Mirror, Mirror Series

OCD

Pt. 2 – Mirror, Mirror

I. Introduction

No doctor's appointment is needed. No blood has to be drawn. No X-rays need to be developed and reviewed. There is no need for a second opinion. The diagnosis is accurate and the outlook is bleak unless we get treatment. We are all sick. We are all diseased. We have all succumbed to this sickness and it continues to deepen as we check our social media feeds and believe that the highlights are real life. We get sicker as we believe the filtered, touched up photos are reality. We grow green with envy. We turn shades of red with anger thinking we have been overlooked and left out by God. We are overtaken by sleepless nights and increasingly heavy debt loads trying to keep up with people we really don't know and probably don't even like! We are minding our own business feeling some amount of contentment and thankfulness and then they get that car. They get that house. They get that job. They go on that vacation. They get that recognition. Now all the sudden OCD - Obsessive Comparison Disorder - sets in and we are now unable to be everything that we are supposed to be in Christ. So, the fact is we are sick. The question is how do we recover?

Numbers 13:2-4, 27-33 (NIV)

“Send some men to explore the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelites. From each ancestral tribe send one of its leaders.” So at the Lord’s command Moses sent them out from the Desert of Paran. All of them were leaders of the Israelites.

They gave Moses this account: “We went into the land to which you sent us, and it does flow with milk and honey! Here is its fruit. But the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large. We even saw descendants of Anak there. The Amalekites live in the Negev; the Hittites, Jebusites and Amorites live in the hill country; and the Canaanites live near the sea and along the Jordan.”

Then Caleb silenced the people before Moses and said, “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.” But the men who had gone up with him said, “We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are.” And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, “The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”

OCD leads to see sickness!

The spies, sent by Moses, allow their view of others to cause them to see themselves as grasshoppers. In fact, the KJV says it like this "we were like grasshoppers in our own sight!" Their OCD causes them to be see sick.

Because they didn't see correctly the Children of Israel didn’t enter Promised Land and end up wandering in the wilderness for 40 years. They didn't enter the Promised Land because they didn’t believe the right things about God. They didn’t enter because they didn’t believe right things about themselves.

If you don't believe Him about you, then you won't believe the right things about you that are necessary to get what He says you can have and to be who He says you can be. How you see you matters. I can't allow how I see them impact how I see me.

I wonder how many of us miss the provision and the promise of God in our own lives? How many of us overlook what God has given, is giving and will give simply because we are see sick? How many of us are missing out on possessing the promise of what God has for us simply because we are see sick? If you see yourself wrong, then you will see yourself retreating. You will pull back. Why? Because you can't follow Jesus if you are comparing yourselves to someone else!

Our eyes are what causes us to be sick. But our eyes are also the key to our healing. We must see to be free!

Notice the only difference between the report given was the eyes. Caleb saw differently. Caleb and Joshua are the only 2 of the 12 that ever enter the Promised Land simply because they saw correctly, so they thought correctly! They saw correctly, so they believed correctly!

Unless you see yourself correctly you will be overcome with OCD. The issue is that if we don't see ourselves correctly, then we either see ourselves as inferior or we see ourselves as superior and either view will destroy us. So, how do we get it right? We have to look right.