God is at work and he's calling his people to rise in truth. Truth Rising is a powerful new documentary from Focus on the Family and the Colson Center. See how ordinary Christians choose courage in a culture that needs truth. Watch Truth Rising today and find out how you can become an agent of restoration and hope. Visit truthrising.com today.
That's truthrising.com. we have been rescued and if we realize what we were rescued from we will live with joy and we will live with worship and we'll set the bar really low for anything else god asks god doesn't have to prove himself anymore he's more than proven himself that's gary thomas and he joins us again today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly, sharing how he believes Christians can be set free from spiritual lies that hinder our relationship with God. I'm John Fuller, and we're so glad you've joined us today. John, we had a fascinating conversation with Gary last time about the things that rob our intimacy with God. Let me put on pause what robs you of that intimacy, something popping up, like maybe you don't have peace, or you're over-controlling, or maybe you're putting your family in that first position.
It needs to be the Lord. Those are all things we covered last time.
So if you missed it, you can go to the website, or better yet, get the app and download the Focus on the Family broadcast app, and you'll have everything there, podcast, broadcast, and access to the full library. Yeah, it's free. It's great. Get that app and start listening today. Gary Thomas is a prolific writer.
He's got numerous books about marriage and walking with God, and they've sold millions of copies. He's a recurring guest here at Focus, always popular, and is on the pastoral teaching team at Cherry Hills Community Church in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. We're talking today, a continuation, as Jim said, of what started last time, talking about the book, The Life You Were Reborn to Live, Dismantling Twelve Lies That Rob Your Intimacy with God. Get a copy of the book from us here at our website, focusonthefamily.com slash broadcast. Gary, welcome back to Focus on the Family.
Great to have you as always. Thank you. And now it's just a close drive from Denver to Colorado Springs. And a beautiful drive at that. It is, isn't it?
Now you know our little secret. Hey, let's start with scripture. Romans 12, 2 tells us, do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.
Now let me add a little additional scripture there where Paul says, those things I don't want to do, I do. And those things I should do, I don't do in essence.
So put those two together for us. It is kind of that battle of our mind, our heart, our soul that Paul's actually recognizing in his own heart. And he's, man, he's a giant of the faith. Yeah.
Well, belief sets up what we practice. We will never practice perfectly. This side of heaven, we are all going to be a work in progress. In fact, one of the chapters that was hardest for me to write was living with the ongoing reality of sin, recognizing that that's going to be a continuing factor. What is my relationship with sin?
How can I learn from that rather than be defeated about that? But if I don't believe the truth, I'm going to practice a lie and I'm going to live a lie.
So the mind isn't everything, but when he says, be transformed by the renewing of your mind, I do think he says it begins there. And so often when Paul sets up the ethics, it's remember who you are before he tells us what to do. You're dearly beloved. You're chosen by God. You're adopted by God.
Therefore, live this way. If we are mistaken about who we are, we're gonna be mistaken in the way we live. And it's so true. Gary, you mention a lie in the book about self-serving salvation. Let's hit that because that one jumped off the page at me.
We all do that to a certain degree. I think it's just, and again, in our fallen nature as human beings, and you've got to keep checking that in your spirit, in your soul to hopefully make sure you're doing it less and less. But speak to self-serving salvation. What does that mean? It means we make it all about us.
It means, and this is one of the lies I think I picked up in the church that Jesus lived a perfect life, died on the cross, rose from the dead so that my sins could be forgiven, and I could live with him in heaven for eternity. Yeah, it's all true. That's true, but it's not complete. That's a self-centered view where, okay, I get forgiven, and I hang on for heaven, and that's what it means to live the Christian life. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5.15, and he died for all that.
And the word that is basically meaning because he died for all that, those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and was raised again.
So the full gospel isn't just Jesus saved me, but that God enlists me. He has a plan for my life. He has a plan for everybody watching. And theologians will think this is obscene when I use this analogy, but there's the word election in scripture about God chooses us, I like to liken it to the NFL draft. And again, apology to all the theologians, but it works in a church.
It preaches in a church to common people, trust me. And so if you're chosen to be in a draft, you're not just chosen to put on a uniform and cash a paycheck, i.e. call yourself a Christian and get to heaven. You're chosen to play a position. In 2025, the Denver Broncos drafted Jeremy Croshaw.
And if you see a picture of him, He's all legs. He's got the longest legs I've ever seen. Nobody thinks he was drafted to be an offensive lineman, right? Or Bo Nix would have a very long day getting crushed. He's a punter and he looks like a punter.
