Freedom
Tom Shrader continues his life management series by examining spiritual freedom, using Jesus as the ultimate model of a free person. He explores eight areas where Christ demonstrated freedom: from ineffective traditions, daily necessities preoccupation, unhealthy relationships, unrealistic expectations, temporary prosperity, gender constraints, material assets, and bitterness over violated rights. Shrader challenges listeners to identify what invisible barriers are stopping their spiritual growth.
“The only thing that can stop you, if you're a Christian, the only thing that can stop you is you.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Life Management (2001)
Recorded: November 08, 2001
Duration: 43 min
Themes: freedom, barriers, growth, expectations, relationships, traditions, materialism, bitterness, feeling trapped, struggling with expectations, dealing with toxic relationships, young adult, new believer, mentor, parent, overwhelmed by responsibilities
Scripture: Luke 12:22-31, Mark 7, Matthew 12:46-50, Matthew 9:37-38, Luke 16:9-15, Luke 8:1-3, Matthew 8:19-20, Luke 23:34
Theological Themes: spiritual freedom, christology, sanctification, spiritual growth, incarnation, humanity of christ, spiritual maturity, christian living
Full Transcript
This is the fourth week of what's going to be seven or eight weeks dealing with this issue of life management. What I want to do and think I need to do every week is make certain you all are on the same page, and that is this: Life has with it a lot of different aspects, and the object here is to be successful or to be winning or to be doing what God wants us to do on each and every one of the fronts that we have to encounter. So that's what we're looking at.
School, for example, prepares you to perhaps be successful in a specific area. My girls are involved—one's involved in nursing now, the other's in a nuclear medicine program. Both of these kids are being prepared and trained to go out into some specified field, and that training will be important for them in that area. If you're in the area of law or engineering or architecture, whatever it might be, education helps prepare you for that field.
But what education doesn't do—you don't look to them to do and they wouldn't do and they'd screw it up if they tried to do—would be to prepare you for the balance of things in life. They're not going to tell you, for example, how to live, how to have a successful marriage, how to date in a godly fashion, how to have friends. But we want to fill in those gaps. We're happy to do that for you.
Jesus as Our Role Model
We said, and again, I know this is repetitive, but the only reason I repeat it is because it's critical: Our role model for this exercise is Jesus Christ. Now when we say Jesus is the role model, you need to understand that that can produce some confusion. So you just need to listen closely.
We believe the Bible teaches that Jesus is fully God and fully man, that Jesus is like us in every way except sin, yet at the same time He retains His deity. When we say to you, be like Jesus, we're not asking you to model His deity. You can't do that. He's God, you aren't, nor are you becoming a god, nor will you ever be a god. You're a creature. He's the creator. There's a chasm of difference. There's a world of difference there. So what we're asking you to do is not to model Jesus' deity.
At the same time, guys like me tend to get very conservative and sometimes focus so much on the deity of Christ that we miss the humanity of Christ—that He was like us in every way except sin, therefore He encountered all of the things that you encounter in life. And from that, we can learn a great deal. So Jesus is our role model.
Starting with Purpose
We began what I think was the appropriate place to begin, and that is purpose: to understand who you are and why you're here and all that goes with it. Jesus understood that. In fact, before He was born, Joseph was told, "You'll name Him Jesus because He will save His people from their sins." That's the whole objective here. Jesus understood that all through His life.
Jesus lived a life understanding that there was this point in time at which He would die on the cross. If you read through the gospel, especially the gospel of John—you read through the gospel of John, and really from the midway point of that gospel, Jesus is coming back again and again and again with, "I must go to the cross, I must go to the cross, I must go to the cross." He understood that He was going to die. He had a purpose and He understood it. That's where we started.
Freedom: The Fourth Topic
Today, once we talk about purpose, what we're talking about frequently is the thing or things that would interfere with the achievement of that purpose. And today we're talking about freedom. And that's probably, when we say Jesus is our role model, this is probably the most appropriate of the conversations because Jesus is the freest person that's ever lived. In fact, not only was He free, He was the great liberator. He came to set you free.
Jesus speaks in one of the gospels and He says this: "The Spirit of the Lord is on me because He has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recover the sight for the blind and to release the oppressed."
