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You’re tired.
Not just physically; though yeah, that too.
You’re tired in your bones. In your soul.
Trying to be a steady husband, an intentional dad, a man of God… but deep down, you feel like you’re falling short. Like you’re carrying more than you know how to hold.
Dad Tired is a podcast for men who are ready to stop pretending and start healing.
Not with self-help tips or religious platitudes, but by anchoring their lives in something (and Someone) stronger.
Hosted by Jerrad Lopes, a husband, dad of four, and fellow struggler, this show is a weekly invitation to find rest for your soul, clarity for your calling, and the courage to lead your family well.
Through honest stories, biblical truth, and deep conversations you’ll be reminded:
You’re not alone. You’re not too far gone. And the man you want to be is only found in Jesus.
This isn’t about trying harder.
It’s about coming home.
Hey guys. Welcome back to the Dad Tired podcast. Before we jump in, I want to thank my friends over at Samaritan Ministries for sponsoring today's episode. I have two questions for you as we jump in. The first one is, how are you paying for your family's healthcare? And the second one is, how is that working out for you?
If it's working perfectly, then great. You probably don't need to listen to this, but if not, then listen closely because I do have a solution, a biblical solution, and it's called Samaritan Ministries. Samaritan Ministries. Is a community of Christians paying one another's medical bills. It's not insurance, but it is assurance that you're part of a healthcare sharing community where members care for one another spiritually and financially when a medical need arises.
Here's how it works. There's no networks, so when a medical need arises, you choose the healthcare provider. That's right for you and your family, and you have a say in the type of treatment that they receive. You can send your medical bills to Samaritan Ministries and they'll notify fellow members to pray for you to send money directly to you to help pay those bills.
And when another member has a medical need, you'll do the same for them. This is what biblical healthcare sharing looks like. It could be more affordable than what you're currently paying now. And if it's the right fit, you can even join today. Learn more@samaritanministries.org slash dads hired. Again, that's samaritan ministries.org.
Forward slash dad tired. As we jump into October, the questions of Halloween always come up, and you may have strong thoughts on Halloween, whether you are celebrating it or you partake in it or you don't, or you think nobody should or whatever your views are, you might have. Strong thoughts on it. Maybe you don't have any thoughts.
Maybe you just kind of done the same thing you've always done. Uh, I think today's episode is gonna be really helpful for you 'cause we're gonna break down what is Halloween, what's the history of it, and then as Christians, does the Bible say anything about it? Are we allowed to celebrate this? Maybe you did as a kid and you don't know if you should with your kids, or maybe vice versa, whatever it is.
We want kind of break down the history and then just give you some thoughts on, as a Christian and as the leader of your home, what does it look like to try to lead your family well? On things like this Halloween. And so my encouragement to you, this is gonna be a really helpful episode for you, but my encouragement to you is make it all the way to the end because I have a feeling you're gonna make some conclusions at the beginning here.
You're like, ah, well this is where I'm at. But I would suggest that you go all the way to the end. 'cause I can assure you that at some point you're gonna feel challenged. So just wait till the whole thing, like listen to the whole thing and then try to come up with some thoughts. And the goal is, at the end of all of this, you just have more confidence and you understand what the history of the holiday is.
More importantly, you understand what the scriptures say and like what is a good theology As you are thinking about leading your home and being the spiritual leader of your home, you have like a. You have confidence in your theology and then whatever you decide, whatever's your like final conclusion as a dad or as a man, you just have confidence in it.
When somebody asks you, why do you do X, Y, Z, you can say, here's exactly why I do X, Y, Z. I've thought through it and these are my thoughts. So anyway. As always, I hope this is helpful for you. We do have a closed community. If you go to da tire.com/community, there are a bunch of guys who are gonna be talking about this.
If you don't have friends that you're like, I, I don't have anyone where I can go and like talk to other guys about this stuff, we want you to be part of that. Go to da tire.com, click the community tab. Jumping over there. I'm gonna get outta the way. Now let's dive into what it looks like to have a theology of Halloween.