And this means every believer, you're chosen not to sit on the bench and wait to get into heaven. God has a role for you to play. He's given you gifts. He's given you talents. He wants to use you to fulfill a role in his kingdom.
And if we have just a self-centered view of salvation, when life starts to hurt and ministry starts to get hard, we want to jump off. A verse that has just changed my life, I've just been living with, 2 Timothy 4, 5, there's an ellipsis in the middle, but Paul tells Timothy, endure hardship, Discharge all the duties of your ministry. And Paul's warning Timothy, faith means you're gonna be hot, you're gonna be cold, you're gonna be tired, you're gonna be persecuted. But Timothy, hang in there.
Sometimes you have to endure it. It's not just about getting to heaven. It about fulfilling all the duties of your ministry I was speaking to a physician once and she believes God created her to be a physician but her office spends as much time trying to get paid from insurance and Medicaid as they do caring for patients. She's threatened with one-star reviews, malpractice lawsuits, and she's scared, I want to practice medicine, but I'm so tired of this and this and this, and why do I have to put up with that? As a pastor, you like to be comforting, but sometimes as a pastor, you have to say what I said to her, what Paul said to Timothy, if God has called you to do this, that means you have to endure the hardship and discharge all the duties of your ministry.
And I've said it to husbands. I had one husband... Be careful now.
Well, his wife was divorcing him, I didn't believe, for biblical reasons. and you put up with a lot when you're facing that. And he finally texted me and he said this, Gary, why am I fighting for this marriage? And here's what I texted back to him. You're fighting for your marriage because you made vows before God, because you want your kids to have an intact home, because God is using even your wife's tiresome aspects to help you grow.
You've been digging deeper into your faith in part because of the way you're being mistreated. This doesn't make it easy, but it makes it worthwhile.
Now, I've had people try to sidestep this call saying, Gary, you and I both know God's going to forgive me and I'm going to go to heaven anyway. I've literally heard that in any number of ethical situations. That comes from a self-serving salvation, that view that it's all about being saved, forgiven and waiting for heaven, which is not the gospel Jesus taught. He said, seek first the kingdom of God. It's not what Paul taught when he said he died for all that those who live no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and was raised again.
Man, there is so much in that answer, Gary. Moving to another lie that we need to dismantle is that materialistic world. This is probably one of the biggest battles for the West, the battle between a materialistic world and a supernatural, spirit-led world. How do we reduce the one and increase the other in our relationship with God? This was one of the...
I kind of like running water and bathrooms inside the house. Are those... Is that a materialistic thing? No, what we're... What I'm talking about there is a materialistic worldview that denies the supernatural aspects.
specifically the reality of angels. And I have to confess, I hardly ever taught about angels and spoke about angels because I was thinking my friends would say, oh, Gary, are you waiting for the Easter bunny to show up? I mean, kind of that thing. But when I looked into how pervasive angels were throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament, it is shocking. Just about every major movement of God, the angels were active there.
And then the New Testament saying that angels are still active today. And the way that changes our faith, what it does for me is it takes it from living a life of feeling alone and fearful to going on the offense. I'm not just playing defense. God's mighty messengers are there to help fight God's battles. This is a Christian privilege.
People talk about everybody has a guardian angel. I'm not sure I'm buying that. The angels are sent to be messengers of God's servants. Psalm 91, 9 and 11 says, if you say the Lord is my refuge and you make the most high your dwelling, then he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. Which believer, this is one of the great kingdom privileges.
There are millions of them, but you give your trust to God and God says to his mighty angel warriors. They're not little fat cherubs in wings wearing diapers. These are mighty messengers that make people feel terrified. God is saying to them, this is my daughter. Protect her.
Empower her as she goes out. A widow who read an earlier chapter of this book, this was so fulfilling, wrote to me and said, Gary, I was in tears. I lost my husband this past year. I'm an older woman, I felt so alone. And I read about this divine protection that's real and some of the stories you shared about how angels were really there.
And she goes, I've never felt safer since my husband died. And Gary, this question isn't to put you on the spot, but to recognize there are people that maybe they didn't get that supernatural intervention, something bad did happen to them, but speak to them too. It doesn't mean God has abandoned you, but it can feel like that.
Well, you see both in the life of Jesus, frankly. There's a time when it said they made up their mind to stone him, and then Jesus walked through the crowd because it wasn't time for him to die. But then Jesus was crucified. You have Peter delivered from prison, and yet James was beheaded. And so the Bible tells us there are times when God will intervene and protect us.
