How to Have Peace in the Home

0:00Peace in the home before the holidays

I’m going to talk with you this morning on the topic of how to have peace in the home, how to have peace in the home. Now, I want to prepare you that I’m going to hyper-focus on the relational dynamics with family this morning, but you can take the steps and the principles that I’m going to teach you today and you can apply it to all kinds of stuff to help you have peace. This would probably be well served as a series, but right now, for those of you that don’t know, I stepped into the pastoral role and into this pulpit — I’d say we’re somewhere nine or ten weeks ago at this point.

And so for the first year, I’m kind of preaching through the brochure of stuff that I want you to know. And so I’m getting peace into one message when peace probably ought to be a whole sermon series. And so today I’m more hyper-focused on relationships. The reason I’m preaching this now is I think we’re forty-some-odd days away from Thanksgiving. So the holidays are upon us. And that means that person is going to be in your house in a few weeks. And so I just want us to prepare to be able to walk through the holiday season with peace. A recent survey showed that 88% of married Americans say they experience increased stress during the holiday season.

And the number one thing that stresses those people is relationship dynamics. Now, some of the other reasons that you get stress is because y’all want to be cooking Tyson chicken nuggets in the microwave eleven months out of the year, and now you got to make a turkey. So there’s other contributing factors as well. But 88% of Americans, married Americans, say that their stress increases at this time of year. And I really believe this message is going to help you as we walk into the holidays, but I want you to know in general, this concept of peace in the home is a major value for Ashleigh and myself.

We were both raised in highly dysfunctional environments. I will share some of that with you today, but I don’t have the four hours to walk you through the nonsense. I was raised in much less than what Ashleigh was raised in, but we were raised in dysfunctional, potentially dangerous at times, environments. But let me also say this. We have not perfected peace in the home. And I only say that for two people who are sitting in the room: my daughters, who, when I get home, are going to look at me and go, “Who do you think you are, preaching that today?”

Because I’ve yelled at both of them this week. We had a fireball preacher lady come in one time and preach. I mean, she’s about this tall, probably weighs 33 pounds, and would preach the Holy Ghost in, out, and back into you in a service. And she said one time, she said, “My husband never yelled at me or our son.” And I thought, “How?” That’s like — I’m bilingual: I’m loud, and then I’m yelling. Okay, y’all can sit there with your sanctimonious look on your face. I know you do it too. But I want you to know, we aren’t perfect.

We haven’t perfected it. But if you will look at the generational leap that both Ashleigh and I have participated in, comparing what our daughters are being raised in to what we were raised in, we might actually be some of the world’s foremost experts on this subject. Because I was raised afraid to come out of my bedroom. And now yesterday I had to look at Ali and go, “Why don’t you go hang out in your bedroom for 30 minutes or so?” You know, because they live in the living room. That is so foreign to me, because I was afraid to be out of the bedroom, but they feel safe in the bedroom or in the living room.

4:31Leviticus 14: disease in the walls

And so today I want to look at a passage of Scripture that is a little bizarre. This will be a strange passage of Scripture to look at. So if you want to turn with me to the Old Testament and look at Leviticus chapter 14, Leviticus chapter 14, we’re going to get started in verse 33. And this is a bizarre passage of Scripture, but I believe it’s really going to help us. There’s actually a real strong framework in here that the Holy Spirit has placed in this text. And as you turn there, let me just remind you of this: that Jesus did not say, “Blessed are the peacekeepers.”

He said, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” meaning that peace takes effort. We talked about it on Wednesday night that the writer of Hebrews says to labor to enter into the rest. Peace does not just happen. You have to work for it. The psalmist said, “Seek peace and pursue it.” Leviticus chapter 14, starting in verse 33 — bear with me through this passage. It says, “The Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying, ‘When you come into the land of Canaan, which I give you for a possession, and I put a case of leprous disease in a house in the land of your possession, then he who owns the house shall come and tell the priest,

“There seems to me to be some case of leprous disease in my house.”’” Now real quick, I’m going to just pause and kind of explain what we’re reading here, because this is a little bizarre. The children of Israel, the nation of Israel, has been brought out — at the time that this is being instructed to them, they have been brought out of hundreds of years of slavery and oppression. And it has been promised to them that they are going to go into a land that is going to be turnkey ready. This is like buying a fully furnished home. They’re going into a land that is ready to go, turnkey.