Think about it a second. Jesus came to proclaim freedom for the prisoner. As far as I can tell, in reading all of the gospels, other than His arrest right before His conviction and His crucifixion, I don't think Jesus ever visited a prison. He came to proclaim the good news to the poor, that's for sure, and yet we regularly see Him speaking to rich people. In Luke 12 and I think about 17 and 19, Jesus has one-on-one encounters with somebody who's described as a rich man, as Zacchaeus, a parable about rich people. Sight for the blind—indeed He did heal and give sight back to some who were physically blind—and release the oppressed.
The Spiritual Nature of Freedom
You see how they missed the kind of Messiah He was going to be? Because they were looking for this grand Messiah that would somehow sweep in maybe a political move or even a military move that would accomplish all these things. Jesus did this on a physical plane, but don't miss it. He's talking in a spiritual context as well.
Beginning in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit"—literally spiritually bankrupt. Jesus came to preach the good news to the poor, to release the prisoner, to free him. What's that mean? Well, we're enslaved to sin. Romans 6 says that. We're prisoners to sin, we're slaves to sin. Jesus frees us from that.
To give sight to the blind—He's talking about the spiritually blind. Haven't you had that? I was talking to a guy the other day, a smart guy, and I'm just sitting there and I'm laying out for him what is so blatantly, obviously the truth of who Jesus is, of who he is, of Christ's death. And I'm telling you, this guy didn't get it. I'm looking into his eyes. There's nobody home. There's nothing there. He's glazed over. He's trying to figure out something to say. He doesn't understand. He doesn't get it. He's as blind as a bat. I'm sitting right
there in front of him. There it is. There's the truth. Man, I've just served you up a seven-course beautiful dinner and he's too blind to see it. Jesus comes and now He opens our eyes. That's what happened to you.
I hope you get this. I was watching television last night and they had an evangelist on and the evangelist was talking about today is the day of salvation and today choose who you're going to follow. If you don't choose today, then you may never have this chance again, whatever. This may be the only time. You're preaching to dead people. If the Holy Spirit doesn't open their eyes, they're never going to get it. See that? This is absolutely critical. At some point in time, God opened your eyes so you were, once I was blind, but now I see. That's what that means.
And not only those, to release the oppressed, there's the idea of that freedom again. It is what separates Christianity from all other religion. Religion does not free you up. It puts you in bondage. Bondage to ritual, bondage to men, all sorts of bondage. Jesus comes and says, no, now you're free.
The Reality of Human Nature
Let me say it to you again, because I'm still reeling from this September 11th thing, reeling in the sense that it was exactly what I thought it would be. It was revival for three weeks. One more time, the Christians to me look like idiots. They were all excited, God's doing some great thing and all these churches are going to fill them. Look at, nothing happened, you see this, nothing happened.
Nothing happened. We're two months away from this, nothing happened. Your churches are smaller than they were before. Isn't that right? It's all back to the way it was. It was like this year, God gave us Christmas and Easter and an extra special holiday for people to come in and screw up the parking lot. That's what happened. That's all that happened.
Do you not understand mankind enough to know that they're going to come running when they think they need something, but the minute they get their breath, they're going to just run back to the way they were? Very interesting. And what separated them was, the minute you said Jesus, that's what I observed. People came in to see me and they were people who were new to the church or new to whatever and they were coming because of September 11th and now they needed their religion. They came and they wanted to talk about spirituality and they wanted to talk about God, but the minute I said to them, no, I don't want to talk to you about God, I want to talk to you about Jesus. They said, well, we're going to have to go somewhere else. Which is fine, whatever, but you're lost.
Somebody said, well, we come only when we really need Him. And I said, that can't be true because we need Him 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We're in need all the time. All that happened on September 11th is God just lifted the veil a little bit so you could see how pathetically impotent you are in life. And then He dropped it back down and we went right back around the way we were. That's all, no big deal.
Understanding True Freedom
Freedom. Here's what we're talking about. We're talking about getting rid of the entanglements and the influences that come into your life. You have the definition in your outline. That really prevents you or inhibits you from speaking and moving and thinking all the things that you want to do.
What we're trying to do, because freedom can get overemphasized, but I want to put it in perspective. What we're trying to do is to free you up from the things of this world, but never free you up from God. When Susan and I had Sarah, we weren't Christians. And yet we had to develop some sort of child-rearing philosophy. And what we came up with was to try to discipline her and move her and shape her.