We always have his protection. It may not be in the earthly form that we want, but Jim, those are one of those unanswerable questions. I can't give a definitive answer that I think would satisfy everybody. Yeah, let me put it in this context.
Sometimes we keep score as human beings.
So if you have enough credits with God, you don't get hurt. If you have credits with God, he protects you. That's not how it works. No, not at all. You don't see it in scripture.
Some of the most faithful servants of God suffered the most. You see in the book of Revelation, all the martyrs, people who were literally killed for their faith, crying out, when will we be avenged? And so God uses his servants. I think of it this way. There is a whole spiritual battle going on, and this might seem hardcore, but there's a story from the Civil War.
It's actually from the Battle of Gettysburg where the Union lines were being broken through and they didn't have time to regather. And so a general had to make the horrible decision to send 50 men. You need to go plug that hole while we pull back. Every man that went forward knew they would not come back. They would be killed.
The general knew he was sending them to their death. But for the battle to be won, he had to do it. Those men went, all of them were killed but the line was spared the union won that battle and eventually the war We have to recognize God is our general he is our sovereign Now we got a glorious eternity ahead of us but if he calls us to sacrifice ourselves in this battle, as we've seen recently, I think young Charlie Kirk, we think, how much could he have done if he'd been allowed to live? But Jesus was 33 when he died. Dietrich Bonhoeffer never made it to 40.
I mean, I think throughout history, you see these great lights that live relatively short lives. But we can live a life with confidence knowing it's not random, God's going to protect us, and we're gonna go to a tremendous place. We would never wanna leave if we saw what it was. And that's probably the best promise. Yeah.
Gary, you write in the book on entitlement, and you said, which I thought was the knockdown quote and the reason I wanna make this statement, You said, when entitlement drops, happiness rises. Yes. You know, that sounds so counterintuitive, which is so God, right? And at first I thought about that in a parenting context. If you can get those teenagers to relax on entitlement, their happiness will rise.
And that is true, I believe. Same is true in marriage. Yes. Same is true for us individually. I mean, it's consistent through our lives, this idea that when your entitlement drops, you'll actually be happier.
In fact, you point to a Russian author who drills this point as well. How does that Russian author connect to that idea? This chapter hit me as hard as any of them. I loved it. I would have been appalled if anybody had called me entitled until I realized how entitled I am.
The problem of being entitled is you don't realize that you're entitled because you're entitled. Dusty Esky, it's a powerful story. He's, I think, one of the greatest novelists ever. We could say of the 20th century, but I would say ever. Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot.
I mean, these are deep works of faith and fiction and psychological insight. He almost never got to write any of them. When he was in his 20s, he'd just been writing some nonfiction pamphlets. he was arrested with some friends for what Russia called anti-government activities and sentenced to death by a firing squad.
So he's there not having written any of these novels, literally looking down the barrels of guns that are going to take away his life for just writing these nonfiction pamphlets. And we don't know why, but there was a last minute reprieve where he was sentenced to four years of hard labor in a Siberian labor camp. and normally we joke about a Siberian labor camp like it's the worst place in the world because it kind of is nine months of winter no day off you work as long as it's light and he maintained this sweet spirit because he didn't compare the Siberian labor camp to Santa Barbara he compared it to I should be dead I shouldn't be alive I was second to one pull of that trigger and I would be gone and it filled his novels. It shaped his life. I get to write about Sonia.
I get to write about the brothers Karamazov. I get to do this. This whole sense of, I don't deserve any of this. And Jim, this is how it should be for every believer who realizes we deserve eternal death, that our sin has separated us from God. And yet Jesus died so that we could have a relationship with God.
And then we can have the Holy Spirit within us. And we can have the hope of heaven when we should be in despair. by what we deserve on our own. And God saving us has given us more than we ever deserve. If we could see what we've been saved from, as Dostoevsky saw the guns that he was saved from, we would be on our knees every day.
God, I can't believe I'm not where I should be. And yet we think that we dismiss it. Jesus made it very clear in John 16, 33. This is about not letting a lie rob you from intimacy with God. In this world, you will have trouble, but take heart.
I've overcome the world. Genesis 3.16 says relationships will be hard. 1 Corinthians 7 means the battle against sin will be ongoing. 1 Corinthians says, unless Jesus returns, we're going to face sickness and death. The Bible is not lying to us that these things will come even to the family of God and Jesus doubles down, this world, you're going to have trouble.