The houses are going to be built. The fields are going to be tilled, and they’ve been sown, and there’s going to be crops growing in them. And so they’re good. And this is their promise that they are inheriting from the Lord. They’re going into what is called the Promised Land, the land of Canaan. And when they get there, however — the only way that there can be a land ready for them to possess is if another people dispossess it. See, somebody had to build all this stuff. And so as they go into the Promised Land, God is going to supernaturally drive out the inhabitants of the land, and it’ll be there for them, and they’re going to take over their promised land.

But on the way out, the people who are dispossessing the land, who worship false gods and false idols, the people who have these little idols that they own, that they sit in their house and they worship — as they leave, some of them are going to dig down into the foundation. Now the Lord knows this in the future. They’re going to dig down into the foundation, they’re going to poke holes in the wall, and they’re going to stick these little idols in there. So there’s going to be a point in the future where the Lord is going to allow or cause a leprosy to grow on the walls in order for the people of Israel to know something unholy is in the house.

Okay. Let’s continue reading, verse 36. “Then the priest shall command that they empty the house before the priest goes in and examines it, lest all that is in the house be declared unclean. And afterward the priest shall go in and see the house. And he shall examine the house. And if the disease is in the walls of the house with greenish or reddish spots, and if it appears to be deeper than the surface, then the priest shall go out of the house to the door of the house and shut up the house seven days. And the priest shall come again on the seventh day and look. If the disease has spread in the walls of the house, then the priest shall command that they take out the stones in which is the disease and throw them into an unclean place outside of the city.

And he will have the inside of the house scraped all around, and the plaster that they scrape off they shall pour out into an unclean place outside the city.” Verse 42: “Then they shall take other stones and put them in the place of the stones, and he shall take other plaster and plaster the house. If the disease breaks out again in the house, after he has taken out the stones and scraped the house and plastered it, then the priest will go in and look. And if the disease has spread in the house, it is a persistent leprous disease in the house. It is unclean.

And he shall break down the house, its stones, its timber, and all of the plaster of the house, and they’ll carry it outside of the city to an unclean place.” Now, this small, strange little passage of Scripture — I believe the Holy Spirit has given us the steps to ensure that we have peace in the home. Now, not every person is going to need to engage every step, and I really hope that you don’t. I pray that you don’t. But I want you to know that I personally have engaged every step I’m going to talk to you about this morning with somebody in my life. And so if you’re ready, give the Lord a praise.

I could tell y’all were asleep. That’s why I said it. Let’s do it one more time. Give the Lord a praise. Hallelujah. All right. So here we go.

10:00Step one: inspect the irritation

Starting with number one. Number one, the first thing that you have to do to have peace in the home is inspect the irritation. You have to inspect the irritation. Let me encourage you with this: you don’t have to go looking for problems. If there’s a problem, it’s going to show up. It will present itself. Leviticus chapter 14, verse 35. It says this: “Then he who owns the house shall come and tell the priest” — right here —

“There seems to me to be some case of disease in my house.” It seems like something is going on. “And then the priest shall command that they empty the house before the priest goes to examine the house.” It seems like something’s off. We’ve got to take a look at it. We have to examine it. A few weeks — literally a few weeks — before we moved here, I was laying in bed one night. It was a Tuesday night to Wednesday morning. I’m laying in bed and I’m feeling discomfort. I just cannot get comfortable. And I lay there for hours trying to get comfortable. And it’s been about four hours, about four in the morning.