And then all of a sudden, God invaded our lives and He changed our lives. And then, for the first time, we had a philosophy of child-rearing and it was this simple: to make them independent of us and totally dependent upon God. Totally dependent upon God. That's our desire.
It is so cool. I'll go down at night, even now, at the end of a hard day, and these girls, our girls right now, especially Sarah, is just working very, very hard. She's working six days a week. She's working some 12-hour days. She's got school in there. And I'll go down at night at, she's got to go to bed early. She'll stay at 9 o'clock. It's my bedtime. But she'll go down there when she's tired and she'll be sitting there before she dozes off with her Bible, making notes, journaling. And I get great satisfaction out of the thought that she is now growing more and more independent of us and more and more dependent upon Him.
So that's what we're trying to do with you here. We want you free from the trappings of this world. We don't want you free from God. We don't want you walking around independent of Him.
Freedom from Ineffective Traditions
But here you go. Freedom in, I think, we've got eight areas. Here's the first one. Christ was not bound by ineffective traditions. In Mark 7, the Pharisees and the teachers of the law said to Jesus, "Why do your disciples live according to the traditions? Why don't your disciples live according to the traditions of the elders instead of eating food with their unclean hands?"
And Jesus replied, "Isaiah was right when he prophesied." See what Jesus does? He goes right to the basis of what they accepted as truth, which is the Old Testament. "Isaiah had it nail-cold when he prophesied about you hypocrites." Let me stop just a second, because you get all these people that want to, "Oh, Jesus was just love and Jesus was just," look, I'd never say this. He prophesied about you, you hypocrites. "You've let go of the commands of God and you hold on to the traditions of man."
That's what man does. That's what religion does. I'm going to go out and let me just ramble just a bit here. That's even what Christians
do in a church context. They build up all these traditions. Now, you've got certain traditions that are good. We're coming into that traditional time of the year. You've got Thanksgiving. Yeah, that's my favorite holiday. You've got that, because you've got all the stuff for Christmas without any of the pressure of the gifts. I love Thanksgiving. You just eat. You watch football. You sleep. And everybody understands it. It's just a great time.
So He's got traditions. We've got traditions at Christmas. We've got stuff that we do at our house and with the village and the stuff. We've got all that. Everybody's got traditions. I'm not saying get rid of those. What He's talking about here is, there's the commands of God. Now, here's what God says. Do this. But then we tend to add all this stuff to it.
Let me ask you to figure this out in your own life. Look at your own church. It'd be fascinating to go through the Scripture and say, okay, here's what a church is supposed to do. And then over here, it lists all the things that your church does. And I think what you'd find is, if you had a hundred things that you do, I think you'd find that three or four or five of them are prescribed biblically in a specific way. So the rest are preferential.
The Music Struggle
I'll show you. This is a big deal, I think. You want to see what churches struggle with, I'll tell you what it is. Music. Their constant struggle for music. To try to get it hip enough, to try to get it quiet enough. So rather than have the fortitude to make a decision, here's what some churches do, and they call it wisdom. We'll have a traditional service, and then we'll have a hip-hop service, and then we'll have a blended service. And some of you go to churches like that.
Let me tell you, and this is just my view, I'll tell you what, that's really bad. Because here's what you do. You take all the old people, and you put them in a room with an organ and hymns, and now you give them what they want. You just play right to them. And now what do you teach them? That we're here to just give you what you want. Then you take all the young people and you go, and what do you teach them? We're here to give you what you want.
And now you create all these subsets. You have no cross-culture. The old people don't learn to give, and don't learn to yield. And the young people don't learn to understand the tradition. And rather than blend a family together, you isolate groups even more. You do the very thing you're trying to not do.
A Challenge to the Greatest Generation
Let me talk, because especially in this group, you've got a lot of old people in this room. So let me talk to you. Where? Yeah. Well, look to your left and right. I met a guy a couple of weeks ago, and He's involved in a church. It at one time was a very large church. It's now a smaller church. It was a church that had a great history, and it's fading. And He just can't figure out what the problem is.
And I said, you know, I don't know that I know, but I can give you my guess. My guess is you've got a bunch of old people that won't let go of the reins. Here's what you've got to do. You've got to set them down, and you've got to say this, they're the greatest generation. You were. I have extraordinary respect for my father's generation. I have extraordinary respect for you. You have to set those people together, and you have to say, you were the greatest generation. You took Normandy. You went and you took land. But now you've got to do something more difficult. Now you've got to give up control. Now you're not taking control. You've got to yield.
