How To Build Your Emotional Health - Chris Hodges

i want to share a message with you that's come out of this season uh it's a message that i'm actually dealing with personally still um and i want to speak to your soul this soul part of who you are you know the bible says may your whole body soul and spirit be kept blameless until the coming of the lord for he who promise is faithful and he will do it so we talk a lot about our bodies there's a lot of talk out there about our bodies we're all trying to avoid this dreaded disease where you know we go to the doctors we take good care of our bodies and of course we just spend time in worship reading the word i mean your spirit man is your spirit man it's the part of you made in the image of god it's perfect but i think this year has needed a lot of soul care amen i'm talking about just is your soul okay and i really want to just ask that question you know how's your soul your emotions what's going on the inside and i want to give you a formula that is not only biblical but it's also been proven by psychologists to work so i only know this because i just finished a two-year writing project on the subject of depression and i've just turned in the manuscript just a couple of weeks ago we're in the editing process it's not going to come out to the spring of next year but it's definitely the the most extensive writing project i've ever done and i've learned a lot about just what people are going through i think it's the number one health issue in the world right now is depression and there's a lot of people facing it dealing with it and i teach out of the the prophet elijah how he um he how he had this great victory in one chapter and ready to commit suicide in the next and he ends up in a cave the name of the book is called out of the cave and lord willing and the creek don't rise we're going to help a lot of people get out of that cave amen everybody and get free from depression in jesus name but i did a lot of study in fact i did a lot of interviews with psychologists and just people because i had to understand i knew the spiritual part i'm a pastor not a doctor and but but i wanted to learn i wanted to grow in this area of soul care and i just want to share with you just a snippet of it and i think especially in this year boy i had in 2020 been a year y'all and um in fact i brought a picture for you in the words of of julia roberts you want to show them that y'all have that by picture yeah 2020 has been hard on all of us y'all amen everybody so sorry y'all excuse me i have a sense of humor i'm so sorry i'm from louisiana you know what that means y'all we you might not learn a thing but we're gonna have a good time all right so i'm just letting you know okay uh but it's been tough it's been tough on me i actually consider myself to be a fairly uh emotionally stable person um i don't get rattled easily and 2020 has blindsided me i had um in fact i was in in israel on march 14th uh i was on a i was on a trip with john maxwell helping him with a donor trip he was doing for a ministry that he's a part of and we were in israel when kind of all this thing was breaking down we got home on that saturday the 14th and that was the day on that 14th we were still having church on the 15th yeah we didn't have church on the 15th but uh that but on the 14th i thought we still were and i remember saying well i'll give them this sunday but i'm not giving them easter how many y'all know we gave them a lot more than easter right i mean and and and then there were just many more things stacked on that sense that i've had a lot of personal issues this year with my family i had my precious mom uh my dad's in heaven my mom we ended up having to put her in memory care this year i had my 19-year assistant um just kind of surprised me with a new new plans they wanted to do something different a lot of a lot of things that honestly challenged my emotions and i know you have your list as well none of mine are any worse than yours i promise you that i know that but i want to help you and if you'll just lean in just for a few minutes i want to give you a formula of how you can stay healthy i want to give you this one verse for actually two verses in one place in matthew chapter seven if you have your bibles you can open that does anybody even carry a bible to church anymore your iphone your ipad if you don't have any of that use your eyelids on the screen okay everybody therefore jesus said everyone who hears these words of mine watch this and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house i want you to file that thought they he built his the wise man what he what they did really well is they built their house i'm talking about emotions i want you to think about what does it take to build a solid emotional house he built his house on the rock now listen to me the rains came and i hate to tell y'all we've got more rain coming and even beyond this year my god pastor can't you be more more positive i'm positive the rain's coming all right the rains are coming the streams are going to rise and the wind's going to blow but the person who built correctly come on everybody did not fall that's what we're trying to get to because it had its foundation on a rock i want you to think about building you don't have to be a construction expert to know what the process is so when this building was built when your house was built they pretty much followed the same formula that they lay a slab a foundation they put up some kind of structure framing structure and then you decorate it make it beautiful so there's always there's always some something that's built on there's some kind of steel structure and then there's chairs and paint and pictures and flowers and furniture you decorate it i want you to follow that process i'm going to give you these three steps of how to build an emotional house and again this is in the word of god and clinical psychology is proving this i always like it when science figures out what god always knew amen everybody and basically they say the foundation if you're taking notes these are really will help you but the foundation of all emotions is your relationships and your connectedness they say and i say they the bible and psychology says that the foundation of all of your emotions come from how solid your relationships are and then your connectedness in those relationships now this is huge because one of the things that this season did to us and and we had no choice but it