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Hey everyone, this is Pastor Rick's Daily Hope. And we are so glad that you're here today. You know, you can lose your money, your health, and even the people you love. But you can never lose God's love for you. Stay tuned today as Rick continues his new series called the Key to Hope. So now here's Rick with part one of a message called what's holding youg Back?

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I love New Year's because New Year's are a time for new beginnings and fresh starts. And obviously God figured out that human beings need a lot of fresh starts and new beginnings. Cause he gives us so many of them. We get one every 365 days and then we actually get one every about 30 days with a new month. Then we get a new beginning every week, every seven days, and then we even get a new beginning every 24 hours. Now why does God break up life into little bite sized pieces so we can have new beginnings? Well, because we blow it. That's why. We blow it a lot. And we need fresh beginnings. Now the Bible often compares life to a marathon race. Now this is not a race that you're in a hurry to get through. It's not to see who can get to the fastest and first at the finish line. It's an endurance race to see who simply finishes. Do you finish the race of life faithfully? And as we've said many times, life is preparation for eternity. And God is watching. Now, serious runners always strip down when they're running a race. They don't carry a lot of baggage. They don't wear a lot of extra clothes. In fact, they wear as little as possible. I was in New York City recently and in the middle of winter, in the middle of cold, there are these people out in just a pair of jogging shorts and a T shirt on, running because they don't want anything to slow them down or hold them back. And God says, that's the way I want you to run the race of life. With as few distractions as possible, with as few limitations, as few hesitations, as few hindrances as possible. The Bible says, I want you to lay aside the things that hold you back. Notice this verse in Hebrews, chapter 12, verse 1. Let's read it aloud together. We must get rid of everything that slows us down, especially the sin that won't let go. And we must be determined to run the race that is ahead of us. He says, get rid of the things that slow us down. Well, today I want us to look at the three most common things that slow us down. Things we need to let go of. Things the Bible says you need to release as you begin the new year. Number one. The Bible says you must first let go of your worries. Of your worries. Because worry is emotional garbage that hinders your progress to spiritual maturity. It slows you down. The more you worry, the more it slows you down. Proverbs 12:25 says, Worry weighs a person down. Now you know this feeling. Have you ever felt so worried you felt like you weighed more? You know, you get heavy. You just go, oh, man, I got so much to do. And there's so many things I'm stressed out about. And you don't feel light when you feel worried. You feel heavy, you feel pressed down, you feel depressed. Worry weighs a person down. And so God says, I don't want you walking around like that in life. I don't want you loaded down with burdens and cares and fears and anxieties and worries. I want you to release those things. Look at the next verse. Psalm 46, 10. The Bible says, let go. Circle that. Let go of your concerns. Then you'll know that I am God and I rule the earth. Now, what's the correlation between letting go of your worries and knowing that God is God? Well, here's the correlation. Worry is always playing God. That's what it is. Anytime you're worrying, you're playing God. You're acting as if God isn't in control. That. That God doesn't care about you and that God won't care about you. You're saying, I better take matters into my own hands, so I better worry about it. I better be uptight about it. I better be stressed out and anxious about it. God says you're playing God. He says, let go of your worries. Let go of your concerns. Relax and just let me be God. I'll take care of the things in your life. Now. Why is it so important to let go of your worries? You know all those things you worried about last year that didn't happen? You need to stop worrying about them now. You know why you need to let them go? Because you got some new ones coming up this year. You got a whole bunch, whole new crop of new worries to hold onto. So don't dare carry worries from last year into this year. You're gonna get new ones. And there are three reasons you need to let your worries go. Look at these verses. First, worry exhausts your energy. David said in Psalm 55, I'm worn out by my worries. Ever felt like that? See a lot More people are worn out by worry than they are by work, because a lot more people worry than work. Worry actually drains energy out of you that you need for work. It's stewing without doing. And worry never helps you anything. It just takes your energy. It saps your strength. It exhausts you. Second, worry not only exhausts your energy, it exaggerates the problem. The Bible says in Psalm 25, my awful worries keep growing. Now, you've seen this happen. You start worrying about something, and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger in your mind. Somebody says an unkind or critical word to you, pretty soon you start worrying about it and thinking about it, it gets bigger. Pretty soon the whole world's against you. And worry is an irrational, illogical form of thought. What it does is it magnifies. It exaggerates the problem. It makes your problems bigger, not smaller. So don't worry. Cause worry doesn't work. It doesn't solve problems. It just makes them bigger. It causes them to grow. And then the third reason you oughta not worry not only exhausts your energy and exaggerates the problem, it wastes your time. Jesus said in Matthew 6, Will your worries add a single moment to your life? And of course, the answer is no. Worry has never solved any problem in the history of the human race. And so it's just a worthless waste of energy and thought and emotion. So what does the Bible say? Let go of your worries. Why? Three reasons. It's unhelpful, it's