Well what about the financial thing? Listen, people have been through that. Others are going through that. Whatever happens it's not the end of the world for you - may be the end of some parts of your world, it's not the end of the world altogether. Come on now aye? Now you can be free, see? In Romans 15:13 it says this: Now the God of all hope, fill you with joy and peace through believing, that you may abound in hope. In other words, God of hope, God of hope fills us with joy. Joy is one of the characteristics of freedom in the Lord - and how does it happen? Because I believe God is powerful! God is with me! Nothing's too much for me, I can do it! And I've got to change how I think. Now the problem is, people get stuck in a rut, and they think that only - well I spoke to my husband, he wouldn't listen. So what you're implying is: it's all his fault, and you're now a poor victim, we should feel sorry for you, poor you. You haven't got anything else you can do, except roll over. Well that's nonsense. You've got lots of other choices, except the choice you wanted, you didn't get. He didn't listen the first time round, but you're not limited to that. There's lots of things you can do. You can learn new ways of dealing with people. You can learn different strategies, you can try different things. There's a whole range of different things you could do. You just haven't seen them yet, that's all, just got to think about them, and ask the Lord to help you.
So how am I going to get out of this learned helplessness? Let me give you it in two steps. The first part is, you've got to deal with the roots. You've got to deal with the roots, and maybe there's some people today, and you're living with despair, hopelessness, there's a pressure lives around your life. The one thing we can do today is we can pray and break the power of the thing over your life, but that does not keep you free of it. To keep free of it, you've got to change how you live life, how you do life. So the first thing is, you've got to ask the Holy Spirit to uncover any roots in your life where you've become resentful or angry or grief stricken because you were powerless. You were held down, and you had no choice. All of us have had experiences like that, whether its sin that we're in bondage to, some kind of family situation, some circumstances in life and you were powerless, and you were hurt and wounded, and you were broken, became angry, and you learnt that you couldn't do anything.
Now you've got to admit that and bring that out to the Lord, because usually when people find they get like that, they become bitter, and they have a bitter expectation which defiles everything. They kind of expect: hey, this is how life's going to work for me. Oh well, you know, this is how it'll be. I just wonder what today will turn up. You can feel the bitterness, and the expectation, drawing all kinds of negatives in; and if that's in your life, you've got to repent of it. You've got to break your agreement with it, got to decide to leave the pain of Egypt behind, not carry the pain and grief of Egypt with you, so you can't enter into the things that God has for you, because to enter those we've got to change. So if God has been taking you through some painful experiences, and you've had all these old ways and thinking coming up - it's time to learn something and change. It's time to bring the grief and the pain out to the Lord, and to grieve over it, to repent of bitterness, to repent of making judgements against people, to repent even of just that whole thing of bitterly expecting: nothing's going to work for me.