Agreements-Vows And Bitter Root

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Let's bring the living water to the world. Hello, this is Matt Slick from the Matt Slick Live Podcast where I defend the Christian faith and lay out our foundation of the truth of God's Word. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few seconds.

Enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. Grab your gear and come on a quest with your band of brothers who will serve as the guides in what we call The Masculine Journey. The Masculine Journey starts here now. Welcome to The Masculine Journey. We're glad that you're with us this week and we're in the middle of what we would call pillars. Rodney, can you help us kind of understand when we talk about pillars what we're talking about? Well, I had to have it explained to me.

So, back when you guys did a big show some years ago, you guys started off on, hey, the pillars of the Masculine Journey. And it started off as something, oh, you had two or three. I think you ended up with like around eight or so. It was probably close to 10 or 12.

10 to 12 by that time? It went on for a long time. Yeah, I've heard the shows because I went back and listened to them, but it was just one of those. It's an inside joke. So, when you hear us talk about pillars, it's the inside joke for a long running series when we just keep coming up with more and more things on the same topic. Absolutely.

Yeah. Originally, we were doing like three or four of this topic, and then God just kept giving us more and more and more. And so, that's where it kind of came these pillars. And so, I don't even remember what the topic was. There was just a lot of them. I think it was some... Yeah, I'm trying to remember what the exact...

It might have been the pillars of the Masculine Journey. Yeah, it was something close and similar to that, but it was actually a really good series. I enjoyed it a lot.

I really got a lot out of it. Oh, no. We don't make your favorite list. You guys used to be there until I got in here.

Oh, then you realized how the soup's made. You're like, no. Yeah. When Sam starts slamming your clips and stuff, it's like, well, then if I'm not going to make it be on there, I'm not going to listen. Well, that helped me make a decision about tonight's clips. Yeah, I know. Okay. Here you go, Danny.

Appreciate it. Danny, you're up with the first clip. Yours is still getting played, as of I don't know if Rodney's is.

Yeah, I think Rodney's just got cold. It might have been. Yeah.

I always thought the pillars would go with blankets. Exactly. That's not the case. Yeah. Yeah, my clip's from the Andy Griffith Show.

That shocks a lot of people. The show is called Henry the Jinx, and this poor guy is having a run of bad luck. Barney and some of the other town members pile on and just make the matters worse.

And ultimately, the guy begins to believe that he's a jinx himself. And the clip is toward the end of the show where Andy and Aunt B and some of them are trying to redeem him and trying to shake him out of his agreement so we can play the clip. Well, we actually can't because we didn't say what the show was about. Yeah, I just realized we didn't say what it was. So you did a great setup, and then we're gonna have to come back to it. The show is about agreements, vows, and bitter root agreements, right?

And so, bitter roots. And so, we're gonna talk about that. And so, this is an agreement or a vow that's been made by Henry the Jinx. Yes. Okay, we'll play it.

Get your numbers ready for the big drawing for the beautiful portable TV set. Come on, Henry. Well, I think I'll step out for a breath of air. Oh, but wait a minute.

This is a drawing. You might win. Well, you got a good chance as anybody else. You took a number, didn't you? Yeah. Well, come on then. Now, everybody sit. Go ahead, Auntie. Andy, would you do the honors?

Well, I'd be proud to serve. Everybody ready? The winning number is number... The lucky number is number 44, and the winner is stepping forward right now, and we see that it is... No number 44, huh?

Everybody want to check your cards? My number? Why don't you look at your number? What number did you get, Henry? You did get a number, didn't you?

Good. Folks, Henry Bennett's going to show us what number he pulled out of the hat. What'd you get, Henry? Number 44? No, six and seven eighths.

An eighth? Oh, Andy, he pulled out the hat side. I told you, didn't I?

No, I've even jinxed myself. Wait a minute, Henry. Wait a minute. There's something you ought to know. This, uh, this drawing was rigged.

Rigged? That's right. Folks, would you show Henry what number you got?

