So I'm curious. I wonder how many of you have a bad habit, something you wish you didn't do, and you've tried to break that habit, but you can't seem to break it.

I wonder how many of you, maybe at some point, you just prayed out to God like God, would you please help me stop?

Help this go away. You might even negotiate it with God and say like, you know, if you will, I won't ever again, you'll please God, just help me stop.

I don't want to do this. Maybe you prayed, maybe you made a promise, and maybe you did stop for a little while, but then unfortunately you fell back into the very thing you didn't want to do.

You might have made a promise, like God, help me, and I promise I won't ever cuss and lose my temper at my kids.

And you drove all the way to church and set all the way through church, and you didn't cuss and you didn't lose your temper at your kids.

Until you were driving home and someone cut you off and someone was saying something in the back, and you cussed and you lost your temper, and you went home and you were so mad at yourself, you felt so depressed.

You just scroll through social media mindlessly, and that made you feel worse, and so you went into the kitchen a half of what's in the refrigerator, and so you lost your temper and cussed again.

You wanted change, you tried to change, you asked God to help you change, but it didn't work.

The title of today's message is, why can't I stop? Would you pray with me?

Father, we ask today that by the power of your spirit, you would speak a word of life, a word of encouragement, even a word of power.

To help us overcome anything in our lives that would be depleasing to you or harmful to us or to others.

God, by your power, teach us through your word, empower us by your spirit, strengthen us God, by your grace, to live a life that pleases you.

We pray this in Jesus' name, and everybody said, Amen.

What's going wrong whenever you want to stop something, you want to change a behavior, but you can't seem to do it.

I would suggest that in most cases there are a lot of people that have the right intentions, but the wrong strategy.

What you're trying to do is you're trying to change, but you're actually trying to change in the wrong way.

As we dive into this message, I want to start by acknowledging, unfortunately, that this message is going to be a little bit incomplete, and I apologize for that.

There's no way, in a 30 minute time period, that I could fully and completely address a full theology of change.

When you ask, why haven't I changed? I would just say there would be multiple factors working against you that keep us stuck in the lifestyle that often we would like to live in a different way.

For example, I'll show you some of the factors, and then try to get to the root.

Why is it that we can't change? For almost all of us, there would be practical reasons that we find it difficult to change.

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