See, that's what every church faces. They don't want to hack you off, because you're the ones with the cash, and you're the ones paying the bill. Hey, I'm just telling you, because you're not in my church, I can tell you the truth. That's the truth. They're making decisions they know are detrimental to the body, because they're afraid you'll take your money and walk if they make the changes.
And you need to institute the change. You need to go to them and say, we are here. We're committed to you. Here's the cash. Here's the money. Here's the support. You do what you need to do to make this church what it needs to be. You need to do that. They're scared to death. I talk to them. They're petrified that if they do what they think they need to do to get the congregation young and vital, you'll walk. And if you walk, you take the cash, and if you take the cash, they're in trouble. That's the way the cow ate the cabbage, right there.
So do it. Lead it. If they won't lead, go in there and tell them, put some life into this thing. It's dying. Look around. We couldn't find three teenagers if we wanted to. Something's wrong. Fix it.
The Challenge of Tradition
But what happens is, it's so easy to stay with these traditions. I'm thinking about it. As I grow older, and I look at our church, am I going to go through that same process? Will we go through that same process? The answer to that is yes, but hopefully we're aware of it, and we're making decisions that will deal with that now.
Here's the second thing. For those four of you that we have not yet alienated, I'll tell you what, I tell you that with all the love in the world, that's just the truth.
Not Preoccupied with Daily Necessities
Here's the next thing. And I love the way we said this. He was not preoccupied with daily necessities. We acknowledge that these are necessities. It's Luke 12. Jesus said to the disciples, "Therefore, I tell you, don't worry about what you're going to eat, or about your life, or your body, or what you'll wear. The pagans run after such things, but you seek first God's kingdom."
Jesus never denies that these are important. In fact, He says they're part of life. You've got to have something to eat. You've got to have something to wear. You've got to have a place to live. There's nothing wrong with even providing those. There's nothing wrong with working toward that end. What's wrong is if I'm preoccupied with them. They dominate everything. He says that's what the pagans
The pagans get together and talk about how much they've made. The pagans get together and talk about where they live. We get distracted from the things that are really important.
Jesus tells stories, parables, and the parables constantly have the theme that life is more than stuff, and that most of us live at a time when life is stuff. I did a funeral on Tuesday for a young man, 36, and his wife woke up, left, came back, and he was in bed. He was dead. And I was trying to make the point at that funeral that what this young man experienced was absolutely common to man. Every person is going to die. And yet we have a tendency to live like we're going to live forever, and make decisions like we're going to be here forever.
Don't Be Preoccupied with Temporary Things
We let the things of this world distract us. Jesus says, "Therefore I tell you, don't worry about your life." This isn't an excuse to say, "Oh God will provide." We had a guy, and this is an absolutely true story, who comes in and tells me he lost his job. So I see him three or four weeks later, and I said, "Do you have a job yet? How's the search going?" He said, "Well, I don't really know." And I said, "What do you mean you don't really know?" And he said, "I think God will provide. I'm just waiting for the phone to ring." And I said, "Well, I think God will provide, and here's how He'll do it: through interviews and a resume, the traditional thing."
Can the phone ring? Yeah, sure. But God doesn't say, "Here's your excuse, here's your ticket through life. You sit and I'll do everything for you." He understands that we work, and we use wisdom, and we use our head. What He's saying is, don't be preoccupied with this stuff.
What preoccupies you? When your head hits the pillow at night, what are you thinking about? And so often it's stuff. It's the next deal, it's getting the inventory balance, it's getting the things in, it's the problems. It's all the stuff that's temporary by its very nature. That's what He's saying.
Jesus Wasn't Distracted by Unhealthy Human Relationships
Here's the third thing: He wasn't distracted by unhealthy human relationships. This is Jesus with His family. While Jesus was still talking to the crowd, His mother and His brothers stood outside, and they wanted to speak to Him, and somebody came in to Him. Someone said, "Your mother and Your brothers are outside. They want to speak to You." Jesus replied, "Who's My mother? Who are My brothers?" Pointing to His disciples, He said, "Here's My mother, here are My brothers, for whoever does the will of My Father in heaven is My brother, My sister, My mother."