Well, they've all got 44. That's right. Only, only they wasn't going to say anything. That way, you'd have to win. And I still lost. Well, I wouldn't be so sure. Well, what do you mean? Well, Henry, look what everyone's trying to do to prove you're not bad luck. What, uh, what Aunt Bee's trying to say is that you got to believing that you're a jinx and full of bad luck and everything and, well, I don't know how you figure it, but the way I see it, why, the luckiest thing a man can have is friendship. I heard over the last week or so, somebody sent a thing on a text or something that says, you know, if you, if you hear a lie enough, then it becomes the truth to you. And that's kind of what happened to Henry. And I think that's what happens to a lot of us.

I know it's happened to me more than once, is that you hear something or you think you hear something and that becomes the agreement or the vow and you begin to believe it yourself. And, you know, he said, I even jinxed myself. He, he had bought hook, line, and sinker into the, uh, end of the lie. So. Well, thank you, Danny. Uh, you set up some of what I wanted to ask Wayne about, but Wayne, can you help with another way of saying, you know, what agreements are, or what vows are or bitter roots or any of that? Well, Danny kind of talked about it, you know, when we hear something or make an agreement with that statement, I'm sorry, something going on to throw here. Now, Sam throws a mic in front of your face and your whole body goes into shock. Yeah.

Especially when you don't know what I'm going to ask. Right. Yeah. That's what it was. That was intentional. Right. Yeah. I suppose probably the easiest way to describe a, a, um, a agreement is, you know, for me, um, it's when I hear that voice in my head, right.

Whenever we hear a voice that's not ours, it's not God's, it's usually accusatory or, um, speaks to you in the third person. Um, and you take hold of it, you take ownership of it just because we hear something from our, you know, our friends or our family or, you know, in our own mind, you know, it's not true unless you accept that it's true. You know, um, it's, and that, and that's the, that's kind of the rub, right? You know, where do you, where do you draw that line?

Yeah. The enemy's really good at using half truths to get you to jump on agreements. You know, you'll do something that's not the wisest thing to do. And he'll say, well, that was really stupid. And you kind of go, well, yeah, that was kind of stupid. I mean, you have to admit it, right.

He's like, well, you're just an idiot. Right. Right. And so then you just agree on with him some more, right.

Or worse. And that's a very mild version of it, but, you know, and then the agreement sets in, well, I'm just an idiot. I had a pretty serious one come up yesterday. Um, actually, um, talked about a little bit earlier, but, you know, I was sitting there at my work computer and my youngest daughter, she's six years, five years old, sorry, beautiful little girl, greatest heart you can imagine. And, and in my mind, you know, I was going through a lot of, um, I've been under a spiritual attack with a lot of my past and, you know, again, you should have done better. You could have done again, it's that third person voice that you need to listen to or to kind of, it helps you to determine if it's yours or not. But, and as she was sitting there playing just as happy as she could be, um, this, I, and it sounded a lot like my thought and it wasn't a you or her or anything like that. The thought was actually she, she could have had a better dad, you know, she could have had a better dad and that was all it was. And I started to cry and I started to kind of take that and say, and, and say in my heart, you know, yeah, she could have, um, knowing my past, she could have had a better dad. And immediately something rose up in me and I, and I knew it was not my voice. I knew it was not God's and I knew it was somebody else's. And I, and I just said, that's enough. It was like, that's not God's voice. That's not my voice. You got to go.

We're not having that. And it left, it left immediately. And then father, he, he, he dealt with some of my agreements, um, from that today. Um, I was sitting there with, I'm just having time with father and, and he asked me that question again. He said, you know, do you think she could have had a better dad? And in my heart, I still thought that, I mean, there's still a, yeah, she could have had a better life. She could have had a better dad.