unreasonable, and it's unhelpful. It doesn't work. So what I want you to do right now is I want to think of one of the things you worried about, and I want you to write it down on your outline right now. Okay? This is gonna be fun. Go ahead, write it down. Try to think of something that you worried about that you should not worry about. Go ahead and write it down. If you can't think of what worries you, ask your husband or wife. They will tell you right away. They often know better than you do what you worry about. And so it may be your health, it may be a job, it may be finances, it may be getting married, it may be your stock prices. You know, it could be all kinds of. Write down something that you tend to worry about. Now, the reason why I'm asking you to do this, and some of you are going, I'm not doing that. Well, let me tell you why you need to do it. Because you can't release it until you know what it is, until you understand it, until you identify it. You can't release it until you recognize it. That's a principle of life. One of the reasons why you're stressed out a lot is you just have this vague feeling of something's wrong, but you don't know what it is. And if you carry this vague sense of anxiety, general anxiety, it's not specific, it's harder to deal with. It's very easy to deal with a specific worry. For instance, that mouse beneath your chair right there. See something very specific, you could deal with it. But something that's general, you don't know how to deal with. So you write it down and you say, it would be helpful for you to go home today and say, what are the things I tend to worry about? And just make a list of them and then just kind of cross them off and say, I'm not gonna worry about those. I'm gonna let it go. Now. Some of you had a hard time writing that down because of a fact of life. We rarely recognize all the emotional baggage we're carrying. We almost never see it in ourselves. We don't see other people have to see it in us. And so what we do is we lug around this big garbage bag of worries and fears and memories and bad feelings and all kinds of things from a relationship to the past, and we just keep carrying them along through life. God says, I want you to let it go. Let that garbage go. One time I did a wedding for a couple years ago when I used to do weddings. And they. About two or three months after they were married, they were having serious marriage problems. So I invited them over for dinner. And the woman said, you know, she said, as I was that beautiful bride walking down that aisle in that white gown, I had no idea that behind me, I. I was dragging along a garbage bag full of emotional garbage unresolved from previous relationships. And I was carrying that into my marriage. And that's what's causing us problems. You see a lot of the problems you have with your friends, you have with your parents, you have with your husband or your wife are really caused by previous relationships that you never resolved, you never let go, you never dealt with. And you're carrying it into this relationship and it's causing problems. God says, let it go. I want you to drop the garbage, the emotional garbage, the worries and the feelings and the memories and all that other stuff. We don't realize how much it slows us down. It almost always takes somebody else to point out the junk we're carrying through life. We almost never see it in ourselves. We don't realize it. We don't see the madness, the craziness, the way we hold on to hurts and habits and hangups and guilt and grief and grudges and remorse and resentment and all these things. We hold onto them and we carry them along through life. And it takes somebody else. The second truth is that it usually, almost always takes a confrontation with somebody else who loves you enough to say to you, this is madness. What are you doing? Let it go. Let it go. Because we don't see it in ourselves. This is why we need community. This is why we need each other. This is why you need a few. You don't need a lot. One or two really intimate, godly Christian friends. Do you have anybody in your life who loves you enough to. To tell you the truth. Do you have anybody in your life who loves you enough to get in your face and say, you need to let it go? You're blowing it. You need to let it go? This is crazy. If you don't have anybody like that, I pity you. It's why we talk about the importance of small groups all the time. You need somebody in your life who loves you enough to see what you don't see and. And tell you about it so you can let it go. Because for you, you've carried that garbage from relationships in your life so long, you don't know it's even there. It feels like your own weight, and it's not. You need to let it go. What does God want you to do? Look at the next verse. Psalm 55. Read it with me. Give your worries to the Lord, and he will take care of you. He says, let it go. Give it to me. I'll take care of them. Now. How do you do that? How do you let go of your worries? There's only one way in the entire universe to do this. It is prayer. Prayer. You might write that down. It's the only way you're ever gonna get rid of worry. You don't get rid of worry through therapy, through fads, through diets, through pills, through seminars, through conferences. You get rid of worry one way by praying about it. If you prayed more, you'd worry less. You'd have a lot less to worry about, too. The alternatives in your life are prayer or worry. You're gonna do one or the other through life. And the more you worry, the less you're gonna pray. And the more you pray, the less you're gonna worry. Prayer is the way you release your worries. Look at this verse. Philippians 4, 6, 7. It's a wonderful verse and I love it. In the message paraphrase, let's read it aloud together. Instead of worrying, pray. Let your petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns. Before you know it, a sense of God's wholeness will come and settle you down. It's wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life. We're gonna do this right now before we waste any more time in this new year, we wanna stop and let go of our worries. And so Pastor Tom's gonna come and lead us in a prayer of releasing the things that make us anxious.