This is right at a time where Mark's gospel tells us that Jesus had started His earthly ministry and His family said to Him—we talked about this a couple of weeks ago—His family said, "Somebody better get Him. He's nuts. Come and take Him away. He's goofy. He's crazy."
November and December, there will be a steady procession of people who come up to see me after the sessions or who call or who email who want me to help them fix their goofy families. Their mothers are nuts, their brothers are nuts, their sisters are nuts. And it comes this time of year because now they've got to go home. They got the plane ticket, they're hoping that somehow there's a problem and this flight gets canceled, but they're on their way to Pittsburgh to be with these goofy people.
Let me just help you out: it isn't going to be okay. You've got situations here where you've got people around you who aren't healthy. They don't know Christ, they're not saved. You can't go into that and think that because you're present in the midst of that, everything's going to be alright. And some of you spend months in absolute terror of having to go into that situation and you're devastated coming out of it for months. You cannot be in that kind of bondage to unhealthy relationships. You can't fix it.
The Problem of Unrealistic Expectations
This ties very closely to the very next point, and I'll try to bring them together, and that's realistic expectations. This is a time where Jesus is saying in Matthew 9, where Jesus is talking about all of these things that are going on and there's things that are happening and there's lots of stuff and they're saying, "Jesus, You go do it." And Jesus' response is, "The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest and He'll send workers out in the field." In other words, don't look to Me to do all this stuff. You've got unrealistic expectations on Me.
Let me try to blend these things. My firm conviction is that in most relationships, problems develop because of unrealistic expectations. Management has unrealistic expectations of labor. Labor has unrealistic expectations of management. Husbands have unrealistic expectations of wives, and vice versa.
I can give you a billion illustrations. We had a couple. They came. I did the premarital stuff. I don't do that anymore, but I did it then. About six months after they'd been married, the phone rings one night, and I pick it up. It's Tom. I said, "What's wrong?" So I said, "Let's get together. Come over tonight." So they come in the door. Here's this couple, been married about six months. She's the first one in. She walks in, and she just looks awful. She just looks like she hasn't slept. He walks in behind her. I look at him, and he goes, "I don't know." So they come in, and they sit on the couch.
I counseled a couple once where the husband seemed very devout, but the wife told me he wasn't worth talking to at this point. When I asked what the problem was, she said they weren't going to make it. I thought he was a godly man, so I asked him directly if he considered himself godly. He replied, "Well, I thought I was until I married her. I guess I'm not a godly man. I don't know."
When I asked her to explain what he was doing wrong, she began listing things: "We pray together every night, but we don't pray together every morning, just some mornings. We don't have Bible study every day—we have Bible study together maybe three days a week." As she continued her list, I thought to myself, "She married Paul the apostle!"
The Problem of Undefined Expectations
Here's what had happened. During our premarital counseling, I had asked her what was important to her in a husband. She said, "A godly husband." I asked him if he understood that, and both said yes. I asked if he was a godly guy, and both said yes. But we never defined what "godly" meant. Most women I know would call a guy who lived like this husband a godly man. But we didn't define it.
I have a friend who goes crazy every Father's Day because he knows his kids won't be there and won't send him cards. I told him, "I don't get it. Why are you so upset? Let it go. It doesn't matter. If they're not going to give you a Father's Day card, why do you get vexed over it?"
Let me try to blend this issue of unhealthy relationships with unrealistic expectations. If you have a brother who's strung out on drugs and a family that starts drinking heavily when they get together, it isn't going to be a Norman Rockwell Christmas. It isn't going to happen. For you to pretend that it will only fills you with disappointment. I'm telling you, you have a spiritual problem because it will mess you up.
Freedom from Toxic Relationships
There has to be freedom enough—does that mean we give up on people? No. But it means I approach them with realistic expectations. Are you asking me if you shouldn't go home when all you do is fight? Maybe. But people say, "It's my mom and my dad." Do you see how foolish this thinking is?
If your parents and family are dragging you down, then I'm saying forget them. Get a new set of moms and dads and brothers and sisters—that's the body of Christ. Can you go and fix those people? Not unless they want to be fixed.
I understand the tension here because you have to reach out to them and be salt and light. But if you can't go and be salt and light while remaining healthy and intact, then I think you need to re-evaluate what you're doing.