disconnected us i'll never forget the first day we heard the phrase social distancing the first time i heard it i hated it and i didn't hate it because i didn't think we needed a quarantine i did think so and we needed to but we needed we didn't need to socially distance we needed to physically distance and a lot of people have corrected that in fact i i made my appeal to the leaders who were communicating to our state and our local officials even all the way to our national and i said please consider using a different phrase because we needed more so the more physically disconnected you are the more socially connected you actually need to be because listen to me isolation is the killer and there's a lot of you you're around a lot of people but you're still lonely you know what you don't you don't have to be alone to be lonely loneliness is a condition of your soul that'll tear you apart and it is the foundation of everything else we're getting ready to give you to build a solid emotional house it starts right here with your relationships everything's relational in fact i think it's the most important decision you'll ever make as your are your relationships when you hear pastor greg and we've been doing this together for more than 20 years pastor dino my father-in-law why because god builds his kingdom through relational connections he's a relational god he is the god of abraham isaac and jacob he even talks in family he's a god who is relational can i hear a good amen everybody and it's very important for us in fact let me give it to you this way the first problem in the bible wasn't even sin it was solitude the first thing that god ever said wasn't good wasn't when they sinned that happened in chapter three it was in chapter two that god says i don't think it's good for you adam to be by yourself and he made for him a suitable relation relational partner i would say the same is true for you that your biggest problem is not sin it's solitude and that you should consider how well connected am i how solid are my relationships because that is the foundation that your life is built on genesis 2 18 lord god said it's not good it's not good for the man to be alone ecclesiastes chapter 4 verse 8 says there was a man all alone he had neither son nor brother yet there was no into his toil and his eyes were not content with his wealth in other words no matter how hard they tried you're never going to be satisfied until your relationships make sense which let me just say to you uh i don't know how many of you are here been here a long time maybe you're you're new maybe i don't know i don't know where you are spiritually but can i tell you some good news our god is not a religion he's a relational god actually this is this is a bedrock message for me personally because i was raised in church my dad was organized in a baptist church and i was literally in church the sunday after i was born and i'm 57 i've never missed a sunday in church in my life to date like ever i've never not been in church now i didn't enjoy most of it earlier i was like i you know when they some people say i was glad when they said it to me i was mad when they said unto me you know what i'm saying i was i was glad when it was over i did not i just didn't want to go to hell can i get an amen everybody like i all right that's that was my story but i'll never forget the day that i realized that this isn't a religion and i fell in love with god in fact i led myself to the lord after after visiting a church like seacoast i'd never seen people in love with god before i never see anybody enjoy the singing i and it convicted me and so i went back home by the way when they did like an altar response i didn't respond because i was afraid of what they were going to do to me i had i had been in church long enough to know that they going to take you in a room and i ain't going to no room you know that's not going to happen so so i went back home and led myself to the lord in my bedroom that night and here's how i did it i just went through the bible trying to find out how a person really goes to heaven because i didn't know if my church was right or if this church was right so i decided not to believe either one of them and just find it for myself and i decided to just go to read the red letters of the bible you know there's some red letter editions where you can just go straight to the words of jesus so i just read the red and if you read the red you can only you're only about two or three pages in where jesus says no not everyone who says lord lord is going to go to heaven and that was the problem because that was my plan that's what they told me to say was lord all right and then jesus said no it's not going to work that way but only he who does the will of my father who is in heaven many on that day will prophesy cast out devils and do miracles in my name and i will take tell them away from me you're an evildoer because i never knew you that he wasn't looking for religion he was looking for a relationship i had no idea and i dropped to my knees right there in my bedroom i said well if that's what you want i give you my life like i want to be in relationship and i just would encourage some of you like i don't know what your your religion looks like or your christianity looks like but he only has really one desire and that is it to be in a real relationship with you just to love you and to be loved by you and that's what i've loved i enjoyed our worship time together too pastor greg in fact i didn't want it to end it was so refreshing just to worship i mean y'all y'all's worship is good y'all do know that right when y'all get to heaven y'all gonna wanna y'all get to heaven you're gonna want to come back to charleston on the weekends i mean it's just that was incredible but i would encourage you to connect with god and not only connect with god but also connect with god's people like we need each other and i would encourage you put aside your differences whatev whatever they are and just love people and check on people and text someone and say man how are you doing it's so important that's the bed right the foundation of your emotions are your relationships and your connectedness let's just say that foundation is built very very well listen let's let's just say we understand that what is the framing of your emotional house and again psychology and scripture teaches us the exact same thing that what shapes what your emotions look like now follow this because the