Freedom

Tom Shrader explores 2 Timothy 2:4, where Paul uses the image of a soldier to teach about spiritual freedom. He examines how Christians can become entangled by ineffective traditions, material possessions, unhealthy relationships, and unrealistic expectations that prevent them from fulfilling God's calling. The teaching emphasizes that God saved us for a purpose, and we must reject the possessive influences that distract us from pleasing Him.

“No soldier in active duty entangles themselves in the affairs of everyday life so that he may please the one who enlisted him as a soldier.”

— Tom Shrader

Series: Life Management (2013)

Recorded: October 17, 2013

Duration: 39 min

Themes: freedom, purpose, calling, distraction, priorities, simplicity, focus, obedience, struggling with materialism, feeling overwhelmed, young adult, new believer, parent, business owner, seeking purpose, making life decisions

Scripture: 2 Timothy 2:4, 1 Timothy 6:6-8, Mark 7, Luke 12, Luke 16:14, James 4:4, 1 John 2:14, Ephesians 4

Theological Themes: sanctification, spiritual warfare, christian liberty, stewardship, discipleship, spiritual disciplines, biblical worldview, kingdom living

Handout Link

Full Transcript

Open your Bibles to 2 Timothy and the 2nd chapter. Let me give you a little tip. I think I've mentioned this before, in the front of your Bibles, most of your Bibles, or the back, there's two, three, four blank pages. One of the habits that I developed is I would take verses and put them in one or two categories. This becomes the Hall of Fame of verses, essentially.

I would take verses that either the teacher kept repeating, so Larry would go, for example, Larry Wright would go to 1 Corinthians 15 verses 3, 4, 5, and I would notice we'd go there three or four times in a month. So I'm going, well this is a verse that's at least important to him. And so I'd make a note of it. Then there would be verses that as we're reading them, I would go, this really clicked for me, something in here worked. And I would start just a list of them.

They became passages that I would, in quiet moments, times of reflection, when I was looking for something to read, go back to those passages. What I've found is there's those passages then that I go back to over and over again, for either personal application or just for us to talk about.

A Hall of Fame Verse

So I'm going to give you one of those this morning, and if you're so inclined, either continue the habit or begin the habit of listing them, I would list it. It's 2 Timothy, and it's the second chapter, and it's the fourth verse. Probably for me, that in conjunction with the end of 1 Timothy, so 1 Timothy 6, 6, 7, and 8, are two passages that I'm working together all the time, and they come up almost always in discussions with people. I'm going with businessmen and women, young couples, people figuring out life.

So 2 Timothy chapter 2, verse 4, Paul writes this, and He uses the imagery of a soldier. "No soldier in active duty entangles themselves in the affairs of everyday life." So think of him now, He's in Afghanistan, so He's on active duty. No soldier on active duty, entangles themselves in the affairs of everyday life.

Think as simple as what to wear. Like this morning, I got up early, and I thought, I'm wearing pants today. So to those of you that are new here, that could be alarming, but typically I would wear shorts, but my legs get worse, and I only have one pair of shorts that I can button, and they weren't clean, so I went with jeans. Then I decided to wear a collared shirt, and I decided to wear this one, which raises issues. But I invested some time in this process.

Well, the guys in Afghanistan did not get up this morning and say, what should I wear? This is the duty for the day, this is what they wear, they go to the cafeteria, choices are limited.

The Purpose of the Soldier

"No soldier in active duty, entangles themselves in the affairs of everyday life, so that He may please the one who enlisted Him as a soldier." So in our context, and this is not the verse for the day, trying to illustrate it and make a bridge, which I think I can do, is that you and I are part of the army that God has assembled. He's saying what I ultimately want you to do is to please Me, it's not about winning victories, we hear all that stuff about victorious Christian living and victorious this and victorious that, it's not about wins, it's about pleasing the Father. He's saying one of the things that'll stop that is if I'm entangled in the affairs of just everyday life.

Every decision has consequences, when I say yes to something, I say no to something else. I was talking with some guys the other day, and we were talking about real estate, and one of the comments I made was, for me in my career, one of the big moments is when I learned to say no to deals. Every deal I said yes to meant I, by implication, because I have a finite amount of time, energy, and effort, by saying yes to this deal, I've said no to others that'll come along, I have to be really selective in what I'm going to work on.

Well in your life comes these endless opportunities, and I have to live, if you will, a disentangled, not a disengaged, but a disentangled life.

