turn the thermostat up.
That's another example in for another time. But we we are control freaks as human beings because of one thing, because of the because we're always compensating for something we feel inside. So when we lack self-control, we accentuate our need to control other things and people and the environment and our circumstances. When really Jesus slept in the middle of the storm because he had self-control, he had supernatural peace, he slept in the midst of the storm. He didn't he didn't need the storm to stop for him to have peace. He had peace inside and now he had mastery of himself. So now then what? When they woke him and they're like, Master, don't you care that we're perishing? He's like he was sleeping. Like he's he would have been no different than you.
When somebody wakes you up, you're you're like upset, right? Somebody wakes you up, you've fallen asleep like like it's like as we get older, sometimes it's a little harder. I'm just I'm not prophesying to anybody, but for me, I've had a little harder time sleeping. So as soon as I fall asleep, if somebody wakes me up, I'm, I'm ticked. I just finally fell asleep, you know, Roman comes running into my room. Dad, I got to talk to you. Dad. Dude, man, come on, wake up. I'm knock you out. Boy, this is not good. This is bad timing, bro. So Jesus is like like he's OK, whoa, they're like, don't you care? They wake up and they shake them, they wake them up. Don't you care? We're perishing and Jesus is like, whoa, OK, where is your faith, guys? Oh, ye of little faith. OK, just move aside for a moment. Move aside for a moment. Peace be still, amen.
And the storm stopped, and the wind ceased, and the waves, you know, stopped, and there was a great calm. The Bible says there was a great calm on the outside because there was a great calm on his insides. You see, this is what I'm talking about, like we have got to get calm inside and not moved by all the activity of everybody else being stressed out and you don't like you're not so touchy when you've got this mastery over yourself. And this is what Adam and Eve, this is what they gave up. This is what they this is what they lost. This is what they sacrificed. This is what they lost control. They lost control of themselves, of themselves. They no longer are governed by the spirit of God and by the relationship with God. Now they're governed by their sense of smell, their sense of touch. They're governed by this, by their feelings and their emotions, and they're completely controlled by them. So much so that the first two kids they have are Cain and Abel. And let's look there real quick. It says, For Abel, God was pleased. He respected the word is pleased. God was pleased with Abels offering, but God was not pleased with Cain's offering.
Now, listen to me. Really, really important point. And this is how God reverses it in our lives. Like once we're born again, we now our emotions flow from the same fountain that bit their emotions flowed from our emotions flow from our connection with God. So our emotions flow from how we feel about what God thinks. So when you feel that when you feel that God's not pleased with you, this is this is what happens now. Fear, fear comes in and then anger, which leads to hatred, rejection, low self-worth and retaliation. This is the downward spiral of Cain's emotions that we see, that we see unfold. He he gets afraid, he gets angry, he gets depressed, he gets hateful. He gets he feels rejected. He feels low self-worth. And he feels like his only way of compensating for how he feels is to eliminate the threat in his life.
And the threat is coming from the threat. He doesn't deal with the threat inside of him. He deals with what he projects the threat out onto onto his brother. Like it's really you, you're the problem. So if I get rid of you, then I won't be compared to you anymore. And I won't be the one that doesn't it doesn't please God. So this is what I'm trying to get across to you, is that I believe with all my heart that Christians, they they don't mature because they are constantly trying to obtain this this this moving target of pleasing God. Like, you got to really please God like your actions, like your life is really pleasing to God. Like you haven't you haven't prayed enough. So you're not pleasing to God. You haven't done enough. So you're not pleasing to God. You haven't you know, you haven't given enough. So you're not pleasing to God. You haven't, you haven't, you haven't been holy enough. So you're not pleasing to God.
And and it's this moving target. Like at what point is God pleased with you? Like if you win somebody to the Lord, should you one to people to the Lord. If you won two people to the Lord, should you have won four people to the Lord? Like at what point is God pleased with you? And this is the whole essence of of Christianity and the whole essence of our soul. And what Jesus came to redeem us from was being ruled by fear and being ruled by the displeasure of God feeling that we have that we have fallen short of pleasing God and fallen short of glorifying God. That's why that's why the only requirement, the only necessary ingredient that is required for us to be pleasing to God is to simply believe it's to simply believe him. Yeah. Like what pleases God is that you take him at his word.
That's why it says in Hebrews, Chapter 11, verse five and six, it says now, without faith, it is impossible to please God. Without faith, it's impossible to please God. For He comes to God must believe that he is. And that he is the reward of those who seek him. This is what religion has done in religion, has taken the Bible and has ascribed meanings that were never meant to be ascribed. To seek him means that we forsake all other forms of what we're putting our trust in. God is a reward or not, of those who pray enough to qualify for seeking him. But God is the reward of those that look to him as their source.
That's what seeking God is. I look to him on the cross as the only source of my salvation. I looked at him and the stripes on his back as the only source of my healing. I look to him as becoming a curse for me as the only source of my redemption. I'm redeemed from the curse because he was crucified. I'm forgiven because his blood was shed. I'm healed by his stripes like that, seeking God. It is. It is. It is. It is refusing to look to any other source than Jesus as the only source of my redemption.
You see, that's what seeking God is. And that takes the religion out of it. That takes the the gosh, am I doing it enough. You see. Do you see. So Abel brings the he brings the first legs of the flock and bloodshed and God is pleased. Cain brings effort the work of his hands. And God is not pleased because no matter what you do in your effort, it will never be enough to be pleasing to God. So the moment that you put faith in the blood, you are pleasing to God. All right. And when you put your faith in anything else, you're out of sync with that pleasure.