Jesus and Temporary Prosperity
Jesus isn't encumbered by these problems. He wasn't enamored by temporary prosperity. In Luke 16, He says, "I tell you, use the wealth of the world to gain friends for yourself, so that when it's gone, you'll be welcomed into eternal dwellings."
A little later in the same chapter, the Pharisees who loved money heard this and were sneering at Jesus. Jesus said, "You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of men, but God knows your hearts. What is highly valued among men is detestable in God's sight."
God says two things here. First, here are these temporary things—use them for eternal purposes. Some of you have been given a great deal of money, and you're trying to get a double benefit. You want to hoard it and enjoy it here while getting credit and joy from that, then pass it on to something after you're dead and get satisfaction from that too.
Some of you are taking these temporary things and accumulating them for your own good. When Jesus says "use it," He's saying take these temporary things and use them for eternal things.
Material Things vs. Materialism
I talk a lot about materialism, and you could misconstrue that to think I'm anti-material. I'm not at all. What Jesus is acknowledging here is that temporary things impact eternal things. This study wouldn't exist if somebody—I don't know who because I don't handle money—somewhere wasn't sending in money to pay for this. Your churches function because people send in money to take care of operations.
This is never an anti-material message; it's an anti-materialism message. You don't find life in material things. They are not equal to life, nor are they what life's all about.
I listened the other day to somebody talking about the Diamondbacks winning the World Series. They said, "The people of the city of Phoenix and the state of Arizona can now hold their heads high." Really? My head wasn't down to start with. It was fun and great—we were sitting there with my kids, who aren't that into baseball, watching when Gonzo had that little flip hit, and everybody went crazy. But this doesn't have much connection to life, I don't think.
God's Value System vs. Man's
This is a powerful thing that Jesus says: "What is highly valued among men is detestable in God's sight." Do you get this? It's not that God has His value system ranked 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and man's system is the same things in reverse order: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. That's not what it says.
It says what's number one for man is detestable to God. These aren't just out of whack in terms of arrangements. What He's saying is they're mutually exclusive.
Jesus isn't dwelling on the temporary and saying you should knock yourself out getting whatever you want, and then after that it'll be okay. He's not saying you should pursue these things first, and then the rest will be fine. That's not what He says.
He says, you pursue the things of God, and the rest of these things take their order after that. Jesus isn't distracted by that.
Breaking Down Social Barriers
Jesus wasn't afraid as a man to take help from women, and that might not seem like much to us. This is gigantic in Jesus' days. In Jesus' days, women had no status. The Jews prayed each morning, "I thank God I'm not a Gentile or a woman." They prayed that all the time.
Jesus understood this. In Luke 8, Jesus is traveling around. There's a group of women that He speaks to, and in verse 3, it says these women were supporting Him. I say it again: Christianity is the great liberator. Christianity is the thing that ought to break down walls and bigotry between people and classes of people.
They came to Jesus, and they accused Him of this. "You hang around with the drunkards and the prostitutes and the tax collectors." You know what? He didn't say, "Well, I do not." He said, "Yeah. So what? God called me. The physician goes to the people who are sick." See, there is an understanding here where Jesus said, "I'm breaking down barriers, and I'm not ashamed of it."
Freedom from Material Constraints
He's not constrained by assets. The teacher of the law came to Him and said, "Teacher, I'll follow you." Jesus said, "Foxes have holes, birds of the air have nests, the Son of Man has no place to lay His head." Jesus said, "You know what? I can't offer you much. Well, what are you looking for? What kind of compensation package are you looking for? We don't have a magnificent retirement plan, but we do have the ultimate deferred benefits plan, but I can't help you out here much. We don't have a lot of assets for you."
I saw in our song sheet, I think it's this week or next, we're singing a song at church that makes me nervous when we sing it, and it's "I Surrender All." See, I try it when I sing these songs. I'm serious about what I sing. I'm willing to sing, "I surrender most." I'll surrender a lot, but all? "All to Thee, my precious Savior," everything?
Jesus said, "Listen, you need to understand something. You need to count the cost here, pal. Following me has a cost to it. People are not going to just beat your door down. They're not just going to say you're the greatest thing in the world. You'll be persecuted by men and women, you'll suffer."
I know people who say, "I'm going to get serious about this when my pension plan's vested or when the boat's paid for, when the house is paid for." You don't know if you're ever going to get there. I'm telling you, the guy the other day was 36 years old. I know how ineffective it is to try to manipulate you emotionally. I wouldn't try to do that. But I'm telling you, there's an end coming and you don't know when it is. And what I've observed is, it's harder, not easier, to get focused as you get older. You get more set in your ways.