Part Two of Control

So today, you've got outlines in front of you, today is really part two in its way of last week, which was on the idea of control. Simple premise, it feels like everything's out of control. So I wake up this morning, and Thursday is a running day for Sandy, not a swimming day, so on a swimming day it's 4:50, she gets up, but on a running day, I'm up first, and then I send her off and tell her you're running for two, so run hard.

And so I'm up first, and I go out, and I've fallen in this little habit, I have my little K cup, I turn on TV, oh my gosh, there's a deal. Who didn't know there wasn't going to be a deal, and they've moved it now to whatever January is, and I'm so frustrated. I'm driving in today, and I said I'm going to be positive today, that's not one of my long suits, I'm developing it, but I'm so frustrated, but I was positive they're going to do something, not that they're going to fix, I didn't say fix it, just do something.

I look at this, and it feels like so much stuff is out of control, this was last week, we don't want to be so overwhelmed by the stuff that's beyond our control, that we neglect to attend to things we can control. So again in my illustration, I can't control my height, I can't control my width, I'm not doing very well at that. And then we gave you a list of things that you can control.

The Starting Point: Salvation

Under this premise, and this is the series, is that God saved you, and it occurs to me we haven't talked a lot about that word in a while, most of you know what that means, but I come into this world separated from God because of my sin, my flinch is to fix it. There's probably never been a group on earth more fix-it oriented than we are in this country at

Individualism's False Promise

Individualism can become a trap. We embrace this rugged individualism - "I can take care of myself, I've got a problem, I'll fix it." John Kennedy ushered in a whole series of that pragmatic thinking. At one point he was talking about world situations, and he said, "We got ourselves into it, we can get ourselves out of it." That's our attitude, that's what we look for.

The problem is you come to God, and you got yourself in a fix called sin, but you can't get yourself out of it. That's why Christ died. I finally bought "Killing Jesus" only because so many of you are reading and asking about it. Again, we say this about our buddy O'Reilly a lot - he's starting to wear on your nerves anyway, but he doesn't know anything theologically. He's so far in the dark, and his basic premise is Jesus died because He was upset about the money scheme. While it's true the money was going to the Romans and the Jewish leaders, we know Jesus died to save His people from their sin.

The True Purpose of Salvation

Somebody who's saved or delivered is somebody who's understood that at that point in time, and you've surrendered trying to please God on your own. You've embraced the fact that Christ died on the cross, and you now have eternal life. It's contrary to everything religious in you, and you're incurably religious. By the way, so religious that once you move into relationship with Him, you want to turn right back into religion and somehow now work out your salvation.

But He saved you for a reason, and it wasn't just to get right doctrine and stop sinning. So why did He save me? If you're in a good church - and like up this way, Scottsdale Bible would be a good church. I'm sure there are others, but Scottsdale Bible would be one. In our area, I think the Redemption churches are great churches. Obviously I have a vested interest there.

If you're in a great church, one of the challenges is going to be it can easily turn into an academic study. Our guys are going to crack the Bible. This week, we're going to look at Romans chapter 6, verses 12, 13, and 14. We can crack it and unpack it, and you walk out and go, "Man, I really learned something." But God didn't save you just to get your doctrine right or just to stop sinning. That creates a vacuum, so that's Ephesians 4 - put off the old, but put on the new. You're a new creature, living in a new way, with a new motivation.

Understanding God's Design

Sandy and I were talking about the boys. She's been spending a lot of time with Brayden and Yale. We're talking about Brayden and Yale and they're so different. Yesterday she took them on a hike up a mountain and she said Brayden wanted to text, and Brayden's seven, Yale's six. He wanted to text but then his punctuation was off and he was all concerned about it. Yale's going, "Who cares? Walk and text."

Brayden is very analytical. He's the one that I asked, "Who's your favorite president?" and he said Franklin Pierce. That tells you a lot about him right there. He doesn't multitask and Yale doesn't task - he just goes. He's the little one. If Brayden walked in right now he would walk up and he'd say, "How are you feeling? You feel okay?" I'd say I feel great and he'd hug you and he would say, "I love you Papa, I love you," and he'll come up and said, "Do you hurt? Does that hurt?" That's the difference between the two of them.

What I'm convinced of is that personality is set. That doesn't mean they don't change - that's how God wired you. Some are originators, some are organizers, some are operators in an organization. As we look at these, some of these are going to impact you more than others. But what we're saying is God saved you for a purpose and it may not be big in terms of it's going to hit the news, but it's big in your world. What's going to stop you from that?