So today we get to talk about the topic of Halloween. What do you do with it? What do you do with the day where the tradition is you dress up like people that you're not. You act in ways that you wouldn't, you eat in fashions that are not readily appropriate every other day of the year, and you don't really know how to respond as a dad.
You don't know how to respond as a parent to say, man, what do I do with this? Maybe you're new to your faith and you're going, can I keep celebrating Halloween? Is it okay to go trick or treating? Or maybe you're. Maturing in your faith and you're thinking to yourself, you're starting to question everything that you do as a family.
Is it, is this all really glorifying God? Can this glorify God? Am I, am I sinning when I do this? Or maybe you've been a Christian for a long time, you've never even thought. About the idea that Halloween could possibly be okay or you've never thought that Halloween could possibly be wrong. So what does the Bible say about it and what do we as Christians do in response to things like Halloween or reading Harry Potter books or whatever it might be?
I. What is the proper biblical response to something like this? So lemme start by saying, this falls into a category that we believe as Christians is called ra. Ra means the Bible doesn't explicitly command it. That'd be like a green light issue, but it doesn't explicitly condemn it or prohibit it. So a green light issue would be love one another.
A red light issue would be do not murder. And then there's, there's gray. There's this yellow light issue where the Bible neither commands it nor forbids it. And that's where we have to use a couple different things to help us understand it. We use, this is where's a, a different category kicks in. So if the Bible doesn't say Yes, you must, or no, you mustn't, we actually ask different questions of it.
We ask questions like, does my conscience allow me to do this? That's first question. Second one is, is this a stumbling block to other Christians around me? The third question is, does this hurt my Christian witness? So if it's not explicitly commanded or expressly forbidden, then we jump into a new set of questions, which is, do I have some kind of a personal conscience against this where I just can't in good conscience do this task?
Secondly, if I do do this task, are there gonna be Christians around me? Who perhaps, um, are trying to avoid this, and this might get 'em to slip back into it. So think about someone who doesn't, a family that doesn't drink at Thanksgiving because their Christian brother or sister has a drinking problem and they don't want to cause them to stumble.
This would be an example of that. Or thirdly, maybe it's the case that you don't want to hurt your Christian witness. You think to yourself, I might have the freedom to do this, but the place that I live, the culture that I live in. I think people would've a hard time believing that I was a self-controlled, kind, loving person and still participating in this behavior.
So those are the questions that we ask. These are questions of Christian Liberty. Christian Liberty is, it's the arena we go to when the Bible doesn't tell us exactly what to do, and the Bible says nothing about Halloween. It just doesn't. And we never want the Bible to say something now that I would've never said then.
Right? So you can open the Bible to find principles of control or principles of addiction or principles of idle minds and idle hands, but your Bible's not gonna say, thou shalt spend no more than two hours of screen time per day, thus sayeth the Lord. 'cause there was no screen time. It's not gonna say when you date, make sure that you always stay in a sitting up position and always have all feet on the floor at the same time to make sure you avoid stumbling.
The Bible's not gonna say that because the Bible doesn't really talk about dating. So we can derive principles, but we can't say it expressly says, this is how you should or shouldn't date. We did the same thing with Halloween. We don't know, the Bible doesn't say on Halloween, thou shalt or on Halloween.
Thou shalt not. So we jump in and we go, are there other principles surrounding the holiday that we should look into? Or is there anything that, that resembles it a little bit that we could kind of borrow from? And this is kind of the world and the the space that we have to jump into to answer this question.
And I'll tell you right now that the answer is gonna come down to, don't mean to ruin it for you. It's gonna come down to your Christian liberty, it's gonna come down to your conscience, your idea of being a stumbling block and your idea of your Christian witness. Those are gonna be the answers. Where this comes down to.
In other words, if the Bible doesn't say this, it's, it's very similar to drinking or to celebrating other things. Which is someone can have a glass of wine and be completely fine. The person next to them, it's been so destructive in their life. They can't understand how you could possibly drink and still be a Christian.