The Church's Mission vs. Consumer Mentality
I go back to this music thing, if I can just spend a second on this. What the church has done that is such a tragic mistake is given the illusion that they're there to meet your needs. Churches are busting their necks to try to meet your needs. People die with needs unmet. The greatest need you have is a spiritual need. The greatest need you have is for truth.
When you walk in with a consumer mentality, when I walk in, I'll use myself, when I walk into Nordstrom, I have a certain expectation. And they know that. And they'll tell you that. Nordstrom will tell you, "We're here to make you happy and to serve you." When you walk into a church, your attitude is exactly the opposite, or should be. I'm here to serve, not be served. I'm here to worship and give worship, not receive praise.
Freedom from Victimization
Jesus wasn't incapacitated because His rights were violated. This is Luke 23. Jesus is now being led away for crucifixion with the criminals. They now hang Him on the cross, and in verse 34, Jesus said, "Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing," and they divide up His clothes and they cast lots.
We see people, maybe you're one of them, who are walking around all the time with this idea that somehow you've been hurt, and because you've been hurt, now that hurt needs to be fixed, and now you're bitter, and now you're angry. Do you understand that the only person you're hurting is yourself in this? It's the only person you're hurting.
And I see it. We had a guy, again, I can't make this stuff up. I had a guy who's angry, and he's bitter, and this guy's like 40 years old, 45 years old. I said, "What are you angry about?" And he said, "High school, high school baseball, in a state championship game, they didn't put me in to pitch, so the scouts never seen me, so I never got the scholarship, I never got to pitch in the major leagues." I said, "You've got to be kidding me. I said, first of all, if you're that good, all you've got to do is walk on out there and throw that baby, and somebody somewhere is going to—they're dying. They're dying for guys like you. You're carrying that around? You're 45 years old, and you're still bitter about high school? You've been victimized?"
I have no question in my mind that you've been fired unfairly. Maybe some of you have experienced the pain of a spouse who's walked out on you, or a kid who's thumbed their nose at you, or maybe—they tell me, I can't get my arms around this statistic that one out of four women have been sexually molested. That sounds way too high, but I don't know. So I know one thing: there's a lot of pain and hurt in here, but harboring it isn't going to help you any.
I don't care how much you've been a victim, you've never been victimized like Christ. He was the perfect man who was held—they held court three times to determine His fate, and all three times they declared Him not guilty, and then at the end of the day they decided that they need to crucify Him for their own benefit.
Ironically, this forgiveness was for our benefit as well. And at the end of the day, what does He say? "Father, forgive them." See, if you're going to manage all these components of life, you have to understand who you are. You have to strive to achieve the potential that God has given you, and that's going to be different for every person, but you have to be unencumbered. You can't have yourself in bondage to these unhealthy relationships, or to the material things.
Breaking Free from Invisible Barriers
All these things are stopping you. We have, on our street where we live, a guy who has a dog, and it's real interesting to me, because when I drive down the street, I'm not sure this guy doesn't have one of those electronic sonar fences. The dog runs right to the edge of the lot and stops, and he's either a very well-trained dog, or I think he has this invisible fence. That's my conclusion. He runs to this thing, and that dog just stops.
What I'm saying to you is, you have these invisible things around you. You run, God's just starting to do something in your life. You're starting to see fruit. You run, and then all of a sudden, something pulls you up quick. The love of stuff, the bondage of a sick relationship, something's stopping you, and you have to get rid of them. You just have to let it go. You have to get rid of it.
The only thing that can stop you, if you're a Christian, the only thing that can stop you is you. That's the only limit you have—you.
We'll pick up right there next week.
Prayer
Father, help us see this truth. Let us live lives that are free. God, help us understand that in almost every one of these instances, we are in bondage because we let ourselves be. We aren't free because we've decided that we want to be bitter, or we want to be angry, or that somehow we're going to take realistic expectations and throw them aside, and enter in or continue in a relationship that's unproductive and destructive. God, help us see that.
Maybe it's a job. Maybe we just are in the wrong place, and we know it. God, help us. Help us see what You would have us be, how You would have us live, what You would have us do. God, we ask that in Jesus' name, amen.