James MacDonald - Getting Unstuck from Negativity
Summary:
The preacher warns that chronic negativity is a sinful pattern of thinking that fuels discontent and grieves God, identifying five «logs» on its fire: a critical eye, wrong expectations, negative friends, unresolved hurt, and poor time management. Drawing from Israel’s complaints in Numbers 11-12, where God responded with anger and judgment, he stresses that God hears, hates, and judges negativity even under grace, as deliberate sin profanes Christ’s sacrifice (Hebrews 10:26–29). The heartfelt conclusion urges believers to own their negativity as sin, repent earnestly, and cultivate gratitude like children on Christmas morning, remembering we contributed nothing to our salvation yet received everything through the cross.
The River of Negativity
I don’t think we realize the river of negativity that flows out of many of us. Why is it so hard? Well, the things we do drop these down; things we do to fuel our five logs on the negativity fire. One of them is a critical eye.
Pastor Rick is one of the most positive people I know, and one of the reasons why he’s so positive is he literally cannot see anything wrong with anything ever. Way back when the church was smaller, we would have a service review meeting every Tuesday where we would sit in a room with the worship leader and a couple of other people, and Pastor Rick and I would go over the service.
This was Pastor Rick’s comment six, seven, eight years in a row: I thought it was awesome. I thought it was great, but what about areas for improvement? I can’t think of any! I don’t know how it could get better than that, really. Now, I don’t want to get critical of him right now, but how many people would say, «I do see the negative»?
A Critical Eye
I constantly see it, recognize it, and have to put it down. Put up your hand if you’re like that. Put up your hand if you’re like, «Yeah, I really don’t see it; someone has to point it out to me. I’m just humming a tune, having an awesome day.» Go ahead, put up your hand if you’re like that.
Love you; you’re like that too. I see your smile right there; you are like that. I know you are, and I’m trying to love you. Now, those are two very different things. If you’re a person who has a critical thought—a critical eye for things—you see, «That’s not right; that’s too short; that’s the wrong color.»
Wrong Expectations
That’s the second thing: wrong expectations. You have an expectation of something that isn’t likely coming, and that could be a log on the fire of your negativity. I relate to that a lot. Just let it go; let it go. It’s not going to change.
A critical eye, wrong expectations, and negative friends. When surrounded by wrongdoers, wrongdoing comes easily. If your friends aren’t friends of faith, and if your friends are friends of doubt, you hang up the phone with them and think, «I gotta remember not to take her call, » because every time you do, you’re going to get an earful of what’s wrong with the world, wrong with our lives, wrong with your hair, and wrong with this.
Unresolved Hurt and Bad Time Management
Negativity often flows from unresolved hurt. I’ll go first and say that I understand it has to get resolved. Sometimes you can find yourself kicking the dog when you’re not mad at the dog at all; it’s something else, and you can’t get to the bottom of it.
So it wells up inside you and comes out elsewhere. Thank God for patient, loving spouses and friends who absorb that. But don’t stay there; let it go. Then lastly, bad time management. Bad time management leads to a lot of negativity.
If you have too much time on your hands, you’re just a screen and a mouse away from becoming an internet troll—going around, searching for significance, leaving your «who cares» comments all over everything, just trying to get your voice heard. No one is blessed by that. You’re not helping anything.
If you have too much time on your hands, if you have too little time on your hands, and you’re late for this, late for that, and late for the other, you’re running all the time. This is more what I would battle, and you’re looking for places and people to bear the weight of the fact that you’ve taken on too much. You’re going to express your frustration in that context.
Choosing Better
It’s better to do a lot fewer things. I got a little submission this week for I don’t know, eight or nine speaking requests, here, there, and everywhere, all over North America. It was so fun to say, «No, no, no, no, no, no. I want to love my family. I want to lead our church. I don’t want to use my time poorly and let negativity.»
It’s one or the other: you have too much time, or you don’t have enough time. Either one of those can be a log on the negativity fire, and I don’t know how you feel about it, but it grieves me to think that God hears it. God hears it.
Gratitude Like Christmas Morning
Think back to the time when you were a kid. What was the time when you were most over-the-top thankful? I mean, you had a bright smile on your face, and you had the world by the tail—so happy and so thankful. When was that?