And he asked me point blank. He said, who knit her in the womb? Who chooses who we're born to, right? Well, my agreement is with my dad and my family and a lot of things the way I grew up, you know, and he asked me the same question, you know, who knit you in your mother's womb? Did I not pick your father for you? Like, and he, he melded it into the reality that our lives, that what he does in our lives is he shapes us along the way and the enemy comes in and tries to create these agreements to throw us off track. Yeah.

Thank you, Wayne. Jim, you want to help us with the either vows or bitter root? Bitter root is when you have, and often it is something that you deserve to be angry, upset about, but you nurse it. You help it grow.

You want vengeance rather than forgiveness. And it eats you up. Um, now I already forgot what the first thing you said was.

That's okay. You think about this time of year, people are gardening, right? And so you have a root that's coming up root, a weed that's coming up. And if you just kind of snip it at the top, it's not really going to do anything, right? You got to get that, that whole root. Yeah. Like actually grow, grow quicker.

If you trim them down and leave the roots in there. Exactly. And so it's getting to that root, you know, a lot of times that is an agreement, you know, at that root level, but it's one that's, uh, infiltrated many, many aspects of your life at that point. Cause as you said, you nurse it, you nurture it either intentionally or not intentionally. And, and it grows and, and spreads, you know, throughout your life.

A vowel, I guess I would say is something when you make a more of a proclamation, it's usually accompanied with never, or always I'm never going to trust this person or I'm never going to trust people again, or they're always like that. I literally swore to God one time I would never step foot in other Southern Baptist church. So God made me a Southern Baptist minister. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And he tends to let us, uh, it gets us to eat those, uh, those vows, you know, I remember telling him, I would never get up in front of people and talk. We're sure glad you broke that.

Yeah. Well, he broke that, but yeah, it's, uh, it's those things that, that hold us back. And that's one of the key tools of the enemy, you know, he started as early as in the garden. Did God really say this, right? You know, trying to get, get Eve to agree with, you know, God's heart, you know, almost as if God was holding out on them. And so it starts very early in mankind story. And it starts very early in our story.

It happens as we're little kids, you know, a lot of our, our biggest agreements, the ones that are hardest to break the vows that are hardest to break are the ones that has been with us for a lifetime, whether your lifetime is, you know, 30 years or 80 years, you know, it's still the majority of your lifetime. I don't think anyone here's in the 30 category. You're, you're 30 something. Yeah. 30 or close to 30.

So not 30. Okay. Yeah. Of course, Harold, you're 80 ish is 80. Yeah.

30 seconds of dead air. Go to masculinejourney.org, register for the upcoming bootcamp. It's November 17th through 20th. Uh, if you would have registered sooner, you would have got an extra day. Cause apparently for the last several weeks, I would say at the 21st. So it is only four days.

It's the 17th through the 20th. Go to masculinejourney.org, register now. For me describing bootcamp, when I heard the stories from the stage that the other men had, and then during my prayer time, I'm getting a download from God on where my life is and how I have wounds and I have a place in his story to know how I heard from God is one of those things he really does communicate with us register today at masculinejourney.org. What has bootcamp meant to me? That's a really tough thing to articulate. It's so deep inside me. It's ingrained in every part of me understanding woundedness. That's where God really caught me at my first bootcamp and also helping me step into healing and restoration from those wounds. It's kind of cool.

It's like an onion. He keeps peeling back layers and it's, it's exciting and sometimes frustrating to go there with him, but I enjoy the process and the way God leads me to freedom. Register today at masculinejourney.org.

Welcome back to Masculine Journey. And as you hear that bump in, you're like, really? What's that about? Well, that's Dionne Warwick. And she sang that back in like late sixties, early seventies.

I can't remember when it was for sure. And it sounds like a very upbeat, nice song. You know, you're listening to the, you know, the rhythm of it and you're like, everybody in the studios dancing around, you know, mainly Danny and Rodney.

But they're dancing around and you just, it makes you feel kind of good. And then you listen to the words, you know, love's only going to give you pain and sorrow. I'm going to swear off of it at least till tomorrow. And I know I'm not getting exactly right there, but that's basically what she says. And then she says, I'm never going to love again. Never going to fall in love again. Well, you've got a never, don't you?