And finally — well, let me be honest with y’all, after I’ve talked to ChatGPT for a while. Let me tell you, if y’all want something better than WebMD, ChatGPT will hook you up if you’re not feeling good. And so I finally just get to the point where I go, “This is not going to get better. Something’s going on.” And I woke Ashleigh up, and you know it’s serious, because if I wake Ashleigh up before 11 a.m. — any of y’all married to ladies that will hurt you if you wake her up? Amen. She’ll cut me. And so I woke her up.

We go to the emergency room. They tell me in the emergency room, “Your gallbladder is messing up.” By the end of the week, they’ve taken that thing out. This was fast. I felt a discomfort, to “this is too much,” to the emergency room, to surgery. It all happened lickety-split. However, a few months before that, I went in to get my shoulder repaired. Had to get my shoulder repaired a few months before I had the gallbladder surgery. I’ve had a very eventful 2025. And I had my shoulder repair, but the shoulder repair followed about three years of discomfort.

There were three years of my shoulder. And I just got to the point where it had been uncomfortable for a long time — mainly if I was doing something to stress it out. But then it started to hurt all the time. All the time, everywhere, all day long, no matter what I was doing, it was hurting all the time. When a pain is sudden and strong, it is easy to identify. But when a pain is hard to distinguish between pain and general discomfort, it’s a little more difficult to figure out what’s going on. Because see, the cartilage in my shoulder was torn for three years.

The same problem was going on for three years. It just wasn’t torn bad enough to be in pain all the time. So I didn’t know what was happening. And peace in the home can actually be a lot like this. There are moments where you’re going to know why your peace is disrupted. If you have sewage coming up out of your bathtub drain, you’re going to know why you’re going to be upset. You’re going to know why you’re not in a great mood. Because we got sewage in the bathtub. That’s obvious. But when you have a toilet that just runs a little too long, you might not realize that that’s chipping away at you slowly, until one day you’re wigging out and you don’t realize that it’s connected to the toilet dripping or just running.

We’re in a rental house right now. Our toilet, after you’ve used it and you flush it, after you wait about a minute and a half, it goes — I got a feeling that’s going to wear me out before too long. We’ll be back in the bed: “It’s ready. You can go in there again.” And so, for instance, if you’re coming into the holidays this year and this is your first year going into a Thanksgiving or a Christmas after having lost a spouse, it’s going to be obvious why you might not feel great. Nobody’s going to look at you break down at the kitchen table and go, “Well, what’s going on with her?” “What? She lost her husband this year.

That’s what’s going on.” However, if you go to family gatherings, and for years you’ve been going, and every time you leave you feel like trash and you’re not sure why — you might not know that you’ve just gotten inoculated to grandma making comments about your weight every time you come into the house. And at some point somebody’s going to have to say, “You aren’t a general practitioner. I didn’t come up in here to hear about my weight. Yes, every year, it’s going to fluctuate a little bit.” Meemaw. I had a Meemaw.

So I can say that. And so you have to figure out what those things are. So the first step is that you say, “There seems to be something going on. There seems to be something happening in the house.” And once you realize that something’s happening, you’ve got to inspect and identify the irritation. You have to inspect and identify what’s going on. In Leviticus chapter 14, it says in verse 37, “And he shall examine the disease. And if the disease is in the walls of the house with greenish or reddish spots, and it appears to be deeper than the surface” — let’s pause right there.

Because if there is a disease that can be in the walls that is deeper than the surface, then it stands to reason that there can also be something on the walls that is surface level.

16:12Step two: evaluate the environment

So step number two is, you’ve got to evaluate the environment. You have to evaluate the environment. So you inspect the irritation, and then you evaluate the environment, because it may not be leprosy in the wall. It could be spaghetti sauce. Right? It might be something you have to dig into. It might just be as easy as something you have to wipe off. And now, one way or the other, you got to deal with it.

You can’t have leprosy in the wall. You can’t have spaghetti sauce on the wall. So you’re going to have to deal with it one way or the other. But the good news is, if it ain’t deep, it ain’t hard to get to, right? And so some of the peace disruptors that just occur in the environment can range from things like your schedules, your coordinated schedules with your family, your daily schedule; menus, what you’re eating, trying to figure out what you’re eating. My God, we spend so much time trying to figure out what’s for dinner, like we didn’t know it was coming for our whole life. Organization in the house.

