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Part 4 of 7
The Danger of Unmanaged Pain
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I want to talk about a group called Bell Biv DeVoe. They sang about the danger of wanting someone who feels good to you but is no good for you. They warned us: some people are poison. While Bell Biv DeVoe warns us about people that can poison us, the Bible tells us about how pain can poison us.
Some of us are paranoid about people when we need to be intentional with how we handle pain. Because when pain is mismanaged and not handled correctly, pain can then morph into poison. This poison comes in the form of a false personality—one where you become hypersensitive, easily offended, passive-aggressive, people-pleasing. God did not form you like that. Pain did.
Hebrews 12:15 warns us:
Watch out that no root of unbelief rises up among you. For whenever it springs up, many are corrupted by its poison.
Bitterness doesn't exist without unforgiveness. Someone truthfully said that unforgiveness is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die. Let me say that again: unforgiveness is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die.
Unforgiveness is an infection. Being cut will hurt, but being infected can kill you. When you get a cut, a good mother or grandmother would keep peroxide in a brown bottle. The peroxide wasn't for the cut because the cut already happened. The peroxide was to prevent infection. Forgiveness is a prophetic prevention to keep you from allowing pain to morph into poison.
I wonder if you have people in this room today looking at your past and saying, "I've been through some pain. I had people I love that left me. I had people I trusted betray me. I want to be sure that in 2024 I don't allow that pain to become poison because if the enemy can't stop you, he will poison you to make you stop yourself."
I'm not trying to fight with the enemy in this season. I'm going to war with me, myself, and I. I'm not blaming my ex. I'm not blaming my co-workers. This is my responsibility. You may not be responsible for the hurt, but you are responsible for your healing. Whoever hurt you is not coming back to heal you. Have you ever seen somebody that hurt you come back and say, "Hey, I know I hurt you. Can I heal you?" No. You may not be responsible for the hurt, but you are responsible for your healing.
Proverbs 4:23 says:
Above all else, guard your heart, for it determines the course of your life.
Guard your heart above your house, above your money, above your relationships—above all of that. But watch this: God is not instructing us to put up a wall but to use a gate. A wall will keep everybody out, including God. But a gate will allow the right people in and the wrong people out. For some of you, maybe we got hurt in the past and instead of putting up a gate, we put up walls.
When you've been offended and hurt for so long that offense becomes a home—that's an invisible prison that you take with you everywhere you go. Yes, you may have a new relationship, but you're still in that fence. Yes, you're at the altar saying "I do," but you're saying it behind the fence. Yes, you got saved and you joined Rock City, but you're saved and offended behind the fence. Yes, you may have all this gift and you're successful at work, but you're showing up every day behind the fence.
Now people love what you do, but they can't connect with who you are because you're keeping everyone at a distance. It's poison.
We often focus on our pain, but I'm telling you your pain was never about your past. Your pain was always about your future. Throughout scripture, you'll see how the enemy would attack firstborn infant babies. Because if I can attack you in its infancy, I won't have to deal with it once it matures. What have you been attacked in at infant stages? That's a prophetic sign of what God wants to use once it matures. The devil knows if he doesn't stop you now, he won't be able to stop you later.
We see this in the life of Jonah. Jonah shows us that sometimes we may leave a season, but the impact of that season may not leave us. Jesus tells us: "Whoever doesn't receive you, shake the dust off your feet and keep it moving on to the next."
When you keep unforgiveness in your heart, you're choosing to intentionally be dusty over destiny. I don't need no dusty people in my circle. I don't need no dusty behavior in my heart. I am choosing destiny over dusty.
I dare you to give God praise right now that even though they rejected you in your past, God was protecting you for your future. Because man's rejection is God's protection. Praise God for everybody who didn't say yes. Praise God for the people who did walk out of your life. Praise God for the people who didn't see your true value. Shake the dust off.
Don't take old dirt into new seasons.
Jonah gets called from God and runs the wrong way. Now he's in a storm because he's going in the wrong direction. He pays to go the wrong way when he could have went the right way for free. How much has living wrong cost you? How much has picking the wrong person cost you?
The text says because he's going the wrong way, he goes down to Joppa. Any direction away from God is down. When you step outside of the will of God, you start lowering your standards. You start accepting stuff that you wouldn't accept if you were connected to the Father. You wouldn't have dated them if you were really tapped in.
He goes the wrong way and because he won't listen, God sends a storm, shaking up everything. He's asleep while everyone else is suffering. They cast lots—a superstitious way to determine decisions, like flipping a coin—and the lot falls on Jonah.
He looks at them and says, "Pick me up. Throw me into the sea. The storm is my fault. I'm the reason we're going through everything we're going through." Now, he's not crippled. He's not a baby. Why wouldn't he throw himself into the sea? Because even in him making the right decision, his poisonous heart is still holding on to codependency—depending on men or people to do what God has strengthened him to do in his own power. Because he never dealt with some stuff inside of him, he's putting people in the place that he should have God in.
