Sheryl Brady - Fueling Our Blame Shifting Behavior

On your way down, hit somebody and say, «Stop fueling your blame-shifting behavior.» I’m going to look for my preaching section today because I think there might be a lot of people who don’t want to say «Amen» today, but help your pastor out, thank you. I believe it was June 17th, if my research serves me right, when the Surgeon General urged Congress to require warning labels for social media platforms. His statement was that social media is associated with significant mental health harm for adolescents. I would dare say it doesn’t stop with adolescence; it’s caused a lot of mental harm for many people. The term «mental health» was not something I grew up hearing. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t around a lot of people who were suffering, but we didn’t know how to articulate it, and so we never knew how to label it. I didn’t grow up hearing about mental health issues. Even for my children, in the time that I raised them and Bishop raised them, we didn’t hear the term «mental health issues» as broadly as it is used today. The topic of mental health is huge today, and the need for us to become more aware of mental health challenges is really at an all-time high in my lifetime. I’m glad about that because I’m grateful that people are becoming more aware, conscious, and intrigued to find solutions than ever before. There are a lot of problems in the world in which we live. Mental health issues never affect just one person. Just like sin never affects just one person, mental health issues affect everybody to some degree who is around or connected to the person who is actually suffering. Mental health issues are very far-reaching. Many of us act the way we do today because our great-great-grandmother or great-great-grandfather acted the way they did, and because there were no solutions and nobody checked them, that behavior passed on through DNA. Now it has surfaced in some of us. Thanks be to God for Calvary and for the blood of Jesus, because that means I don’t have to be like that, right? For the sake of my children and my children’s children, I refuse to be like that, and that is only because of Calvary and the price that was paid for our redemption. But the truth of the matter is that there are many mental health issues that people are struggling with today. Almost every day never goes by when I don’t hear that term. The thing is, the mental health issues that people are struggling with today are causing relational issues in our lives. Now, y’all are perfect, right? No, the truth is that a lot of us are affected by this. So today, I want to look at our relational lives and see if we can find ways to make our relationships better. Amen? Look at somebody and say, «We need this today.» Even if you fought with your spouse on the way to church, look at them and say, «I’m telling you, we need this today.» Great relationships are built on trust, and if you don’t have trust, you cannot have a great relationship. The truth is that there is no trust unless you have truth. You must have truth to have trust in order that you might have a great relationship. Ephesians 4 and 5 in the Amplified Bible says, «Let our lives lovingly express the truth in all things—speaking truly, dealing truly, and loving truly.» Therefore, if we fail to be truthful, there will be no trust, and where there is no trust, there can be no real relationship. We can have phony relationships, but I’m talking about the kind that we really need—our real relationships. Today, I chose to go to the Book of Genesis and talk about this from the perspective of the first couple. I’m not talking about Joe and Jill Biden; I’m talking about Adam and Eve, because that is where it all began right there in the garden. If any couple should have made it and had a perfect relationship, it should have been Adam and Eve, right? They lived in the paradise of God. They had no kids and no in-laws, so neither one of them could say, «Who’s my mama?» They didn’t have to get up and go to work, so they had no job. They had no house they needed to clean, and there were no interruptions in their lives—no ironing that had to be done, no dry cleaning. Did you pick up my dry cleaning? I told you I needed my dry cleaning! They didn’t have to worry about dry cleaning. As a matter of fact, they had no clothes to worry about, period. They lived in a perfect environment, and they should have had a perfect relationship. There was no sadness. You know how it is—sometimes women get sad, and our husbands want to know what’s wrong because they immediately want to fix it. They didn’t have any of those kinds of issues. There were no baby mama issues in their house.