Come on. So everything’s got a place and everything should be in its place. Use of electronics. You know, “I’m tired every day.” Well, maybe you stop watching TikTok till three o’clock in the morning. Ashleigh felt like that was targeted at her. The temperature in the house can affect you. The temperature in the house can affect you. You know, I don’t like a couple of things. There’s three things that throw me off: I don’t like to be hungry, waiting, or hot. So the temperature can affect you. And so there’s a lot of little things you can fix.

The good news is it can be really easy to fix once you identify it, and when you just communicate a little bit in the home. A few years ago, we had moved to a house in Lakewood Ranch, Florida. It’s right by Sarasota and Bradenton. And how many of you know that when you move into a house, you don’t decide where the stuff goes? The house kind of decides where the stuff goes, right? You kind of got to put it where the home says, huh? Hallelujah. And so we had moved into this house and we put the TV where the TV was supposed to go.

I know it’s where the TV was supposed to go, and that’s where we put it. But here was what happened. I was getting irritated all the time. And I mean, I was snapping at a level. I was hot all the time. One day it occurred to me: my office is on one side of the TV, and then the kitchen’s on the other side of the TV. I worked from home. I’m a little chubby, so I spend a lot of time in these places. And so I would come out of my office and walk to the kitchen, and I’d walk in front of this television every time. And as I’ve gotten a little older, I’ve realized I don’t like a lot of noise.

I want to go down into a hole and think and focus and then emerge when I’m ready. And so every time I’d walk past, I was getting hit with that noise. And I got kids, so, you know, “Miraculous Ladybug” only got so many times a day before I just can’t handle it no more. They ain’t got no parents in here, apparently. That was a good one. And so I would walk past, but also I’m very introverted, very introverted. And so when I walked through the room in front of the television, all the eyes were on me. I was a spectacle.

And when I realized it was the television, the placement of the television, all it took was we took it from this wall and we put it on this wall. And I never had a problem with it again. It’s an easy, simple fix. Easy, simple fix in the environment. These things can be solved with relative ease if you just figure out what they are, have some open communication, adapt when it’s necessary, and have some expectations that are managed. Because I’ll also tell you this: my kids going into school, the schedule messes with my morning routine, but guess what? I can’t change that.

So I can either be mad about it or I can manage my expectations. All right. Everybody with me? All right. Let me just throw in a bonus here. It’s also good to have a little decompression time between work and home. I’ve learned that it’s not good to merge incompatible environments. And so what you don’t want to do is take the stuff from work that’s got you irritated and you cannot control into an environment that you can control, and be upset in the house. And if you work for yourself, this is harder than you think it might be. But you have to figure out how to not let your work environment dominate your home environment.

21:14Step three: contain the contagion

Continuing on, Leviticus chapter 14, verse 37: “And he shall examine the house. And if the disease is in the walls of the house with greenish or reddish spots, and if it appears to be deeper than the surface” — so now we are going to talk about when the issues are a little bit deeper, when it actually is below the surface. It’s not spaghetti sauce. This is leprosy in the wall. Verse 40. It says, “Then the priest shall command that they take out the stones in which is the disease and throw them into an unclean place outside of the city.” So you have to investigate the irritation.

You have to evaluate the environment. And number three, you have to contain the contagion. Some of you in this room are thinking, “The marriage just isn’t working out.” But maybe it’s not the marriage. Maybe it’s just the communication issue. Some of you are under constant condemnation. You think, “I’m a terrible parent.” Maybe it’s not your parenting. Maybe you just need to tune up your patience. Some of y’all, every time you get a big bill in the mail, you go, “Oh my God, we’re running out of money.” Maybe you’re not running out of money. Maybe you just got a debt that’s pressing on you.

