Freedom Friday - Breaking The Religious Bubble!

Hello everybody and welcome once again to the Unlearned podcast. I am your host, ruth Abigail, aka RA, and you have entered into Freedom Fridays, which is when me or me and a friend of mine comes to you with something we've unlearned recently and how it has made us just a little bit more free. So the other day I shared something on the socials and this is what it said the same people that wanted Jesus dead were the same people who spent most of their time in church. The same people that wanted Jesus dead were the same people who spent most of their time in church, and what I mean by church in those days is essentially people that spent their time in a religious bubble, spent their time just around people who lived and believed exactly like them. And, as uncomfortable of a truth that might be, it's worth letting sink in that the people who were most against Jesus were not the people in the street and were not the people that were even trying to figure things out like his disciples. Right, the disciples were always trying to figure something out, always had questions. They may have grown up in the religious circle, but they didn't stay there. They were rejected from that circle. They were familiar with it, but they weren't really a tight part of it. These are the people that Jesus was around. The folks that were steeped in that religious bubble are the people that wanted him dead and ultimately did do that, and then afterwards, the people who were steeped in that bubble wanted other other Jesus followers dead. Right, saul, who was later Paul, is a great example of that, and so that's the reality, and I think it's still the reality today. So, like, how do you know? When you spent too much time in church and I'm saying this because I used to be that, like I used to be in a religious bubble I know what it looks like and feels like, and so I also know what it does, what it did to me and what it can do to other people. I've lost relationships because I was in too deep of a religious bubble. I have, I've I've lost myself in some seasons because I was too deep in a religious bubble, and I know what that is and I hate seeing it. It's not freedom. It's not freedom, and so it's one of the things that probably bothers me the most. This is how you know you spend too much time in a religious bubble, right, your language becomes less relevant. It's like you can't talk to people normally anymore, or even when you do try to talk about faith, you talk about it as a, in a sense, where the assumption is people understand what you mean and then when they try to get you to break it down, you have a hard time doing that. There's a term that we use when we're in the youth development world or the youth ministry world, called cookies on the bottom shelf, and we're trained to keep the cookies on the bottom shelf, keep it accessible, keep your language accessible, because you can't assume that people understand what you mean when you say words like sin and salvation and and, and faith and restoration and eternity and all these different, all these different buzzwords that we use in the Christian faith all the time, and we just throw them out there like people are supposed to know what that means. So your language becomes less relevant. Your tolerance for other people's mistakes decreases. This is huge. Your tolerance for other people's mistakes decreases All of a sudden. You look at other people and you look at them in a light that devalues them because of what they do. Here's the other thing, and I think this one is is is really relevant, especially for where we are right now that the temptation to hide your own mistakes increases. So we have a lot of people that have, um, you know, have have fallen, quote unquote publicly They've done something, um, immoral in the public eye. Uh, that people who have, uh, who make the claim to be a Jesus follower, who are Jesus followers, um, and they've done something immoral and they've gotten caught. And I think if we're not careful when we spend too much time in our religious bubble, then we can the temptation to hide your own mistakes increases. So I guess, contrary to popular opinion, I believe that the primary reason that people in church are within the religious bubble, that are particularly in leadership or anyone else that gets caught up in things that they preach against, is not necessarily because they believe that they are super human or that it's not. You know, they're kind of above the fray, if you will, like they. It doesn't apply to them. I don't think that's probably the case most of the time. I think it's because a lot of times, they've promoted themselves as a certain person and have just gotten to the place where it's more painful to be seen as somebody different than it is to keep doing what they're doing behind closed doors. At some point your pride becomes the most important thing to you and that being damaged is worse than the damage that your immorality is doing. So you hide it and you hide it, and you hide it and you hide it until you can't hide it anymore. But again, I really believe a lot of times that's the function of spending too much time on a religious bubble. People that have all these huge platforms and that are in this, in these tight knit circles. A lot of times they're in circles with people that are just like them, and I understand that to some degree. I understand why that's appealing, because there aren't a whole lot of people that understand the life you live. But the danger in that is we lose touch with the very people that we are called to really do life with, called to really know, and we have to be careful about that. It's easy to get sucked into that. It's easy to get sucked into any world that is primarily made up of people who have your same experience and believe the same things you do and are like you. We see that racially, we see that politically, we see that religiously, we see that even with education statuses, we see it with all these different things, and so it's not unique to the religious world, but I see it as having a real danger in multiple layers when it is active in the religious and spiritual space. Right, here's the deal. You can't gain a heart for people by simply praying for them from afar. That's not how we connect to people. You don't connect to people by praying for them. You connect to God by praying, but you don't connect to people by praying for them. You have to spend time with them and let other people who don't necessarily see things or believe things the way you do, actually add value to your life. As crazy as a concept that that might be people that don't believe what you believe or agree with you can actually add value to your life. So I had a retreat with the team at Angel Street this past weekend and one of the things we talked about was how you build healthy relationships with the young people and I think it applies with anyone, right, and one of the challenges that I shared with them and I give myself as well, is to make sure that you've built up enough credits with young people or with any people before making withdrawals. You gotta make sure you build up credit before you start making withdrawals. People that are in religious bubbles and that are so convinced by their own experiences and process of what's right, what's wrong, what should be paid attention to, what shouldn't, what needs to be elevated, what doesn't. People that are in that space are withdrawing from empty accounts because they haven't made deposits. You're making withdrawals from other people. You're making withdrawals from relationships that you haven't deposited into, and it's screaming insufficient funds that we're not listening. So we keep running up mounds of debt and calling it God's work. It's not God's work. It's not. That's not the work that Jesus called us to do. We're called to have relationships with people and in the course of that relationship we add value to each other. We are able to show who Jesus is because of how I treat you, not because of the way I express truth to you, believe it or not, it's possible to pray for someone in one breath and treat them like trash in the next. Most people, at least in my experience, are not asking you to be a different you. What they're asking for is to be accepted for where they are and to be accepted for who they are in that moment. They're not asking you to change who you are. They're asking to be accepted for who they are. Some people now, some people might want you to change, and that's fine, but most people again in my experience aren't asking for that. They wanna be accepted for who they are in that moment and allow the same freedom to matriculate through their own process in the same way that you have, regardless of the outcome. I really believe that if we could do that, then we would have a lot bigger impact on this world as Jesus followers. All right, that's all I got. This is one of those things that, for me, I am pretty passionate about, because I think it's important that we represent what we believe well and we represent it accurately and we don't try to make stuff up and we're not afraid to really live the life that Jesus lived, which was not in a religious bubble, because bubbles are safe and that's not what Jesus called us to be. He didn't call us to be safe, he called us to be secure in him, and because we're securing him, then we can take the risk that he took. So, anyway, I'm gonna stop. This has been another edition of Freedom Friday and I hope that it was helpful. I hope that it helps us to live more free those of us who are Jesus followers, those of us who aren't All right. Let's keep pursuing a free life together by unlearning what we need to unlearn Peace. ["fel free"]. Thank you once again for listening to the Unlearned podcast. We would love to hear your comments and your feedback about the episode. Feel free to follow us on Facebook and Instagram and to let us know what you think. We're looking forward to the next time, when we are able to unlearn together to move forward towards freedom. See you then. ["fel free"].