Alright, alright—Christmas morning! Christmas morning! Why? Because I had been given so much. How many of the presents under the tree did you buy, person who called out «Christmas morning»? None! Thank you for your honesty—zero, right? And all God’s people said, «Zero.»
He gave nothing; He got everything and He gave nothing. Does that remind you of anything? Does it remind you of the cross? That’s what Jesus did when He gave His life as a sacrifice for our sins so we could be forgiven. We gave nothing; we received everything.
All that He asks is what? Just a grateful heart—a positive, grateful, faithful, forward-looking demeanor in view of what it cost and all that I’ve received in Christ. A bunch of bratty kids—a bunch of bratty Christian kids. God forgive us.
Own Your Negativity
So, do what? God hears our negativity; therefore, own it. Own it! It’s a pattern of sinful thinking. Negativity is a pattern of sinful thinking that you get into, like the kid who had this ball one Christmas.
You were five or six, and you were so happy to have this ball, playing and bouncing it, enjoying it. Then all of a sudden, you lost the ball. Now, the way you think about that is going to be really important: «Stupid dime-store cheap slippery ball! Really? If my parents had given me ball-bouncing lessons, that wouldn’t have happened! I’m such a loser! I always drop balls!»
Those are all really bad roads to go down. Think about it: a pattern of thinking. Or, «I dropped the ball; no big deal. I’ll just ask my friend to get it for me.» Thank you! You’ve got to own it! You have to own it!
This is my way of thinking about things, and it’s sin, and God hears it. This negativity is sin.
God Hates Negativity
God hears our negativity and someone may say, «Tell it like it is!» But I’m afraid… I’m afraid to tell you the truth: God hates our negativity. He hates it. If you look at chapter 11, verse 1, it says, «The people complained in the hearing of the Lord about their misfortune. When the Lord heard it, » it says, «His anger was kindled.»
Do you see it there? The fire of the Lord burned among them. In the next chapter, very similar; in verse 9 it says, «In regard to all of this, the anger of the Lord was kindled against them.» So don’t miss this cause-and-effect formula.
Here’s the formula: my negativity plus God’s hearing equals God’s anger. How good are you at math? Are you pretty good at math? That’s pretty straightforward. That’s not some calculus thing I just gave you there; that’s some pretty basic math: my negativity plus God’s hearing equals God’s anger.
Grace and Ongoing Sin
Now an educated Christian—and we’ve got a lot of them at church this weekend—an educated Christian would say, «Pastor James, it just really surprises me that you don’t know that all of God’s anger for my sin was poured out upon Jesus on the cross and that God’s not angry with me. I’m saved, I’m forgiven, and I am loved!» Pastor James, you need to get out of the Old Testament!
That is true! All of God’s anger for our sin was poured out upon Jesus! That is absolutely true! If you have turned from your sin and embraced Jesus Christ by faith, you are saved, you are forgiven, you are loved, and God is not angry with your negativity!
If you are saved, would you just turn with me to one passage in the New Testament that might cause you to think about this a bit differently? Hebrews chapter 10. I preached a message on this back around 2007 or 2008 when we went through the book of Hebrews.
Hebrews 10:26—I kind of want you to turn there, so I’m going to wait for a second so you can get there; make the lovely sound of the pages in your Bible turning. Alright, got it? «If we go on sinning deliberately… I’m forgiven; I can be as negative as I want; I’m forgiven.
If we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sin but a fearful expectation of judgment and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. Anyone who set aside the Law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses.
How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God and profaned the blood of the covenant and outraged the Spirit of grace?»
The Destructiveness of Negativity
The Spirit of grace is God giving you forgiveness because of what Jesus Christ did. You can debate with me about whether God is or isn’t angry, but I can tell you this for a fact: if you don’t think humbling yourself under the Word of God and living to please the God who saved you is your primary mission, you’re not saved.
Okay? So you can’t get out of this with the cross. Say what you want to say about it; God has very strong feelings about it, and saved people care about what God says about what He hears. Maybe part of what God hates is how destructive it is to us.
