God, Get Me Out Of This

Focus Keywords: spiritual deliverance, daily provision, overcoming relapse, Steven Furtick, Lord’s Prayer, Exodus manna, faith in the wilderness, emotional freedom

This rewrite summarizes Steven Furtick’s message, “God, Get Me Out Of This,” which addresses the persistent struggle of believers who find themselves “going back” to old habits, hurts, or sins, even after experiencing monumental breakthroughs. The central argument, rooted in the Lord’s Prayer and the story of the Israelites’ journey through the desert, is that God’s deliverance is an ongoing, daily provision, not a one-time, dramatic event, and requires dependence on the Source, not the supply.

The Universal Struggle: Going Back

The message acknowledges the profound emotional disappointment believers face when they relapse into behaviors they thought they were “through with”. People who have moved from “death to life” often find themselves “going back to some things”. This struggle is universal; the speaker noted he would embarrass those who claim they are so holy they “never go back sometimes”.

The speaker shared examples of this relapse:

• A person who went from suicidal thoughts to standing with their daughter, yet admitted to “going back” to old patterns.
• A woman who lost 110 pounds ten years prior but had put the weight back on, revealing the difficulty of maintaining deliverance.

This reality challenges the expectation that salvation is only about avoiding future judgment (hell), reminding believers that they were saved from their sins and to walk in the newness of life, here and now. Though salvation is complete, the individual is still “going through” a journey.

The Prayer for Deliverance: Food, Forgiveness, and Freedom

The sermon uses the Lord’s Prayer (“Our Father in heaven…”) as the blueprint for engaging God’s deliverance, focusing on three key provisions Jesus instructed us to pray for daily: food, forgiveness, and freedom.

1. Priorities: The prayer begins by focusing on God’s priorities: “Your kingdom come. Your will be done”.
2. Provision: This is followed by provision, which is broken into three terms:
   • Food (Daily Bread): God promises to give “bread”.
   • Forgiveness (from God): God provides forgiveness for sins.
   • The Ability to Forgive: Believers receive the “ability to forgive” others. Jesus stressed that one cannot truly experience the forgiveness received without exercising the forgiveness that must be given.
3. Freedom (Deliverance): The prayer culminates in the request: “Deliver us from the evil one”.

The expectation is that salvation is not just a future promise (not just so you won’t “pop like Orville Redenbacher’s one day”) but a here and now reality to “walk in the newness of life”.

Stuck in the “Through”: The Desert Dilemma

The story of the Israelites’ journey from Egypt to Canaan provides the central metaphor for the experience of relapse and spiritual stagnation.

• From and To: God delivered the Israelites from Egypt (a place of 430 years of slavery) and promised to bring them to the Promised Land.
• The Problem in the Middle: They found themselves in the desert—the “through”. This desert is “disorienting” because it is “not where you’re going, and it’s not where you came from”.
• The Loop: For the Israelites, a journey that should have taken three weeks turned into 40 years. What should have been a “line through the desert turned into a loop,” where they went “around and around”.
• Grumbling and Nostalgia: In the desert, facing hunger, discomfort, and disorientation, they began to grumble against Moses and Aaron. They expressed perverse nostalgia for their former bondage: “If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the [carnivore diet] we wanted”. They preferred predictable slavery and food over uncomfortable freedom.

This tendency to look back is the danger for believers today: “If I keep going back to what God saved me from, I’m going to spend 40 years… I’m going to spend a whole lifetime”.

The Provision: Daily Manna

When the Israelites grumbled about starving, God intervened with an impossible miracle.

• The Rain of Bread: The Lord promised Moses, “I will rain down bread from heaven for you”. This miraculous provision—manna—was a memory that Jesus’s disciples would have recognized when He taught them to pray for “daily bread”.
• What Is It?: The word “manna” literally means “What is it?”. God sent something they didn’t know how to label or explain, emphasizing that they needed to give God time to show them what He was doing in their lives. If they tried to label it, they would limit it.
• The Condition of Provision: This provision came with a specific, crucial condition: “The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day”. They were forbidden from gathering enough to fill their pantry; if they tried, they would be disappointed.