frame is what it's going to look like like when they put up the steel it went to a certain height of this auditorium to make it look like what it looks like so what makes your emotions look like what it's supposed to look like what is what is the structure you ready for it purpose purpose and routines purpose and routines like the most important part of your emotions is that i know why i breathe air i know what my life is all about i i have i have a sense that god has called me and my life's important and i'm living on purpose and my life matters and then it brings order to my days and again i would submit to you that's one of the things that coveted stripped from us because now we've even lost our routines we've lost our schedules i was doing zoom calls with a sport coat on and gym shorts on underneath because they couldn't see that part like i wasn't even getting up and doing my routine anymore i was i'd gotten out of it in fact i had a point about two months into quarantine and kind of end of may and i was in a bad place just because i'd given up some of the structure that my life had and i'm telling you the same is true for you i'm thank god we're back in church can i get a good amen everybody and for those of you that are watching online we get it but they ain't nothing like being in the room so we hope you you're well and you make the right decision but if you ever feel well enough to come back we're inviting you back because there's nothing like being in the room and getting that structure look i go to church on a sunday i go to first wednesday i i get up in the morning i read my bible and then i i'm on the i'm on the team here somewhere why because my life matters that purpose for my life and it makes sense now when the word bible says where there is no vision proverbs 29 where there is no vision people perish by the way that's not talking about a physical death he's talking about an emotional one a purpose-filled one and there's a lot of people dying right now i'm not even talking about physically death i'm just talking about that their dreams have died their their their life has died they feel a sense of death on the inside one translation says uh that same verse says where there is no vision you cast off restraint in other words you change how you live because you don't know why you're here okay look in my eyes you're called you're as called as pastor greg is like you have a call on your life you're supposed to do something with your life that matters you're supposed to make an eternal difference there's breath in your lungs not to survive but to live a significant life and you just need to know that and praise god you're in a church that'll help you find that and get you connected to your own spiritual gifts and your purpose so that you can live an intentional life and watch your emotional health soar one verse says in psalm 126 i love this verse it says when the lord restored the fortunes to zion we were like those who dreamed our mouths were filled with laughter are tongues with songs of joy do you know in the hebrew the word health and dreams are almost the exact same word it's so much so that when they translate the old testament they sometimes don't even know what word to put there because they mean the same thing that the best way for you to get healthy is to dream is to know why you're alive i actually had a year ago about this time i had rotator cuff surgery it was my second one on the other show i had this one four years ago and then i had this one and first one went really well i just bounced right back when i had this one i didn't bounce back and and i was in so much pain every night um i just slept on the couch down in the basement in the in a in but not laying in a reclined position because i couldn't lay down the pain was so great to lay down and i'm not honest i don't like taking um pain meds they they do a lot of i have a lot of bad side effects to that so i went on any pain meds and i was in excruciating pain with this shoulder and i got to a place of it just i want you to know just wasn't good i was i was down there you know thinking about my wife who was laying in that bed upstairs by herself she'd tell me good night no nothing see you later you know and just i don't know i just got in a bad place and i didn't even tell anybody which i honestly is not good i i broke really the first rule of that of your emotions is i kind of got alone in my thoughts i wasn't relationally connected and i didn't let anybody know and it was about this time and last year we were doing a series where we had pre-recorded everything so i'm preaching on a sunday but i'm sitting right there on the couch every and then day after day after day after day after week nine weeks on that couch and now y'all i'm telling you i was in a dark place and one day the lord i woke up and i just decided to write down some vision and i started dreaming about buildings we would build and missionaries we would send and church planters we would train and then i started calling all of our lead team and then one by one i said i need you all to come to the house and just talk to me tell me what you're dreaming about and you guys i i bounced back like in a matter of hours just when i allowed my spirit to connect to my life's purpose again but i was ready to go bear hunting with a switch come on somebody right i mean all sudden there was just life inside of me and i'm gonna tell you there's some of you you've been down you've been smiling but nobody knows how a dark place you're in right now and i'm telling you the first step is for you to be connected relationally you can only be as healthy as your relationships first to god then to god's people am i helping anybody here then are y'all listen to me and then you better get to dreaming again i always say either find your calling or remind yourself of your calling like if you if you don't know what your calling is you need to find it and we'll help you or if you know what it is you need to remind yourself of that calling i go back to the place god told me to go to birmingham alabama i was there to see a baseball game to watch the lsu tigers play baseball and standing on a hill that overlooks a six-lane highway i heard the spirit of god say you're going to pastor some of the people down in that traffic jam and whenever i feel depressed or sad i go back to that hill and remind myself of what god called me to do and then the key to the routine is what i call mastering your mornings you