And those people are both underneath the umbrella of something being appropriate in God's kingdom that someone can say, I can't in good conscience drink. And the next person next to them can have a great glass of wine with dinner and both can thank God appropriately for it. And God smiles on both of them.
Equally. So what do we do with Halloween? What do we do with what looks like this Pagan festival of trick or treating and witchcraft and all of the above? And I like how one author puts it that I like to steal this idea from and, and he uses this threefold system, and this is our role as parents. We get to do one of these three things when it comes to holidays like.
Halloween when it comes to the tradition of Santa Claus, when it comes to maybe virtual reality games or reading Harry Potter or whatever it might be, we, we have three options and they all start with an R, which makes it simple. But when presented with something that the Bible neither expressly commands or explicitly prohibits, it's an Audi Opera mid-level yellow light issue.
We ask a different series of questions, and so then we simply ask. You have one of three options on what you can do with Halloween, and we'll kind of chase each of those and make the best point for each, and then it'll be up to you and your wife or uh, you and your conscience if you're a single dad like me, to figure out what do we do with this.
The first one, the three, I'll just give you all three of 'em first, which is with something like Halloween, we have the choice to reject it, to receive it, or to redeem it. Okay? So we can reject it, receive it, or redeem it. Rejecting it means carte blanche. No, it has no role in a Christian household to receive.
It means, yes, we can take the holiday and we can celebrate it just like our secular friends. Were just like our non-Christian friends would, and to redeem it means we can celebrate it, but we want to adjust some things so that we can actually do it in a way that honors God. And not in the same way that our non-believing friends would do so.
So we'll start with the best case we can make for each of those, and then you can make your decision on what you're gonna do with this holiday. The first one is to reject, okay, so I'm gonna role play each of these. I. Of course you have to reject Halloween. I mean, are you kidding me? It's roots in the So Wind Festival, which is a Wiccan festival.
It, there's a Celtic tradition that goes back to this time between the vernal equinox and the winter solstice when the belief was that. Darkness was gonna start winning. The, the veil between the living and the dead realm was the thinnest, uh, between October 31st and November 1st. It's when the seasons were changing and, and we weren't in the thick of winter, but we're also not in the thick of summer anymore.
It's the autumnal equinox. It's about the moons and the stars and the, the way the planets move, and the way that the seasons change. And the belief is that there's this thin veil between the living realms and the dead realms. And this was the best time for the dead to walk about and to express. Their existence in the realm of the living, or for different traditions, the Dia de los MUTOs where you create an renda for your dead ones and they come back and they visit it at night and they, they come and they see their picture on the renda and you lay out their favorite food and you lay out these crystal skulls made of sugar and candy and.
You're, uh, ulce and all these things, and so it's, it's everything though is a celebration of death. It's not who God is. Who is God, but life. Right? As John chapter one, verse one through 17, Jesus is the light. He declares himself the light of the world. The Book of Ephesians says, if you are a Christian, you ought to have no meddling with the darkness of the world.
There's just no two ways of putting it. Regardless of what it is. It's got roots in, in this belief that there's a thin veil and the dead come and walk. And when the dead come and walk amongst us, we wanna keep them out of our home. So we light, we carve scary pumpkins or gords, and then we put lights in them to keep away the evil spirits that might come and haunt us on that night.
And. The souls of the dead have come up. And so we wear costumes and scare thing and scare people, and then the kids will come around and they'll pretend like they're one of those dead people. And if we don't want them to steal our souls and to play a mean or horrific voodoo trick on us, and we have to give them some kind of specialty cakes.
And they say, you've got two choices. You give me the food or I'm gonna haunt you. And you it's, it's basically what we call trick or treat. How in the world could a Christian family invite their children to dress up, to keep away the evil spirits, which is God's job, not ours, and to invite, it's like playing with a Ouija board, right?
To grab a Ouija board and say. Oh, spirit, tell me what this is going to say is, is to dress up in a Halloween costume and think you're gonna scare away spirits and to carve a jack of lantern and think that you're gonna put a light in it to keep them away. And it's just out of ignorance that we're not practicing the exact same Wiccan traditions as before.