The Message of Freedom

Today the topic is freedom. Jesus said this: "The Spirit of the Lord is on me because I'm anointed to preach the good news to the poor and He has sent me to proclaim freedom to the prisoner and recovery of sight for the blind and to release the oppressed and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." Now certainly there's some physical aspect of that, but the spiritual aspect is He came to preach the good news to the poor and to proclaim freedom to those of us who are in prison. Those that the Lord has set free are free indeed.

The unique aspect about biblical Christianity is it doesn't put us in bondage, it puts us in freedom. He never says try harder, He says let me live. "I'm the vine, you're the branches, I'm going to live this through you."

The Cost of Entanglements

In our area, go back to 2 Timothy 2:4. I'm this soldier, I don't want to entangle myself in the affairs of everyday life so that when His call comes I can respond. There's a statistic - I don't know how they prove it, it's probably not provable but it preaches well so I use it. Nine out of ten men and women who apply to go to the mission field do not get there because of consumer debt.

Take a step back and think about that. These are people who say God's called me, I have some sense of where He's called me, I sense He's gifted me, I sense I'm supposed to go, but that credit card, that payment, that house, that entanglement of life won't let me do what God's called me to do. That's a gigantic point and a great illustration. We have that all day long.

Somebody you know calls and they need that human touch. You say I can't do it. Why? Not just because I'm busy - am I busy with the right things? Here's our sentence for the week: reject the entanglements of the possessive influences. Get rid of the stuff that's going to get in the way so that you're able to speak and

Freedom From Ineffective Traditions

When we use Jesus as our role model—not as divinity but in His humanity—we discover specific freedoms that allow us to move and think with the ideas that God has given us. First, He wasn't bound by ineffective traditions.

In Mark chapter 7, the religious leaders asked Jesus, "Why don't your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders? Instead they're eating their food..." Jesus replied, "Isaiah was right when he prophesied of you hypocrites, Sadducees, Pharisees. You've let go of the commands of God and you're holding on to the traditions of men." This echoes Matthew 23 where Jesus says, "You scribes, you hypocrites, you're like whitewashed tombs—look good on the outside, bad on the inside."

Now let me make a pitch for traditions—I love traditions. I love traditions of all styles. I have these weird things that I do that I can't explain. Once a week I'll YouTube the armed service medleys, and there's one they do in a church where they play the Academy songs from the Army, Air Force, Marines, Navy, and Coast Guard. The Army's always my favorite, I don't know why—the Marines are always the tough guys, but the Army seems to be the most egalitarian maybe. They'll play it and show veterans, and there's always a guy—makes me think of my dad—who's standing there with tears welling up in his eyes, thinking about something far off.

I play at least once a week the 2011 Insight Bowl with Iowa coming onto the field and the band coming onto the field. It's dumb, but it generates emotion. We have traditions as we come into Christmas and Halloween. The tradition for the last three or four years at Halloween is that all the kids come to our house, and rather than trick-or-treating, they give out candy. There are traditions that are good.

But then there are traditions that are bad—traditions where what's happened is the tradition has moved in and usurped a right relationship with God. All of a sudden I can develop this tradition of having my quiet time every day. By the way, these things aren't bad—having my quiet time every day, praying at this time every day, doing these things every day. But when bumping into these "every days" is really affecting the way I live my Christian life, that's a problem.

I remember talking to a guy who had a friend call him and say, "Listen, I need help, my life is falling apart." He said, "I can't meet with you now, maybe tomorrow," because he was on his way to a Bible study. Hang with me now—the whole gist of Bible study is that when people call and need help, you need to be available for them. All of a sudden my tradition can get in the way because "I've always done it this way."

The Pull Back to Religion

I've mentioned this before: I come into the world religious, God saves me, I come into relationship, but right away I want to move right back into religion again. It comes as simply as someone asking, "How are you doing with Christ?" You have to have metrics to try to measure it, so all of a sudden all you can think about is activity.

One of the most frustrating things we have at church is when people say, "How's the church going? How are you doing?" I'll give you inside information here that you won't hear in many places. Most guys need a measurement, so they use "butts, bucks, and baptisms"—how many people are there, how much money do we have, and they equate baptism with salvation for this exercise.

I can't look into your soul. Mr. Wheeler and I have been friends for what seems like a long time to me anyway, not to him. But if you say, "How's Steve doing spiritually?" the instinct is to say, "Well, he just finished this, he read that, he's been on that retreat." But what really matters is: does he know Jesus more, is he loving Him more, and do the people around him experience that love? How do you measure that? So traditions can get in the way.