That you'd like to probably introduce here that's coming up? Not a, well, yeah, I'm breaking a, well, not a never. It's close to a never.

Well, I wasn't ever going to play one of David's clips and that's going to be broken right now. Wow. We're just breaking agreements right off the bat, aren't we?

No, that was not the agreement. I'm not a Forrest Gump fan and I know that's going to take a lot of people out there and they're not going to understand it. I just am not a Forrest Gump fan. So it's really hard for me to listen to clips from Forrest Gump, but this is one of the better ones.

This is one that I really liked. And this is David's first official clip that could make the air. Congratulations, David. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I came in today hoping to break that rejection agreement that I made last week, but you know, it's still early on. So, so this, this comes into Forrest Gump when him and Lieutenant Dan had been at war. Lieutenant Dan's family, the men in the family had died pretty much every great war beforehand. And we come into this clip where Forrest Gump had drug him out alive and he forms an agreement and a vow and ultimately sow some bitter roots that go on throughout the movie until he breaks that agreement. But we'll go ahead and listen to this and we'll come back and talk about it. You listen to me. We all have a destiny.

Nothing just happens. It's all part of a plan. I should have died out there with my men, but now I'm nothing but a cripple, a legless freak. Look, look, look at me. You see that? Do you know what it's like not to be able to use your legs? Yes, sir.

I do. Did you hear what I said? You cheated me. I had a destiny. I was supposed to die in the field with honor. That was my destiny. And you cheated me out of it. Do you understand what I'm saying, Gump? This wasn't supposed to happen.

Not to me. I had a destiny. I was Lieutenant Dan Taylor. You're still Lieutenant Dan. Look at me.

What am I going to do now? You know, when I'm listening to that, I look back at, you know, he said my destiny and my destiny and my destiny. And I think a lot of time as men, or even as our human flesh anyway, we form these agreements with the enemy that clouds what our destiny should be.

You know, if we take a bigger look at the picture, step back and pray about it, you know, God will fulfill our destiny. And it's not necessarily what we think it should be, or the agreement that we formed that we think it should be, but it's ultimately going to be what He wants it to be. That's really what I took away from that clip. Thanks.

I appreciate it. It's a good clip and good conversation. So what's wrong, guys, with having agreements? Why does God want us to break those? Why does He want to get us away from those? Because most of the time, they're not true.

And they don't always come from the devil. Most of my life, I was plagued with a very bad temper. My temper was shorter than my vertical reach by a lot.

It took nothing to set me off. And my agreement was, that's just who I am. And I'll never change.

But I have. I sat through losing probably an hour on our trip to the coast over the weekend in traffic that was, go two miles an hour, stop, wait, go two miles an hour, stop, wait. A few years ago, I would have been screaming and lucky not to break the top half of the steering wheel off. As it was, I wasn't happy about it. But I didn't react the way I would have before. I don't take the credit for breaking that agreement. I give that to the Holy Spirit, because I had asked God, through His Holy Spirit, to help me get rid of what was plaguing me through His Holy Spirit, to help me get rid of what was plaguing my life, making my wife miserable when we were on a road trip.

And it's happened. But that agreement didn't come from the devil. It came from me. And that's the sneaky part that we have to get around. It's one thing if you can hear a voice and say, that's not my voice. That's not God's voice. But when it's just a part of your nature, as you see it, it's really, really sneaky and difficult to get rid of. Yeah, the hard part is, you know, there may have been a time way back when the enemy did whisper that to you. And you just said, Yeah, that's me. You know, seriously, I mean, that's how he does it. He does it at such a young age, sometimes that we don't remember even making that agreement, or sometimes it's, you know, the old self or somebody that's speaking up as well. But yeah, in that story, you had both a an agreement and a vow, because you said you're never going to change, right, which was a vow.