It’s an isolated issue that you’ve got to contain — that contamination. That one thing is affecting everything. Most isolated issues can be solved with communication and boundaries. Boundaries. Boundaries are a good thing. Boundaries are important. Boundaries are healthy. In fact, I would even dare to say to you this morning that walls build a house, but boundaries build a home. Boundaries are lines that we neither cross nor allow to be crossed. And one type of boundary that can be really helpful to you if you’ve got something that’s affecting everything is, you might have to just build a boundary around a thing.

There might be a thing that you’ve got to build a boundary around. A few of our boundaries: we don’t say “shut up” to the kids. We never have. I question this boundary sometimes. In fact, we’re so serious about this that I told Jocelyn one time to shut up when she was about five years old. She looked at me like I had hit her with 13 F-words. She said, “How dare you?” Y’all need to wake up. I know y’all heard that word this week. I know it’s the house of the Lord, but we’re working on real life here. One of the other things we don’t say — we don’t say the D word.

We don’t say “divorce.” That’s a word we don’t use. It’s an off-limits word. Sometimes you have to build a boundary that doesn’t fall on both sides of the fence. For instance, my children can tell you about Ashleigh’s ex-boyfriends, but they don’t know nothing about the hypothetical and theoretical and do-not-exist ex-girlfriends that I might have. You know why? Because there’s leprosy in that stone. I know there’s a problem if I bring that up. It ain’t worth the next 24 hours if I talk about it. And so you just got to know. And you’re going to have a situation at some point where you get around other family members, and this is inevitable.

You’re going to get around other family members. And here’s the hot one right now in 2025: you’re going to get around them and they’re going to have voted for somebody, and then you’re going to have voted for somebody else. And if y’all bring it up, it’s just going to be an explosion at the dinner table. So here’s an idea: build a boundary around it and just don’t talk about it. Find something you can agree on and talk about that. By the way, in case you didn’t know — maybe you just need to hear the gospel this morning — you’re not changing the way your family members vote. Ever. Ever. Ever.

So let it go. There ain’t no reason to fight about it.

25:42Boundaries around a place

Other times you don’t have to build a boundary around a thing, but you have to build a boundary around a place. A place. Matthew chapter 12: Jesus is out doing ministry and he is upsetting the status quo, to say the least. And his mother and his brothers come to see it. And I don’t know exactly how the ministry event was administrated, but I assume that Mary and some of her other sons come up to the security guard at the Jesus Christ Healing Crusade and say, “Hey, we need to get in and see him.” And he goes back there and he tells Jesus, he says, “Hey, your mama and your brothers are out here and they want to see you right now.”

And Jesus knew why they were there. Mary had showed up with one intention: to tell Jesus, “Slow your roll, son.” But Jesus was on mission. And he says, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” That’s a fancy way to say, “We can talk about this at home, but we’re not talking about it here.” There’s some stuff we can talk about, but we’re not doing it here. Let me just encourage you: you can’t roll up on your spouse’s workplace and hit them with married conversation in the middle of the workday. A lot of conviction in the room, apparently. Y’all real quiet on that.

There’s some places you can’t do that. So we aren’t going to get to the root of our issues in Walmart. That’s just not happening. We’re not going to do that. We’re not going to be out here in public. There’s some conversations we’ll have at home that we’re not going to have in front of y’all. So you have to put a boundary around the place. And for some of you, as we come up on the holidays, you’ve got some family members and you’re just going to need to establish this boundary: “We love you. We want to spend the holidays with you.

In fact, man, we’d like to see you every few weeks if we could. But there’s some stuff that you do in your house that’s fine for you to do in your house, but you’re not going to do it in this house.” You’re not going to do it in this house. And I may be playing my holiness hand a little bit here, and there is no judgment for you, there is no condemnation for you — I’m pretty good with everybody. But let me just tell you, you’re not rolling up in my house with a wine bottle. You’re not smoking a cigar in my house. And you’re not coming up in my house to talk to me about your political agenda.