So, no, no, no, no. Not only ought we avoid evil, Ephesians five says we should a, avoid the appearance of evil. And, and so what if our neighbors think that we're Wiccan, right? We go to church on Sunday and then all of a sudden we have this Wiccan festival on Sunday night where we walk around. It's just, we just like witches and, and you're dressed up like a dead zombie and you're a vampire and there's just no place in the Christian family for Halloween.
Period. End of story done. That person would reject Halloween. So second person would say, okay, Karen, I'm pretty sure that that's not the case. You see, we can receive Halloween. We can receive it in the same way that our secular friends can. Did you not notice when Jesus walked around that he wasn't exactly just sitting there with all the people in the Holy Festivals?
Now he was doing that like, we do go to church. We do worship God and all those things. But God was routinely eating with the tax collector and the beggar, and he, and he, he's not afraid of those things and, and we don't need to practice fear. I mean, kids dressing up in costumes is somehow inciting the demonic realm.
Like show me, like just practically, show me, show me one magazine article where kids dress up in Halloween costumes and then all of a sudden they can set things on fire with their eyeballs. Like it's a false dichotomy. It's like how many kids have started witchcraft because of Harry Potter? You know, like.
And I don't mean like they, they think that they can make things levitate like alo ura, but I mean, they actually truly believe that they're witches and that they're trying to like create voodoo. Like come on. That's ridiculous. This is why your kids don't like you, because you take away everything fun They do.
'cause you think that there's a demon in every sugar cup and Satan hides behind every car tire and every time you lose your keys it's because you're under spiritual warfare. Like, come on. It does not need to be like that. You can enjoy, man, have a party if you want to have a haunted house because it's fun and it's fun to walk around and do those things.
And, and if you hadn't just told me the history of Sam so win and the Wiccan festivals, I would've never even known that. Right? Like, it, it doesn't make any sense. So I don't think we need to have that kind of a view towards it. And by the way, if you're gonna throw it Halloween, then are you prepared to throw away every other Pagan festival you participate in?
Oh, that's right. Every festival you participate in, almost every single one as a Christian is a pagan festival. Like have you ever asked yourself, why do we color eggs at Easter time? Because it's celebrating the goddess of fertility. E os. Stray, right? Westray. It's, it's a fertility festival. Think about it.
Fertility bunnies, une eggs, chocolate. Gifts. What are we doing? We are literally crying out. This is a festival of fertility and sexuality. And then the Christians came in and said, this is not a good look. We don't want our people practicing this anymore. So instead they said, this is the day that Jesus came back from the dead.
And so now what do we do though? Surely then we got rid of all the fertile things, right? We got rid of the bunnies, we got rid of the eggs. No, we didn't. We just brought them in and we said, from now on at your. Easter celebration at church. Make sure you have the bunny there. The celebration of fertility is going to have your Christian kids sit on their lap and they're gonna take a picture together and they're gonna have a basket of fertile eggs.
What are these things except for direct and explicit pagan sexual ideologies. And are you prepared to get rid of Christmas? The time when they were preparing to get ready for the winter to be over December 25th, that's not when Jesus was born. Certainly not. There were shepherds living out in the fields nearby during Jesus' birth.
That was probably in the spring of the summertime. Certainly wasn't in the dead of winter. So why do we do Christmas on December 25th? Because there was another pig in holiday. Where they used to turn it, kinda like Carnival, everything was opposite. They would take things from inside and put them outside like lights.
They would take internal lights and put them outside, but they would take things outside like trees and bring them inside and they would exchange gifts and they would make little clay figurines to give to one another as a gift exchange to as excitement for having survived. The most brutal part of the winter.
'cause now af on December 25th or thereabout, the days start getting longer again. And, and the, the height of the darkness is now over. So if you're not ready to give up Easter and Christmas, don't get me started about Valentine's Day, right. You, it's because when Saint Valentine was martyred, because he was marrying Christians under the threat of persecution.
And a little blind child received her sight because St. Valentine prayed with her. That's not why we have Valentine's Day. If St. Valentine's Day was originally a sexual festival, once again, just like all the other festivals, and it was a festival called Luer Kay, and Luer was a time where they would sacrifice a dog or a wolf looper.