Freedom From Preoccupation With Daily Necessities

Second, Jesus wasn't preoccupied with daily necessity. In Luke 12, Jesus said to the disciples, "Don't worry about your life, what you're going to eat, what you're going to wear, your body..." It feels like we talk about that all the time, so let me put it in perspective.

Is He saying stuff can get in the way and stuff can become bondage? Don't worry about what you're going to eat, but you need to eat—that's a reality. Don't worry about what you're going to wear, but wear something. Don't worry about where you're going to sleep. What Jesus said was, "Listen, it doesn't matter what you're eating, but that you're eating, and that will be taken care of. To the extent that stuff gets in the way, it's going to pull you off your purpose."

I watched a show—it's really interesting, I do no home improvement, I don't know how to turn on a hammer, I don't even know what to do with it, but I watch these home improvement shows. I don't cook—I eat. I was watching a show the other night about a restaurant in New York that just introduced a $175 cheeseburger.

That's intriguing. They asked the guy, "Who orders this?" That seems high, I guess, even by New York standards. He said, and I quote, "Brokers trying to impress their friends."

Now, I don't have any problem with that. If that's part of the deal because you wear a certain tie or suit or whatever, and the cheeseburger is part of that whole thing you have to communicate, I get it. But—and this is totally judgmental, so I confess that—if you're buying a $175 cheeseburger, you're doing a lot of other things to impress your friends. Collectively, they're costing you time, energy, effort, and money from a finite pool.

distracting you. It has to be distracting you from the very thing that God's called you to do. The freedom to say, okay, you naturally care what people think. I get it. I do. But He's saying put it in a healthy perspective.

Perspective might be my new big word. I don't know. It's to be able to see it as God sees it.

Freedom From Unhealthy Relationships

The third thing is he wasn't distracted by unhealthy relationships. This is tough. This is where Jesus' mother and brother come to see Him. They think He's crazy. And Jesus says, "Listen, who's my mother and brother? Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, my sister, my mother."

Unhealthy relationships on a family level or really at any level. We have this as we go through life. We have these relationships. Some of them you share a chain of DNA. Some of them are relationships, and we're coming into that holiday time where you've got Thanksgiving and Christmas.

I would tie it to your next point in your outline—realistic expectations. You just watched a show on the History Channel of Norman Rockwell's greatest pictures. And here are the family and it's the classic cutting the turkey. And all of a sudden in your mind you think Thanksgiving is going to be like that this year. It's never been like that. You're nutty. You're goofy as a family. You come together and you add booze to it. It's not going to get better.

I have these relationships, but the closest relationships are the ones where I share a spiritual DNA. It doesn't mean I jettison the others. It means I put them in proper perspective. Most of the people I talk to when they go back into family settings tend to revert to where they were when they were in there. If you were the nutty little kid, you become the nutty little kid again. If you were the older authoritarian brother or sister, you're that.

Energy-Draining vs. Energy-Giving Relationships

You can only have so many relationships where you walk out de-energized after a period of time rather than energized. I mentioned Wheeler earlier. When I have lunch with Steve, other than the last one—because in the middle of the sentence he stood up and said, "We got to go." I don't know what happened there. But other than the last one, and I'm teasing, when I walk out of a lunch with Wheeler, I'm energized by it. We may talk about all sorts of things, positive, negative, but I walk out in a better frame of mind energized by time with him.

I have other people where you know this. You pick up the phone. You see their name. And it says down here, "decline." You can't hit it fast enough. You know.

Haley called last night and her car battery was dead. And I said, "Well, you know, you can share it with me and I can pray for you. But beyond that, you got a husband. Call the guy." "Well, he's got the boys at baseball practice." So when they get home, they can figure it out.

Sometimes you're with people and at the end, you feel like her car did last night. They walk out and you're emotionally dead. You can only have so many of those before they begin to drain you. I describe a friend who's an absolute magnet for hurting people. And I try to tell him over and over again, you can only have so many of those people in your life.

The Danger of Unrealistic Expectations

It comes with expectations of all sorts. This is my classic, my favorite on expectations. And I learned a valuable lesson. I used to, when the church was smaller, I didn't do everything, but I did a lot. And I would do premarital counseling, which I don't think I was very good at it. Well, this will be evidence of it.