They throw him into the sea and God arranges a great fish. While he's in the fish, he finally starts to pray. Have you ever been in something that made you pray? Have you ever gotten in something that shook you to your core to where you said, "God, if you get me out of this, I'll never do this again"?
We may say he should have prayed first, but why don't we celebrate the times that at least when we got it wrong, we still prayed? When we were wrong, God still answered our prayer in our wrong situation. The picture of Jonah and the fish is a picture of how God specializes in getting man out of what man got himself into.
There are some of you who can say, "I got myself in this because I was crazy. But God is big enough to get me out of this because he's God." Yes, you got yourself in it, but God is about to get you out of this. You don't know how, but he's going to get you out. You don't need the details, but you're coming out because you serve a God that can do exceedingly and abundantly above. He's the God of the exodus. Exodus means exit. If he's the God of the exits, you could never be trapped. You may look trapped, you may feel trapped, but if there's no way, he will make a way.
God commands the fish, and the fish vomited Jonah out. Nowhere in the text from Jonah being vomited out of the fish and going to preach to the people in Nineveh, did he have proper time to clean the vomit off of him. Even if you clean it off with water, you still have the stains and you still have the stench.
What if God is using Jonah covered in the residue of vomit to show us how to keep moving in a mess? For some of you, you've allowed the messy places in your life to make you stop moving. But Jonah is showing us: even though I might look messy, I'm going to keep moving because there's a miracle in the mess.
Have you ever had a season where you had to say, "I look like what I went through"? Could it be that that's the reason Nineveh listened? He couldn't go to Nineveh presenting himself as perfect because people admire your strengths but they connect with your imperfections. You cannot heal what you don't feel. This is why we call Jesus our kinsman redeemer—because he can relate to whatever area of our life that needs to be redeemed.
For some of you, you've been complaining about some of the stuff you had to go through. Might I suggest what you went through wasn't even about you. It was about who God wants to use. He wants to use you to help bring other people out who are in what he brought you out of.
I dare you to praise God right now that what you went through didn't kill you, but it built you. It made you stronger. When you look back over your life, you say, "God, I thank you that you brought me out of it. Now I'm going to go and pull some up." I dare you to pull your neighbor up and say, "I'm pulling you out of this mess. I'm pulling your family out. I'm pulling your money out. I'm pulling your mind out. I'm pulling your emotions out. I'm pulling your future out."
You're coming out if you're the only one that comes out. That wasn't God. That was you. Because whenever God brings a person out, it's because he wants to bring a people out.
Jonah goes throughout the city preaching, "Repent, or God is going to overturn the city in three days." He preaches this simple message and the entire nation including the king gets saved. Covered in a mess, he had his greatest breakthrough, because God will make your misery your ministry. Stop being ashamed of what God brought you out of because maybe that's the very thing God wants to use to change the world.
He says, "Repent or he's going to overturn it." But maybe you don't have a healthy understanding of repentance. For some of us, if we grew up Baptist, COIC, Pentecostal, it was hell, fire, and brimstone. We were taught an incomplete gospel of repentance.
Repentance is a gift. It's not just a change of behavior. It's a changing of the mindset. In the Greek, it's the word metanoia—a militaristic term. It means that soldiers are marching in one direction, and when the general says "metanoia" or "repent," they stop, turn a different direction, and start marching in a different direction.
When you say "I repent," it means what I'm repenting from I'm now thinking different about. And because I'm thinking different, I'm going to begin to behave different. Because if you change your behavior without changing your heart, your behavior will go right back to what you turned away from. That's not repentance.
Repentance is not about making apologies. It's about making adjustments. So the question becomes: am I repentant or am I remorseful? For some of us, we just got caught. He said, "No, repent." Oh, it's all coming down. They repent, God relents. That's grace. You should have been destroyed, but because you repented, he said, "I'm not going to destroy you. I'm going to deliver you."
We get to Jonah chapter 4, verse 1. Jonah sees God forgiving these people and the text says he became greatly upset and he became very angry. He just had one of the greatest revivals of all time. He preached, prophesied. The entire nation was saved. The king was saved. And he's still mad. He big mad. He wants to argue.
Why is Jonah mad? Could it be he's mad because God used him to help people that was hurting him? In other words, Jonah preached it, but he didn't mean it. You said, "I forgive you," but you didn't mean it. You said, "I'm letting it go," but as soon as they did something that triggered you, you brought it back.
They broke your heart, wasted your time, took you through hell and back. It took Jesus, the Holy Spirit, God the Father to get you out of what you were in. You forgave them and God blessed them with their own marriage, new job. They're posting couple goals and here you are trying to beat a bigger person and you say, "Congratulations." But did you mean it? You might say it with your mouth, but in your heart you might be saying, "I hope you struggle."