And that's what kind of locks it down. It's like the Oh, I don't even know how you would say it. But it's like the pressure on the Tupperware, you know, when you get the last bit of the air out, right, that locks that agreement down in there, just like Tupperware does.

If you don't know what Tupperware is, go look it up on YouTube or something, you'll figure it out. One of the things about the vows is, and the agreements is if you've made the vow, it's very easy to go back to. So you can be broken from it for a while. But today, I just said before the show, made a comment about I'm lazy. Well, yesterday, I nearly killed myself and a friend working us to death, hauling stuff out of a building. I wasn't exactly lazy. And I've had times where I've had a goal that I would push myself beyond limits. And God supported that.

And yet I still go back to that agreement fairly often. So Jim, since you got the microphone, why don't you go ahead and set up your clip. We'll go ahead and play your clip.

Alrighty, my clip is Corrie Ten Boom. And if you have never heard of her, I'm sorry, because you need to. She was an amazing woman, still is. But she was a Christian who helped Jews during World War Two. And her and her family, they all ended up in concentration camps. And she was very close to her sister.

And that's what you'll hear at the beginning of this clip, and then we'll revisit it. Betsy's concern for the perpetrators would come to mind. Corrie had never forgotten the traitor responsible for the misery of so many people.

She harbored great bitterness against him. Corrie knew, though, that when the time came that she was released from the camp and was back home, that she had to write him a letter. And she did and said that he was forgiven.

And then she explained the gospel very clearly. I died after 10 months, terrible suffering. My brother, he came out alive with a sick man and died through that sickness, and his son never came back. I myself have suffered terribly through in three different prisons, but I have forgiven you. And that is because Jesus is in my heart.

And I sent that man a New Testament that underlined the way of salvation, and that man wrote me that you could forgive me is such a great miracle that I have said, Jesus, when you give such a love in the heart of your followers, there's hope for me. Now, what hooked me in this is I don't know anyone that has the right, could have righteous anger, have bitterness stay with them more than, I mean, nobody I know currently has gone through what she went through or anything close. And yet she, and she admits how bitter she was and had to take that to God.

And I was really looking to share the remedy for the bitterness, the bitter root that does, once it's ingrained in there, it is hard to get rid of, and you can't do it on your own. God's going to have to pull that out for you, but he's not going to do it if you don't take it to him and ask for it as she did. And she had an impact on many, many people. She lost her sister Betsy, who we loved her, and they had plans that they were going to reach out to those that had hurt them during the war and that were the Germans that were hurt because of the war after they got out. And her sister said, we will both get out of here alive.

Well, she got out alive going to heaven, but Corey was left behind and she spent her entire life serving many of her enemies, as well as the Dutch that suffered. It's a story worth getting familiar with if you've never heard it. Thank you, Jim.

I want to revisit real quickly before we wrap up this show. You know, Wild at Heart, when they teach on spiritual warfare, their whole talk is about agreements. From start to finish, it's about agreements.

And it sounds like those agreements are such small things, and that's what makes them so deadly, right? It doesn't really seem like a big deal if I get mad and call myself an idiot. You know, who's that really hurt? Well, at the end of the day, it hurts me. At the end of the day, it can hurt my family.

It can hurt the other people around me because when they react out of that place, it's going to be a place of anger, right? And so those agreements are a big deal. And so you have those where you make these alliances with the enemy, really, in an agreement.

That's what that does. A vow is a proclamation of never always, you're taking a stand that this will never happen to me again, those types of things. I'll never love again. I'll never trust again, any of that.

And then you have the bitter root, which is also an agreement, but it's one that infects all aspects of your life, or almost all aspects of your life. And we come back on the after hours. We're going to talk more about that, learn some of our stories.

We've got some great clips, one from Rodney that's pretty funny. You don't want to miss it. But in the meantime, go to masculinejourney.org, register for the upcoming bootcamp, November 17th through 20th. And you can also download any of our podcasts there. We'll talk to you next week. This is the Truth Network.