I had a couple and they had been married. It's like four months later. It's Monday night. Phone rings. Somebody's crying. That's not totally unusual. It's a gal. And I said, "Let me get Susan." "No, no, no, no. I need to talk to you." And I said, "Eh." And she said, "Listen, our marriage is not going to make it." I said, "Okay." She said, "We need to get together." I said, "Why don't you come over Friday?" And she said, "We need to come right now." And I said, "But it's Monday night football." And she said, "No, we need to come."

This is exactly how they walked in. She walked in first, distraught, crying, eyes red, beyond trying to cover up the makeup's running. He walked in behind her. I made eye contact with him. And he just went like this [gesture]. So we went in and sat down. I know talking to him is a waste of time. So I said to her, "What's the problem?" And she said, "This isn't going to work." I said, "It's only been four months." "It's not going to work." I said, "Why?" And she said, "I thought I married a godly man."

So I said to him, "Are you a godly man?" And he said, "I was until I married her, apparently." I don't know what happened. So again, that's the only role he can play in this conversation to validate. And I said, "Tell me the problem." And Susan's sitting down at the end. And she's got this smirk on her face.

And she said, "Well, he's not a godly man." I said, "Well, tell me." And she said, "Every night, we pray together before we go to bed. Three or four mornings a week, we have a Bible study we're doing. He calls me during the day frequently and we'll pray on the phone. He's leading a group in which we're in." And I'm looking down at Susan. I'm going, "Don't even start with how you wish you had this guy." And most women at this point would say, "That's pretty godly, isn't it?" Most.

Well, here's what I'd done. We had a point of agreement in our discussion that she wanted to marry a godly guy. And he was a godly guy. But what did we fail to do? Define what godly is. That sounds pretty good—in its generic sense, that sounds like a pretty good guy to me right there. Unrealistic, undefined expectations. That becomes the source of frustration, really, in most of life. Most of your employees. I used to say—here you go. The girls were young. I'd say, "Clean your room." I'd come back in an hour. They'd be messing around.

I'd say, "What is this? It's a clean room." "It's not a clean room." "Feels clean to me. Seems clean to me." So we then had to define that.

It's the same thing in work. When you've got a problem with an employee, you only have really one of two problems. It's either a training problem or a skill problem. You either didn't tell them what to do and how to do it, or they don't have the capacity in which you, as the boss, made a bad hire. So either way, we're going to take it back to you. You aren't training them. What does that mean? How does that look?

All of a sudden, your life is filled with these expectations. I thought when I came in and loved Christ, and I began to go on a Thursday morning, and I started going to church, and I started doing these things, all of a sudden, I thought, this is how life is going to be. But it isn't that way. It isn't that problems go away. It's in a sense that they intensify, if for no other reason, then you begin to see the problems that were already there.

The Trap of Temporary Prosperity

Here's the next thing. It's similar to stuff. It's this idea of temporary prosperity. Jesus is coming. He's dealing with the Pharisees. We're told in Luke 16:14 who loved money. And Jesus said, "What is highly valued among men is detestable in God's sight." It's that idea of the perspective yet again.

You read two passages here: James chapter 4 and 1 John 2:14. James chapter 4, James is writing, and he's dealing on the whole idea of this world, from above, wisdom from the earth. James 4:4: "You adulterous, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God."

1 John 2, we looked at it just briefly last week, is that this world is passing away, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and boastful pride of life. Whoever loves this, there's that challenge, there this present world is the same concept, is an enemy of God. There's a collision of value systems.

The Order of Priorities

It may not be that the list is different, but the order is. I learned this too in pre-marital counseling. You would say list the top ten things that are important to you, and they'd each list them. This is a huge deal, and so she'd have her list one through ten, he'd have his list one through ten. I'd see that items were on both lists, I'd say this is good. What I failed to say is prioritize them one through ten, because she would say dancing, he would say dancing. He meant, if I have a glass of wine at a wedding, I'll dance with you. She meant, we're going to go dancing every Friday night.

So God doesn't say stuff isn't on the list. God just says it's down here, not up here, that there's value systems. One of them is this idea of stuff, proper perspective on stuff. Is money okay? Sure it's okay. Is the love of money okay? No.

There's something in the next, what do we have, two left, three left, there's something on the next one that we included in here, probably for our guy friends. A Jew every morning would pray, "I thank God I'm not a Gentile or a woman." One of the things that Jesus did is Jesus was the great women's liberator. He is the one who came along and said listen, "I'm truly good." He elevated the role of woman, and in His ministry you saw a steady flow of women. He didn't think it was a sign of weakness to engage them and have them involved in His life. If I look on that Easter morning, it's the women at the tomb, it's the women who play a role.