I’m not going to sit here and be uncomfortable in my house. And I love you, but it ain’t happening here. That’s fine for you over there. It ain’t happening here. And that boundary — by the way, we think boundaries are so scary and people resent them. People actually appreciate them. They want to know where you stand. It was Brené Brown, she’s a psychologist, she says that clarity is caring, to be clear is to be kind. So boundaries are good. I feel like everybody ought to just shout amen, whether you agree or not. Hallelujah.

29:05Step four: terminate the terminal

Continuing on, Leviticus chapter 14, verse 44. It says, “Then the priest shall go out and look.

And if the disease has spread in the house, it is a persistent leprous disease in the house. It is unclean. And you shall break down the house, its stones and timber and all the plaster of the house, and he shall carry them out of the house.” So far, what we’ve talked about is realizing that something’s going on. So you have to inspect the irritation. You’ve got to investigate the irritation. You have to evaluate the environment. This is all about discovery moments and dealing with stuff that’s not that big. But then there’s some people in your life that you have to figure out what the issues are that are causing the friction, and you have to contain the contamination.

And you have to say, “This is the thing we’re not going to do. I’m not doing this with you here. We’re not doing this in my house. I’m not going to have this conversation with you.” If we can abide by these boundaries, peace can be maintained and we can still do it. It’s great. I’m glad to have 49 of my cousins come over and have Thanksgiving in my house. Great. Fantastic. But we’ve got to — this is what we do here. This is how we’re going to operate. That’s when you contain the contagion. By the way, you don’t have to put out a press release on your boundaries.

You don’t have to make an issue where there is no issue. But all of y’all know cousin Rodney keeps rolling up in there and causing a problem. So just get on the phone with cousin Rodney and tell him we got to knock it off. If y’all got a cousin Rodney — I don’t know, I’m new, so don’t be mad at me that the prophetic word came forth. So you just got to contain the issue. And if you can do that, then peace. But there is a type of leprosy that gets in the house that the Bible calls a persistent leprous disease. This is something that it ain’t going away.

It ain’t going away. And when this happens, you have to terminate the terminal. You have to terminate the terminal. That’s a hard thing to talk about from the pulpit. That’s a hard thing to preach. But I’ve been reading in Jeremiah — which in the future I might recommend that pastors who just came into churches not read for a year, because there’s some stuff in Jeremiah that just — Jeremiah, on multiple occasions, he rebukes the prophets of Israel and says, “You have healed my people lightly.” And I can tell you this: I can preach this message and talk about the people in your family that are berserk.

And I can tell you, “Go, just go pray. Breakthrough is coming.” And let me encourage you in this message: go pray, breakthrough is coming. The other side of that is, you can only sacrifice your peace so long. The gospel, your family, your job, your church are all best served by you being a person who operates with peace. And when you know that you’re sacrificing peace, at some point you need some information that’s actually going to help you. And there does come a point where you have to terminate the terminal. Some relationships need boundaries and others need to be terminated entirely.

32:45When a relationship has to end

Several years ago, I had to do this with some family that I should have done it with sooner. I knew the relationship dynamics were unhealthy, to say the least. And you may say, “Well, how do you know it was unhealthy?” Well, it shouldn’t take 24 hours to recover from a 30 minute phone call. That math doesn’t work. And I had known for years that the relationship being intact was compromising the peace that I operated in on a daily basis, because I was living in a place where I was having to schedule those phone calls in moments where I thought I was making the least impact — which, by the way, means that anytime that I was about to enter into a rest mode, which is necessary for me, I was causing myself problems and upsetting my peace with my family that I needed to do something about. But it wasn’t only affecting me.

It was affecting my wife. It was affecting my kids. Because when I got off the phone with these people, I’m a totally different person. And I mean, I’m losing my mind to some degree. And they’d all know, they’d all go, “You’ve been on the phone with Hueytown.” And in fact, come to find out, Jocelyn didn’t even know Hueytown was a real city, because she went to a marching band competition a year ago and I get a text in the middle of competition, in all caps, and it says, “HUEYTOWN IS A REAL PLACE.” She thought this was some crazy word I had made up to describe my family. “On the phone with Hueytown again.”