gotta master your mornings you start your day off saying this is why i'm alive and i make a personal declaration that i'm called not to just breathe air i'm here to make a difference in this world and i set some tasks every morning and remind myself of why i'm alive i'm trying to help you build an emotionally solid house because i hate to tell you there's more rain streams and wind coming our way but how do you beautify our emotions let me close with this so we built it on the foundation of relationships and connectedness we framed it by our purpose and our routines but what makes our emotions beautiful like what are the pictures on the wall the paint on the what's what's the furniture of our emotional house here's what it is it's it's it's it's that we have trust and self-control trust and self-control the the the beautifying of emotions is that i'm going to first trust let me read you this verse you probably know this first in proverbs trust in the lord always with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding so that's trust and then look at look where it changes gears now in all your ways submit to him and he'll make your pass straight here the bible says look you just got to trust and then you also have to give some attention to your ways so which one is it it's both trust is giving up control of what you cannot control there's been so much in this year that it's been hard for me y'all know why can i make a confession because my name is chris hodges and i'm a control freak can i get an amen everybody right it's like this is there's been so much of this year that you can't do anything about it it's about to drive me crazy because i fix stuff there's a problem i'll figure out a way we're going to get around this thing and 2020 hadn't let us do that and so what do we do we got to trust we give up control of what we cannot control in fact this is so not like me if there's a psalmist in the house they can go ahead and come on play behind me and make the rest of this message sound really spiritual come on all right there's a prayer that i that you probably have heard of that i have been praying every day this year and it just has served my emotions well and it's just this it's a it's the serenity prayer and i'm going to read it to you i want to read you the extended version of it i like the extended version of it goes like this listen carefully god grant me this serenity serenity to accept the things i cannot change the courage to change the things i can and the wisdom to know the difference it usually stops right there now listen to the rest of it living one day at a time enjoying one moment at a time accepting hardship as a pathway to peace taking as jesus did this sinful world as it is not as i would have it i'm gonna read that one again taking this sinful world as it is not as i would have it trusting that you will make all things right if i surrender to your will and i love the way it ends listen to this so that i might be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy in the next and it just like it puts me in a place like earth doesn't owe me anything you ready for this god doesn't owe me anything i think sometimes we live with this well god why don't you i thought you were supposed to he doesn't owe me anything he's already paid for all my sins and made a home for heaven for me in heaven and in this world i will have tribulation and he's overcome this world because he's given me a place in heaven come on somebody and when you when you have that right perspective it's just called trust but then it's not just trust it's also self-control in all your ways acknowledge him in your ways so i can't control dc and i can't control a virus and i can't control the economy and i can't control my boss and i can't control my neighbor's dog but i control me in all my ways i keep my attitude my time use how i'm gonna live self-control is taking control of what i can control that you know what lord can't fix that but i can fix this and i've just decided i've just decided i'm not tucking my tail anymore in 2020. somebody says it has been a bad year and i my patent answer right now is no we still have two more months to go to change what it looks like well lord where's all the people like what where's the church no the church is always done best in a crisis the bible was written for crisis the gospel expands they don't when when things are good they don't go to the church house they go to the lake house i just it takes a different attitude i'm trying to help you here today church you want to be you want your emotions intact you want solid relationships purpose trust and self-control and father i pray for this incredible congregation god we've all had a year that has been a year and lord only you know the condition of their soul right now and how they feel on the inside only you know god how solid that house is emotionally and god i speak life over every member of seacoast every person watching online i speak directly to the person who's alone right now that god you would do a work in our emotions god i speak to their relationships and their connectedness that you would solidify them lord i pray god in the mighty name jesus that they would they'd be reminded of their purpose and get connected to a daily routine that that that that that admits god that we're here on this planet for a purpose and god we beautify our houses with trust and self-control and i speak health just open your hands right there where you are you don't have to lift them just open them before the lord and just god just bring healing where there's been hurt relief where there has been just despair god that you would bring fresh energy where there's been just this draining of our emotions lord and bring health bring it god so that we can be the light of the world and a blessing to the world around us and we give you all the glory in jesus name and god's people said it good god bless you church i love you

Channel: Seacoast Church

Views: 3,660

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: how to build your emotional health, chris hodges, formula for emotional health, soul care, pastor chris hodges, emotional health spirituality, emotional health and wellbeing, emotional health videos, emotional health sermon, emotionally healthy spirituality, depression and spirituality, overcoming depression christian, overcoming depression sermon

Id: dWqwolFdx4I

Length: 27min 2sec (1622 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020