The time and energy that we waste is staggering, and that’s what negativity does. It just takes an awesome thing that God is doing and just wrenches it out of the heart of faith. I’m glad that that isn’t true, and I’m glad that you’re not like that.
I praise God that you’re not like that! I’m thankful to be preaching a message on this when I’m not trying to correct anything about anyone except myself. That’s the truth; that’s what’s actually true, and I want you to take the same mindset: this isn’t a message for your sister. «I’m going to get this to my sister.»
I think that would be an error. I think it’d be better if you just took it to heart yourself; that’s what I’m trying to do.
God Judges Negativity
So then, God hears our negativity; God hates our negativity; God judges our negativity. That’s the last thing: God judges our negativity. He hears it; we need to own it. He hates it; we need to stop it. He judges it; it’s pretty hard to miss that in the text.
Let me just show both of these to you. In chapter 11, verse 1, His anger was kindled, and the fire of the Lord burned among them and consumed some outlying parts of the camp. In chapter 12, verse 10, when the cloud removed from over the tent, behold, Miriam was leprous like snow.
Aaron turned toward Miriam, and behold, she was leprous. So God judged it; God brought consequences. To choose to sin—what? God brought consequences to bear upon them so that we could be in the street?
You’re like, «Man, this happened a long time ago!» First Corinthians 10 says that the things that happened to them happened as examples to us, upon whom the ends of the age have come. That’s there for us now; for us now. That’s why that’s there!
God hears it, He hates it, and He judges it! He really does!
Repentance and Response
What should we do? Well, He hears it; we should own it! I’m kind of like that sometimes. God hates it; we should stop it. God judges it; we should repent of it. Notice that in both texts.
In chapter 11, verse 2, the people cried out to Moses, so Moses prayed to the Lord, and the fire died down. In chapter 12, it says, «And Aaron said to Moses, 'Oh my Lord, do not punish us because we have done foolishly and have sinned.'»
See, there it is: it’s sin! «Let her not be as one dead whose flesh is half eaten away.» Moses cried out to the Lord. Now, here’s what I want to do in the time that’s left.
I’d like to just invite you to begin to think about the front of the church like a place of worship and surrender, and I just want to encourage you. I’m not going to oppress you harder than I have already, but if you have some things that you’d like to repent of, I’m certainly not standing in judgment of you.
I think I’ve been pretty open about where this series has convicted me. I don’t think I’ve hid that from you, and I’ve done some repenting for sure this week. I want to encourage you, as God’s working on us, to allow Him to work on you too.
If you have something specific that you really want to repent of, to lay before the Lord, come right now and just kneel here at the front. I’m going to pray over all of us on all of our campuses in just a moment, but I want you just to come right now.
We can all stand, and you could just come and kneel here at the front and say, «I really do need to get my legs moving and create a memory of earnest confession and contriteness before the Lord.»
Closing Prayer
Let’s all pray. Father, we come before You now, we come boldly. You say in Your Word that we should come boldly to the throne of grace to find help. Here we are; this is the throne of grace.
Thank You that Your throne is a throne of grace. You could have called it a throne of holiness, for holy You are, and we would be afraid to approach. You could have called it a throne of judgment, and apart from Christ, that is all that would be in our future.
How is it possible that the God of the universe calls this place of prayer a throne of grace? Thank You, God, for letting us know that Your disposition is open arms. Thank You, God, that Your heart for us is not to condemn us, not to judge us, but that because You have showered Your love upon us in Jesus Christ, Your heart is to forgive us and to change us.
We want that, God. We came forward because we’re just kind of at a time in our lives right now where we just don’t want to be stuck. We don’t want another trip around Mount Sinai; we don’t want another year in the wilderness.
God, we have to—it’s urgent now! We have to know that we’re right with You. Where there are patterns of thinking, God, of fear and anxiety, when You say, «Fear not, for I have called you by name, and you are mine. When you walk through the waters, I will be with you, and they will not overwhelm you, » God, we have been living, some of us, like that.
We pray instead that you would replace our doubt and fear with faith and confidence. «I would have despaired unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.»
Because the name of the Lord is a strong tower, and the righteous that run into it are safe; because we can look to the hills from whence comes our help; because God is a refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble, we lay before You our needs.
When we choose to be still in this moment and to know that You are God.