In the original language and they would kill a goat and then they would take the skin of the goat and the skin of the wolf and they would walk around town naked and they would smack each other with those things. And so the, the colors of the festival were red, just like the color of the blood they were smacking each other with.
And the women would try to get hit with it from these men who were running around naked. 'cause I thought that would help them in their labor pains. And then you would draw a name from a hat and you would get randomly chosen just like a Valentine. You would have your own Valentine, and that person would be your partner for the festivals.
It would be your sexual partner for the festivals. So if you are prepared to throw out Halloween because of its pagan roots, then get ready to throw everything else out that you celebrate. And don't even come at me with Harry Potter and the witches and everything else like that because you read your kids the Chronicles of Narnia, like who is the central bad figure in Narnia, the white witch.
They do magic. There is seances, there is sacrifice of Aslan. Like there's just, I mean, I just, I'm just asking to be consistent, so no, if you ask me, we're gonna go to a Halloween party. We're gonna have an October Fest beer. It's gonna be a pumpkin pale ale. And we are going to enjoy the night because we wanna be around our friends and we wanna be around our secular friends.
We wanna have a party and we don't wanna have a party a, a Jonah, the whale Bachelor party. Like we want to have an actual Halloween party and have people enjoy themselves and, and have them think to themselves, man, Christians are not lame and boring. But we're not gonna swear, we're not gonna play offensive music.
We are not going to dress up in a naughty nurse costume. We're gonna wear culturally appropriate costumes, uh, costumes that aren't offending the senses, right? We're not gonna dress up in some way that's overly provocative or whatever it is, and we're gonna have a nice time. We will take all the attendance of scripture.
But we are gonna have fun with Halloween. It's just not worth standing on that thing and having your kids not like it and grow up and tell their story of overcoming addiction and how it all started because you wouldn't let them go trick or treating. Just let 'em go. Trick or trading. Let 'em have a little bit of fun.
Sure, you can talk to 'em about the origins of the holiday, but you know what? If I hadn't listened to this dang podcast, I would've never known the origins of any of those holidays anyway. I'm actually creating culpability by continuing to speak, and I apologize for doing so. But the second group would say, receive it.
Have fun. Jesus ate with the tax collectors and sinners. He didn't have to tax collect inappropriately, or he didn't have to turn a trick with the prostitutes. No, but he still was with them. I. And in it, what were the Pharisee shocked by? This man is a friend of sinners, right? How can we go out into the world and witness to all the nations through Matthew chapter 28?
If we just sit in our own little cooped up homeschooling world, and don't ever go outside, man, open the window. Have some fun at Halloween, throw a party. If you're not invited to one, you can come to mind, but I just think we're making too big a deal about this whole Halloween thing. That would be what second group would say.
That would be the receivers. This is what it means to receive Halloween. You got the Rejectors, you got the receivers, and then you got the third group, which is the redeemers. Hey guys. Hope you're enjoying this episode so far. Stick with it. We got one more group to, uh, talk about. Uh, I do want to let you know that we do have dad tired conferences, one day conferences all over the country and world.
If you're interested in bringing one of these to your church, we would love to come serve your church and encourage the men of your church. You can do that. But go into dad tired.com, click the conferences tab. There's a form there that you could fill out to host a one day conference at your church, and we would love to come partner with you in that way.
Alright, let's jump back into today's episode. The Redeemers would say, and I walk into the first person, look, we know the roots of Halloween. We know what it can become. We've seen how people sometimes dress. It's, it's kind of become a night where it's appropriate to drink way too much and to have all sorts of criminal mischief and.
People behaving inappropriate. There's, I mean, there's gluttony. People are overeating, sugar and everything, and so we do Halloween, but we don't do Halloween the way that the world does Halloween. We might have a harvest festival, and so it might be okay to dress up in, in church appropriate costumes, so like doctors, nurses, astronauts, policemen, Republicans.
