Music.
Welcome to The Rooted Podcast where we believe that life change can happen for,
your good and for God's glory. Today is the first episode. I've done some
podcasting but I've never done a podcast by myself so I'm kind of trying to
figure out just exactly what that looks like and how to best ensure that I'm
having a dialogue with you whether you're listening or watching. And so
So today, we're going to kind of pick up and start with sort of the first principle that
I found to be really key to lasting life change, something that runs throughout the narrative
of Scripture, and something that is talked about over and over again in recovery literature,
and things like the Twelve Steps.
And the way that I've formulated it is to say simply that we need to live in the light.
So what do I mean by that? I certainly don't mean like just leave the lights on and run your electric bill up.
What do I mean by that?
And let's start with just a kind of analogy, an example here.
Sometimes we get all kind of jumbled up when we're thinking about life issues and emotional
issues and spiritual issues.
But when we think about the physical, when we think about practical things, things become
more clear. So let's start in the physical realm first.
Let's imagine that maybe you've got a cold, right? It's not a cold that's so bad that you are like on your back, you're coughing and you
can't go to work, right?
But it's enough to be in a nuisance. It's enough that you are not going to get over it right away.
And so you decide to not call off from work. You decide to go into work and try and work through, you know, take some DayQuil and get
through it.
Well, you do that and what ends up happening? Well, what ends up happening is you don't get better
as fast as maybe you would if you took some time off.
If you keep trying to live your life the same way, right? And you're trying to suppress the cough
and you're trying not to deal with it. And then eventually the cough turns into something worse.
Right? Maybe perhaps you get some inflammation in your lungs and it turns into pneumonia or something like that.
And you continue to try and just play it off, Just use some medication, try and downplay to everyone around you that you're sick, and
and try and just keep on going.
And pretty soon you're on your back and you're very sick and you need to do something about it.
You need to go to a doctor, you need to address the fact that you're sick and deal with it in an open manner
and actually just, you know, get some medication, get some help.
And that seems really straightforward, right? If you have something going on, you need to go get it taken care of, you need to talk about it.
If you've got a, similarly, a gash on your leg and it gets infected, right,
the best thing for you to do is to go to the doctor and say,
Hey, I've got a gash on my leg.
You wouldn't go to the doctor and say, Hey, I just don't feel good, but not tell them, you know, exactly where the wound is.
And so that seems really clear to us when it comes to the physical practicalities of life that,
Yeah, like we should address problems head on. We shouldn't hide them. We shouldn't try minimizing
them. Generally, rest and restoration is probably the best path forward, is whenever we can. But,
when it comes to our emotional lives, comes to our spiritual lives, comes to the way we live and
conduct ourselves, that's not always our first response. A lot of times our first response is
rather to hide the thing up, to cover it up, to avoid talking about it or thinking about it.
And that leads to a place of, well, ultimately a place where wounds and things fester, where things get worse.
And so what we've got here is kind of this ongoing thing where we can often choose to,
hide something away, and in doing so we think that perhaps we're avoiding something, but,
In reality, it's really quite troublesome, right?
We really need to address the thing. So let's put this in some context.
Perhaps you or a loved one is dealing with an addiction, right, and addictions often are this thing that is shameful.
We feel guilt around, and we don't wanna deal with it, right, we don't wanna talk openly about it.
It's not like we wanna wear a badge and say, I'm an addict, right?
But as time goes on, and if the addiction is particularly bad and has been going on
for a particularly long time, it often actually is just as much as wearing a badge that says I'm an addict.
It becomes what's called an open secret, where people around the person and the individual
who has the addiction know that they have an addiction, but they're just not talking about it to them.
And that person is just trying to continue to pretend like they don't have a problem.
And that can be anything, again, from alcohol to pornography to shopping to gambling, anything where we begin
to use a substance or a thing in order to cope cope or to avoid with something, where it becomes compulsive.
But that also can be something around the path of like healing, whether you've had maybe some trauma or something really awful happened to you or something done to you, right?
If we don't want to talk about it because it's really painful, it's really hurtful, it has a lot of really negative memories associated with it and some really strong and hurtful emotions with it,
A lot of times we come into a place where we just don't want to talk about it, right?
I'd rather not deal with those emotions. I'd rather not deal with that hurt. Can't I just pretend like it's not there?
That's the That's what we like to default to because that in our minds seems easier than,
dealing with the difficult pieces and parts of emotions.
Or Maybe we're just stuck Maybe we need to make some changes in our life because the consequences of not maybe taking care of our health,
Maybe the consequences of not building and maintaining healthy relationships is beginning to compound,
Right, but change is hard right admitting that we're stuck and asking for help,
Getting resources and community around us requires that we admit that we're not in a good place.
It admits that we don't have it all together.
And that's not where we like to live. to live. We like to live in a place where things are,
at least on the outside, look all put together. We like to put on these masks. We like to think
and make everyone else around us think that we've got it all together.
But this, if we, again, go back to that analogy that I was just talking about with the physical
illness, a cut on the leg, or a sickness, or a bug, or a virus that we have, ignoring it and
and trying to hide it can often lead it to grow more and more acute, maybe lead into
chronic conditions, can create significant problems if we don't bring it out into the
light and get the healing and the help that we need.
And that seems obvious there, but again, when we're talking about things like addiction,
hurts in our past, making significant life change, needing help where we're stuck, it
doesn't always seem quite as easy or as natural to bring it forward into the light.
And this is part of the human condition. We've been doing this since the beginning of time.
If you know the story of Adam and Eve, right, Adam and Eve are placed into the perfect garden.