Freedom from Anchoring Assets

Two more, and we've got to do them in five minutes. He wasn't constrained, and this is similar, by anchoring assets. Teacher said, they came to Him and they said, "Teacher will follow you," and He said, "Foxes have holes, birds of the air have nests, the Son of Man has no place to lay His head." Then they went their way. Jesus went to the Mount of Olives, which is like the KOA campground of His day.

I've heard some of the prosperity guys, one in particular, try to spend a ton of time explaining this away. You don't need displaying it away. It says He had no place to lay His head. Filling out His tax form was easy. When it came to property there wasn't any. Borrowed tomb, borrowed grave, borrowed cross. Is there anything wrong with home ownership? No.

The Challenge of Decluttering

Sandy and I have had a, and it's been resolved, but one of the things that's been a challenge for her in the time we've been married, a year and a half, is to declutter my life. So she would say I'm a hoarder, and I would say that I'm not a hoarder, I'm a collector. I don't know what the difference is. If you argue over terms long enough, you win.

I have like these mountains of stuff, books. If you come into our house, there's one, two, three, four, five, five and four, nine, ten, twelve bookcases. Not by design, it's just that Sandy was trying to get all the bookcases out of the boxes. I have a lot of shirts, which would make you ask, why do you wear the same ones? But I only like a few of them. So I have a closet, and in this closet I have a whole row of shirts, and underneath it a whole other row of shirts. I love shirts. In another closet which is in the office, I have a whole closet of shirts. In another bedroom I have another row of shirts.

Sandy's rule was if you don't wear it in a year, throw it out. I said, if you haven't worn it since Jimmy Carter was president, throw it out. But even these, and if that house burnt down, other than some things that are irreplaceable, pictures of the kids, my last baseball uniform, a couple of things like that, I don't know that I'd miss any of it. I don't know if ultimately this stuff isn't in the way, and so it all ties together.

The Final Entanglement

It's the last thing, and this might be the biggest in a way: He wasn't disabled by His rights being violated.

There was a show on TV the other night about innocent death row inmates—guys who had been on death row and through DNA or whatever it had been overturned, or guys who were in prison with an explanation from them, innocent or at least understandable that they were there. The only truly innocent man was Jesus. He's the only one where we can step back and say all of the legal authorities of the day that evaluated Him said He's innocent. "I can't find any guilt in Him." He was perfect. He never sinned, yet He went to the cross. On the cross He didn't say "Father, sick Him," He said "Father forgive them."

The Reality of Life's Injustices

This bitterness that comes from rights being violated... We're in a women's ministry gathering, and I said to one of our gals, "What's that chick's story over there?" She said, "What do you mean?" I said, "You know she looks like she's got issues," and all she's doing is standing on the other side of the room. She said, "Well she's—yeah she does, she's angry." Let's go with rightly so, but all of a sudden her husband had left her.

Listen, you don't need to write this down, and you can tell me—you're going to get screwed in life. Your life is going to be a series of these things. The more you say "I'm more concerned about you than me"—isn't that attention? When we got a husband and wife and they're fighting, and he'll go "All right, all right, I'll do it. I'll be the guy I'm supposed to be." The unspoken question more often than not is "I'll be the guy I need to be," and you want to guess what he says next? "For how long?"

"Okay I'm going to do this, I'll give it—what are you, two weeks? What are you, three weeks?" All the time the undercurrent is "And I'm going to be evaluating you, and I'm going to do this for two weeks, but if you're not responding, then I'm not going down this line." We're saying no, it's not about you and your rights. It's the idea of love. Love doesn't take into account a wrong suffered. Humility is concerned about the other person.

The Comprehensive Nature of Entanglements

So there's the wrap on that. You can add to this list, and we do this every year. We'll do it right after the first of the year, where we take a look at this and we say as you're working through that list, what are one of those things that have you in bondage? One of those things that are—and I'm going to add to this, though it's not part of the lesson—they're not just freedom stealers, they steal your joy. They rob your joy.

We're supposed to be joyful people, but it's hard to be if my life is torn apart because of these issues that are stealing away from what God would have me be. We pick up there next week—be the last session in this series, something new right after.

Father, help us acknowledge that this is how we think and feel. Let us accurately assess our life. Look at those areas where we have enslaved ourselves, we've entangled ourselves in the thought process of everyday life. God, free us from that. Not free us so we can play more golf, or read more, or watch more TV, or take more vacations. Free us so we can be the men and women You've called us to be. We pray.