But we don't want to create a world in which we have zombies or the undead or vampires, or. People's with blood and guts coming out of them. And so we can celebrate Halloween, but we don't, we don't need to reject it. We don't need to all sit in that day and, and not, and pretend like it's not going on. But we also don't need to accept it carte blanche along with all of its mythical background and grossness and grotesque and all those things.
So I think we can redeem, we can have a little trunk or treat at church or we can go around the neighborhood, but you know, we'll make sure that we tell the kids ahead of time what. What Halloween is really about. It was All Saints Day or for the Lutherans. It was Reformation Day. It was the day that Martin Luther nailed the 95 theses to the church door at Wittenberg.
And so if you're like me growing up, why do we go knock on doors? 'cause it was the day that Martin Luther knocked on that door. So, you know what I mean? It's like the nerdiest junk you can possibly get, but it's fantastic and you might do that. Or when I was in college, we went to a Mount Rushmore party because that was the day when Mount Rushmore was completed.
So we, instead of celebrating Halloween, we celebrated mountains and how beautiful they were, which was nerdy and weird, but it's taking the festival, enjoying the frivolity of it all. Without expressively engaging in any of the behavior that could be perceived as Wiccan, that could be perceived as evil, that could be perceived as darkness.
And so there's a way of doing both. Sure. You're, you're probably not gonna go to the Halloween party where everyone's a goblin in a goul and everyone's getting drinking too much. And as Christians, we know that it's not appropriate for us to be over drinking or even overeating, so we're not gonna be doing any of those things.
And. We'll hand out candy, but we'll hand it out at appropriate times. Then we'll make sure that people know that we're gone to the Harvest Festival and that's just how we're gonna redeem the holiday. We're not gonna engage in it too much, and so that's what the redeemer would say. All three of these responses I.
Are completely appropriate responses to totally reject it because it betrays your conscience and you just don't see how someone could possibly do that and still be a Christian, would be someone who rejects it. And the Bible gives permission for someone to be like that. Now, here's what the Bible doesn't do, whether you are a rejecter, a receiver, or a redeemer.
The Bible gives no credence and no liberty and no permission for us to look at anyone in any of the other groups as Christians. I mean, again, if you're a receiver and that means that you're gonna dress like an inappropriate nurse and get plastered, then yes, absolutely there is a mark where the Christian can look at another Christian brother or sister and say, Hey man, this is not.
This is not who God has called us to be like, you can enjoy Halloween without breaking God's laws in the process. But we are not to judge those in these other groups. If we see a family and they've chosen to redeem it and they've got a Harvest Festival and they've got their Holy Ween Festival at their church and they're enjoying it, then we want, we just say more power to you man.
And you enjoy that. Even though I'm a receiver and you're a redeemer. Great. And even though I'm a receiver and you're a rejecter, we are still one in the body of Christ. We are both written in a Lamb's book of life. And we don't need to create more divisions. We don't need a new church. We are Halloween celebrator people, and we are non Halloween celebrator people.
We can sit alongside each other in the, in our church pews and just with ultimate respect, say, I get you. And if the Bible gives you permission, and if God's holy judgment says that we're permitted to do both, then I guess we're permitted to do both of those things. The redeemer would say, look, not at the book of one Corinthians chapter six, and I think the redeemer and the receiver would both say, look, everything is permissible, even though not everything is beneficial.
I can do all things, but I'll be mastered by nothing. So as long as it doesn't have mastery over me, as long as I'm not invoking the spirits or actually participating in the Wiccan parts of the festival, it's completely okay to do if you ever had a birthday before. The reason that people used to signify their birthdays was because they wanted to know their horoscopes, and they believed that every year when the earth had made one rotation around the sun, the gods would grant one wish if you blew out fire.
Right? So. Like we at Karen's birthday party, she's blowing out her candles, not understanding that she's making a wish into the unknown of the ancient gods because it was her turn for her horoscope to have revolved around the sun one time. You know what I mean? So I think sometimes without all the knowledge and understanding, we can sit and judge one another without really truly even participating in a great discussion about why each is, is the other thing.