They have communion with the Lord, and God gives them kind of two choices. Not two choices,
And he gives them a command, a singular command, he says, don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
You can eat from the tree of life, but don't eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
And we're going to talk more about those two trees, because I think they're really, really
significant in how we understand the biblical understanding of where we find ourselves when
we find ourselves stuck in addiction, hurt, or in need of significant change.
But let's stick with this story for now.
Adam and Eve were told not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil,
and the story goes that they did. They were deceived by the serpent, and they ate from
that tree. And let's read that story together here. I'm going to jump into Genesis 3 here,
and this is the story, and I want you to pay attention to what exactly it is that Adam
and Eve did, how they responded after they had done this, after they had eaten from the fruit.
And so, this is out of the NIV translation if you find, if that's curious to you. So, Genesis 3,
I'm going to start in verse 1 and just read through the story here.
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals that the Lord had made. He said to
the woman, did God really say you must not eat from any tree in the garden? And notice that that's
a distortion of what God said. It's a lie. And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat from the
trees of the garden, but God did say you must not eat from the fruit, from the tree that is in the
middle of the garden, and you must not touch it or you will die. Notice God didn't say that you
mustn't touch it. He said that you shouldn't eat it. Another slight distortion. And you will
not certainly die, the serpent said to the woman, for God knows that when you eat from it,
your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. The serpent slips
in this lie that the woman believes. And when the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good
for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some
and ate it. She also gave some to her husband who was there with her, and he ate it. And.
Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked, and they
sewed fig trees together and made coverings for themselves." Notice what they did right
after they realized they were naked.
And then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord as he was walking through the garden in the cool of the day
and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden but the Lord called to them, where are you?
He answered, I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.
And he said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree
that I commanded you not to eat? And the woman, and the man said,
the woman you put here with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree and I ate it.
And then the Lord God said to the woman, what is this that you have done?
And the woman said, the serpent deceived me and I ate.
So notice that story of the fall, what's commonly called the fall.
Adam and Eve both do the thing that they weren't supposed to do. They eat from the tree of,
the knowledge of good and evil, and in doing so, what becomes the warning that God gave
them that they would surely die—and he didn't mean necessarily an immediate physical death,
although physical death does follow the consequences here—he means a spiritual death.
Immediately that spiritual death results in this lost innocence, this lost reliance upon God,
and they become judges of their own nakedness, and they become ashamed. And what do they do?
They hide. They immediately go into hiding. And then what else do they do? Well, they point.
Each almost in kind of comic book stripped fashion to the next person down
the line. Well, she made me do it. Well, the snake made me do it. And shifting the
blame. And that is where we find ourselves. Like we often today will live our lives trying to cover ourselves up with sewed together fig leaves. There
There might be fancier fig leaves.
They might be the fig leaves of materials. They might be the fig leaves of fancy clothes, a certain lifestyle, the fig leaves of social
media filters, the fig leaves of success, the fig leaves of a good well-placed lie or,
good well-placed minimization.
But ultimately, the truth remains that there's something broken about us, that there's something
that we are ashamed of, something that we hope God never sees and other people never recognize.
But the truth is, is that like Adam and Eve, we're pretty bad at hiding.
And God ultimately is calling us out of hiding.
That's the truth. That's the story of the Bible, is God's pursuit after mankind in saying, where are you?
Come and have fellowship with me.
And this is my encouragement, and this is where I want to start, is that the conversation
of growing, of stepping out of addiction, of finding healing, of making significant
change, involves us stepping into the light.
It involves the brave and courageous decision of deciding to voice what is going on behind
the mask, behind the fig leaves, behind what everyone might think about us.
And that's a really scary step, but it's the most important step we can take because it's the first step.
We'll leave you with this one last sort of story from my life that was really impactful
for me to an insightful to the human condition.
I was part of a community, I had just joined a new community of believers, and I was having
some different conversations, getting to learn and know what was going on, and I talked to
several different people, and I think I remember having the same conversation with about three
different individuals, and they were all in kind of a generally close-knit community,
But each and every single one of those three people I talked to, the first person came
up to me and they're like, you know, Luke, I just feel really alone.
I feel really disconnected. I feel like, you know, I don't have any community.
And then somebody else I came up, came up to me maybe that same day or the next day,
and they said almost exactly the same thing.
And then I had the conversation again with yet another person.
And the thing that shocked me was like, well, like, here's three people all in close contact with each other.
They all know each other, and they're all lonely.
They're all longing for a deeper sense of Christian community, of accountability, of
being in relationship with other people in a meaningful way and not just a superficial way.
But they're all kind of hiding. They're all a little bit alone and not exactly sure what to do.
And created for me a picture that has stuck with me. And that's the picture of picture. one of those.
Sort of Stereotypical offices with all the cubicles. It's full of people who are sitting alone in their cubicles and,
each and every person in their cubicle is.
Not perfect. There's a little broken has Doesn't have it all together and they never want to stick their head up above their cubicle because they're afraid if they do
do, that other people would see them and they would see just how much they don't
have it together. As long as they keep their head down, they don't interact with
anybody, they'll be okay. But the thing is, is that's not just one person in a
cubicle. If someone were to actually lift their head up above the cubicle and look
over the wall that divides them, they would see that the person next to them
actually looks a lot like them, actually has a lot of the same problems and.
Experiences. And if you could get the whole office to just start peaking their head up
above those cubicle walls and start having some honest conversations about what's going
on in their lives, they would all find that, wow, we're all in the same boat. None of us
have it together. And in an open community, we can begin to untangle ourselves and make
a way forward. Well, that's enough for this first episode of the Rude Podcast. Thank you
for joining me. Please follow and leave any reviews or comments linked and check the show
notes for anything I ever mentioned here. But thank you for joining. I hope that you're
able to join me next time as we begin to dig more into some deeper implications of what what it means to s-
Music.