So this is a real place. But they would know I’d been on the phone with Hueytown. And it came to a head for me a couple of years ago — well, four years ago, I think now. I got COVID real bad. I went into the hospital. They thought I was going to die. When I got to the hospital, they started preparing Ashleigh immediately. For about three days it did not look like I was going to make it at all. And three days in, I started to recover. They kept me there for six more days for one of the most expensive getaways I’ve ever been on.

But they thought I was going to die. And I do not know how, but my family found out — Hueytown found out I was in the hospital. I don’t know how they found out. These people don’t have Facebook. They don’t text message. I don’t know how they figured it. They must’ve sent a bulletin out in the local newspaper that I was — I have no idea. But I will tell you, in my experience, if you get around some crazy dysfunctional addicts, these are some of the most resourceful people on the planet. I don’t know how, but they will find a way to do whatever it is they want to do.

And so they found out I was in the hospital, and the nurse walks in and she says, “Hey, your mother is on the phone.” At the time I’m hooked up in what looks like a space helmet to breathe. They don’t have me on one of these things, they got me on a full helmet pumping oxygen into me. And as soon as that nurse said it, I instinctively knew: if I get on the phone, I’m going to have a heart attack. They’d been measuring my heart rate. They put me on beta blockers for quite a few months. My heart rate had just gone crazy with the COVID.

And I knew, if I get on the phone with this woman, I’m going to have a heart attack. And I said, “No. Tell her I will call her when I’m out of the hospital and I’m feeling better.” The amount of drama that ensued from that, by the way, is being highly synthesized this morning in this message. I get home several days later, about a week later after she called the hospital. I get home, and we kind of have a rule: if we get mail from one of our families, it goes to us. If Ashleigh’s granddaddy is going to send me something, I’m going to give Papa’s card to her first.

If my family sends something to her, it’s coming to me first. It goes through the filter first. That’s just something we do. And she said, “Hey, your grandmother sent me a card.” And she hands it to me and I open it up, and my grandmother has sent my wife a sympathy card with an ugly note inside of it. And I said, “That’s it. I’m done.” That’s the moment I said, “I cannot let this go on.” Because here’s the reality: you don’t owe every part of yourself to everybody. And I want you to know that what I’m saying right now, this isn’t for everybody, but this is a very hard thing to do, especially in the South, because we live in this dynamic of “blood is thicker than water.”

To some degree, some of your families today expect you to be more loyal to them than your spouse. And let me just encourage you, man of God: the Bible says to leave and to cleave. And your wife is more important than your mama. And that’s Bible. Take it up with Jesus, I don’t have time for it. I owed it to myself, I owed it to my wife, I owed it to my kids to terminate that relationship, as hard as it was, because it was never — hear me — it was never going to get better. It was never going to improve. In fact, immediately I did what I would encourage you to do.

If you feel like you need to do this, I called my counselor. I’d been seeing a counselor regularly — good emotional health, it’s a positive thing — and I had been seeing her for quite a while, but I stopped during COVID. And so this all happened, I call her on the phone, I start talking through the process with her. And I would encourage you to do that. But I also talked to another one of my friends who knows my family. And he just asked me, he said, “How are you going to feel if you do this and tomorrow Meemaw dies?” I said, “I’m probably not going to be in a good place for a little bit.”

I said, “But there’s another side of that coin.” And he said, “What’s that?” I said, “She could live to be 135 years old. And if I don’t deal with this, I’m going to be dealing with it forever.” Just like my shoulder pain: it’s been uncomfortable, uncomfortable, and now it’s become something that is unbearable. I cannot do it anymore. I cannot give any more of myself to this dysfunctional situation, because there’s just some people that change is not on the horizon. I believe God can turn it around, but my peace is my responsibility today. And there’s a recipe of issues that you’d have to work through to figure out if this is something you got to do in your family.