This is what's going on with Jonah. He preached, but he was still infected with poison. Prophesied, but was still infected with poison. This shows us that God cares more about your life than he does our gift. You can be successful, but God is showing us that the book of Jonah was never about Nineveh. It was about us.
He said, "Your gift says a lot about me. Your character says a lot about you." Here he is with this big success, shrinking the success down to the size of his soul. Because no matter what you give to people with a poison heart, it'll never be enough. Your generosity to poison-heart people will never make them grateful. It will never be enough.
At some point, you got to get a no in your spirit. Yes, you love them, but you need to learn how to tell them no. Because sometimes you don't know who's really for you until you see how they handle no. You've been telling them yes so much. You don't know that they don't love you. They're just leveraging you. They don't love you. They're just using you. But when you say no, they act like you never said yes.
You don't know what's in people until they don't get their way. Poison starts coming out that you didn't even know existed. This is the real issue: whenever you don't get your way, poison emerges. The problem isn't about external circumstances—it's about what happens inside your heart when things don't go according to your plans.
God wants you to ask Him to search and clean your heart—not just when things go your way, but even when you don't get your way. This is where true breakthrough happens. Like Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, you can say, "Nevertheless, not my will, but your will be done."
In the garden, Jesus crucified his flesh. This is why they couldn't kill Him on the cross—He had already killed Himself in the garden. You can't kill what's already dead. "Nevertheless, I die to me so I can live for you."
Jonah saved over 120,000 people. He preached to the enemy territory. He survived the fish, the storm, being thrown in the sea. But he couldn't forgive. And the question becomes: how many great things have you done for God, yet there's someone you're struggling to forgive? What are you struggling to let go of?
You might say, "You don't know what they did to me." But here's the truth: forgiveness is not about them. It's about you.
Even when Jesus was on the cross, in His greatest pain, He said, "Father, forgive them. They don't even know what they're doing." If He can forgive us daily, surely we can forgive people who simply hurt our feelings.
The text reveals that our destiny is not about arriving at a new place but arriving at a new point of view. Sometimes God wants you to see an old thing in a new way. He won't always take you off the job—He'll give you a new perspective. Sometimes He won't give you a new marriage; He'll help you see an old marriage in a new way.
To embrace this shift, you must understand three things about forgiveness.
Most of us only say "I forgive you" with our lips, but we don't forgive people with our lens. God doesn't just want you to say it—He wants you to see people through the lens of forgiveness. When you say "I forgive," you choose to see that person through forgiveness.
You no longer see them for what they did to you. Here's the shift: what they did to you didn't happen to you—it happened for you. It didn't feel good while it was working, but it's working for your good.
Forgiveness is the only way to stop the people who hurt you from continuing to hurt you. You may not be responsible for the pain, but you are responsible for the healing.
There are people you may forgive in this moment but think about what they did the moment you get to your car. You'll need to forgive them again. You might get triggered in a dream about something they didn't even do in real life. You'll wake up and forgive them again.
Why? Because forgiveness is a process.
Jesus taught this in Matthew 18:21. Peter asked, "Lord, how often should I forgive someone who sins against me? Seven times?" Jesus replied, "No, seventy times seven." That 490 in the Greek literally means perfect. He's saying: until you allow imperfections to be perfected by the blood of Jesus from the cross, you keep forgiving.
Consider what the blood of Jesus did for you on the cross as full repayment for what others did to you in your life. That's the measure by which you forgive.
Understand this clearly: forgiveness does not mean you're a doormat. Forgiveness does not mean trust. Forgiveness does not mean reconcile. Forgiveness does not mean forget. You need to remember so you don't repeat. Some people you forgive, you need to set a boundary with.
Forgiveness means to pardon. It's a criminal justice term—if you receive a pardon for your crime, you no longer have to do the time. You're released. Written off as bad debt.
You might think that only works when you forgive people. But you would be shouting if you realized that's exactly what God did for you. You're guilty of doing the crime, but you don't have to do the time because of Jesus.
The principles of God unlock the promises of God. Remember Joseph: his brothers heard his dream, threw him in a pit, sold him into slavery. From slavery, his master threw him in jail on a false accusation. Yet everywhere in every season of his life, he forgave. And the Bible says the favor of God was with him.
Why? Because the deeper the forgiveness, the greater the favor. You don't know what favor is being released over your life when you choose to forgive today.
You're hearing this word right now. So what will you do with it? Will you allow the poison of unforgiveness to stay in your heart, or will you choose forgiveness today?
If you know there are people you need to forgive, things you need to let go of, and you want to have a moment with God right now—don't be ashamed. Make that choice. Allow the Holy Spirit to come into your heart, give you the courage and capacity to forgive like Jesus forgave, and begin to release those who have hurt you. That's where your breakthrough begins.