And so. One thing we do wanna remember is that we're all on the same team. Whether you're reject or redeemer or a receiver, we're all in the same team. I did, I used a tone and I used a kind of a cynical attitude when I was talking about each of the other ones and, and that's not good. We can have those thoughts.
We can, we can think to ourselves, how could you possibly listen to the Chronicles of Narnia and talk about witches, but then you won't listen to Harry Potter and talk about witches. I know I don't get it, but we can keep it to ourselves. We don't need to. Think judgmentally about other people, and we can know that they're a child of God beloved, just like we're a child of God and beloved.
And when it comes to Halloween, this is what we each as fathers, but it's what we each as mothers and as parents, have to decide for ourselves. Can we in good conscience do this? Is this gonna be a stumbling block to other people? Like if, if your mom lives in your house and she's just so vehemently against Halloween, that it, it upsets her to her very core, then maybe for you it is something to redeem a different way or.
To reject or or to think differently on if your neighbors think that any Christians who participate in this are absolutely Pagan themselves and it's gonna hurt your witness to participate in it. Then you do have a different calling as well. But I. If neither of those are the case and your Christian conscience permits you to do so, then I think you can enjoy Halloween without any sense of guilt or any sense of shame.
And I think that's what we ought to do for each other. We ought to be a place where we can properly disagree. If I'm a redeemer and you're a receiver, if I'm a rejecter and you're. Redeemer, it doesn't matter. For me personally, I've kind of come down that road of redeemer, probably leaning a little bit more towards receiver.
I would say personally, I want my kids to have these fun nights where they can experience with the other people around in their community and enjoy. We're not going to ever buy a Ouija board or participate in those things. We are not gonna chant any pagan sayings while we're running around town. We're not gonna whip each other with the fla skin of goats and wolves.
That's for darn sure. We are gonna practice. Everything about what it means to be a Christian with our sexuality and with our prohibitions on drunkenness and everything. But I want my kids to see me dress up. I want 'em to see dad having fun. I, I want them to see us with our neighbors that we don't get to see super often circling the neighborhood and knocking on doors and meeting those neighbors that we haven't gotten to see, and in some cases, a cool opportunity at least to make a touch point.
With them. And so I can stand alongside people who say, this is completely inappropriate and I can stand along. People who say it needs to be redeemed so much that it should hardly look like Halloween for, for me and my household and my Christian conscience and liberty, and that it hasn't caused anyone in my community to stumble, nor has it hurt my Christian witness to my.
Non-believing friends around me. We will, and we do participate in Halloween. We are gonna go to a church Halloween festival for sure, a Harvest festival and enjoy that. But we'll also go around the neighborhood and knock on doors. They're gonna say trick or treat. They have no clue what it means. And probably until they listen to this podcast someday, no one's even gonna tell them.
What it means. And so sometimes I think we might make mountains out of molehill when the process of doing so actually brings the idea of paganism into the hearts of people who didn't even think about it or care about it or invite it. And I don't think that's the way that Satan works. I don't think Satan operates or that the Holy Spirit operates on some root of.
Accidental nuance when it comes to those things. You know, if you're like, my phone number has the number six, six, six in it. And when someone calls me, they're often like, man, you should get your phone number changed. I, I don't think Satan's out there, like watching people dial phone numbers and going, you pushed it three times, now you're going to get haunted.
You know what I mean? So for sure if your heart is inviting evil spirits, if you're actively seeking out. The realm of the undead, or if you're seeking demonic invitation, if you're playing with Ouija board, that's a whole different thing. Then getting dressed up and then celebrating a holiday with mixed origins where we are absolutely not saying the same things that we used to say and, and so I think in that case, it can be received and redeemed without any retribution, and also can be rejected in such a way that we can all have charity and faith and grace with one another as Christians.
Hey guys, as always, hope that episode was helpful for you. If you want to jump into the conversation, go to da tire.com/community. You can meet other like-minded guys, even guys in your area. There are guys who are meeting locally. You can find all of that by going to dad tire.com. Click the community tap.
Come jump into the conversation over there. Love you guys. We'll see you next week.