And again, I recommend talking to a counselor if you think you’re going to do it. But I will encourage you, for the handful of people that I am talking to this morning — by the way, I’m not talking to everybody anymore, so if you finish before I do, just wait for me at the end of this message — but for the handful of you that I’m talking to right now, I would give you this testimony. Everybody I know who’s ever done this would give you this testimony. Everybody says, “I should have done it sooner,” because immediately the peace in my life increased. The peace in my life went up.

So the four steps this morning: you inspect the irritation, you evaluate the environment, you contain the contagion, and you terminate the terminal.

41:07When you can't change it: His grace is sufficient

As I close this morning, I want to just talk to one more group of people in the room who might find yourself in a situation that you cannot change, that you are stuck in a particular situation. I will also be so bold to say that most of us can change more than we think we can, have more control than we like to pretend we do. But as I mentioned before, I grew up in a very dysfunctional environment. Both of my parents were out-of-control alcoholics.

There was drug use that I found out about later on down the road. There was mental illness that I found out about later on down the road. There was infidelity I found out about later on down the road. I knew about the physical abuse, though. I was seeing that happen. And so I grew up in a crazy situation. But at 13 years old, I can’t do nothing about that. I’m there. I’m stuck in it. I have to manage. And I got saved around 12 years old. The Lord graciously brought me out. I’ll tell you the story one day. It was the miracle hand of God.

And I had been irritated with the Lord for quite a while when I was young, because I had gotten saved, and we kept throwing people on stage telling their miracle testimony, but nobody had a testimony like me, where I got saved and everything got worse. That don’t sound good on a video, but sometimes that’s the case. Sometimes that’s what it looks like. And I was irritated because I thought, “Here I am. I got saved, I’d been called to the ministry, I’m baptized in the Holy Ghost.” I mean, literally I came out of nowhere and just like, I’m anointed and I’m 14.

And my family will not get their act together. These people won’t get their act together to save their lives, to save their souls. But over the years I started to understand what Philippians chapter 4, verse 7 means a little bit more, when it talks about “a peace that passes all understanding.” Because something I saw happening in my own life is, even though everything was getting worse — and I am not stretching that, I’m not talking about incrementally worse — I’m talking, I got saved and all hell broke loose in the home within the next two years. And as my family life was deteriorating, I found that I, for whatever reason, was getting better and better and better and better.

By the way, that’s the anointing. That’s the cross. That’s the Holy Ghost. And I was getting better and better in that environment. It’s a peace that passes all understanding. If you find yourself in a situation like that today, I just want to encourage you that I have seen it true in myself. I have seen it true in Ashleigh Mayfield. I have seen it true in others who are in the ministry today and others who are not and are still serving the Lord. I have found that 2 Corinthians chapter 12 gives you the solution to a situation that you cannot change. It says, “Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me” — that something off of him. And the Lord speaks to him and says, “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you. My power is made perfect in your weakness.’”

And I want to encourage you. You may not see it this week. You may not see it this year. You may not see it for 10 years. But I’m just going to tell you this morning, if you find yourself in a situation — young people, especially, listen to me — if you find yourself in a situation you cannot change, and you’re constantly robbed and your peace is constantly taken from you, and you’re in an unsafe and unhealthy environment, first of all, let us know. We’ll do anything that we can to help you. But I’m telling you, I promise you, his grace is sufficient. God will meet you right where you are. And it may not happen today, it may not happen tomorrow, but there will be a point in your life where you look back and you say, “It is true what the apostle said, that he who started a good work in me has been faithful to complete it.” I’m here to tell you this morning that God is good. He’s faithful to his promise. He will work in your life. He will rescue you. The name of the Lord is a strong tower that the righteous run into.

He’ll set your feet up on a high place. He’ll pull you out of the muck and the mire. The lines will fall in pleasant places to you. God will move on your behalf. And you might not feel it right now, but there will be a moment where you say, “It is certainly true that the latter glory of my house is greater than the former glory of the house I grew up in.” If you believe that, give the Lord a praise this morning. Thank you, God. Hallelujah.