Paul sets the bar at entitlement shockingly low. 1 Timothy 6.8, if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that.
Now, I'm just saying, how many, how often when I say, what kind of clothing, what kind of food? And people usually say clothing would include housing, but what kind of house. And everything that we add to John 16, 33 and 1 Timothy 6, 8 is where we become entitled. God, I deserve this and that. And then I think of the apostle Paul who gave up all of that because he was so enamored by his love for God.
Paul who chose to go from being the persecutor to the persecuted. Instead of, I'm going to put you in prison. No, now you get to put me in prison, that's somebody who doesn't have entitlement thinking. And so I just want to go back to help people understand it. And this is so key, what it means to be rescued, that the Bible stresses so many times the words rescued.
Colossians 1, 13 through 14, he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the son he loves. You mentioned Romans seven. What a wretched man I am who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death. Galatians one, grace and peace to you from God, our father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself our sins to rescue us from the present evil age. We have been rescued.
And if we realize what we were rescued from, we will live with joy and we will live with worship and we'll set the bar really low for anything else God asks you. God doesn't have to prove himself anymore. He's more than proven himself by rescuing us. We were imprisoned by sin. We were slaves to Satan.
We were guilty, deserving the wrath of God. He wiped that out. And I can't tell you, once I laid down entitlement, so much more joy, so much more worship, so much more gratitude. You know, I've thought about that in the context of my own experiences in this life, but I believe it feels so sound that when a person is in those kinds of valleys and they're faithful, God smiles. Because when you get there and you're still trusting God, you're content in all things, he's got you.
You in his hand Nothing of this world is going to be able to pull you away And that is such a good place Gary in this context of a rich toward God life that the way you said it so I say it that way in the book, you made a profound discovery in scripture when you looked at the difference between Paul and Herod Agrippa II. What was that? This changed my life thinking about it because it is so hard. When Paul says don't conform to the pattern of this world, this world says what matters is wealth so that you're at least comfortable, health, power, influence, that people speak well of you, listen to you, pay attention to you, and respect you. Agrippa II had all of that.
He cozied up to Rome so he would rule for decades hence after he interacted with Paul. He had all the money. He had all the power. He ruled every guy would like to be in a situation. He was not a godly man.
He's with Bernice all the time who was not his wife. She was his sister. Yes, there were rumors. He didn't live a life at all that honored God, but he's evaluating Paul. And Paul is brought in from prison, so he smells.
He'd received already the 40 lashes minus one five times, which will scar you for life. He would die in months' times. He had no money, no influence. And then the Pharisees are saying, Paul's not fit to speak, which I think is the worst opinion in the history of worst opinions. I wish Paul had written twice what he did.
And so you look at that and it looks like Agrippa won. He had all the power, the wealth, the comfort, the respect. Paul looked like he had none of that. And yet today, 2,000 years later, no one would even know who Agrippa 2 was except for that interaction with the forgotten Paul. And I don't think it's hyperbole.
I don't think there's a minute on the planet earth where Paul's words aren't being discussed, memorized, or read somewhere on this planet. Paul won. If I'm a pastor, if I mentioned Paul from a pulpit, everybody knows who I'm talking about. If I go into a mall and say, well, Agrippa says, nobody knows who I'm talking about. And so it's about living a rich toward God life that these things that we think matter.
If I've read, I've done this in other places, who the world's richest man was 25 years ago. Nobody had ever heard of them. I mean, today we hear the names Bezos and Elon Musk, and we think they're larger than life and they'll never be forgotten. And I go back and read these names and then you think, well, everybody knows the presidents, right? And so I ask him, well, what was Chester Arthur's philosophy of life?
Unless people had to memorize those things in high school, nobody remembers that Chester Arthur was a president. Fewer could say one thing he stood for or what he did.
So the world's fame is literally like soap bubbles. It doesn't matter. And every day we spend trying to build our own kingdom instead of the kingdom of God, we're literally blowing soap bubbles. We're wasting our lives. And the one thing I never want to hear, I never want to hear, because every one of us is going to see Jesus face to face.
You will, I will, everybody listening or watching, I don't want to hear Jesus saying, Gary, Gary, Gary, you spent your entire life fighting battles that don't matter. You missed the one that does.
Now, I still think I'll be saved by the mercy of Jesus, but I don't want to have that conversation. I don't want to enter eternity thinking that I missed the one life on earth that could be invested to seek first the kingdom of God instead of the kingdom of Gary. Man, that is what it's all about. And that's the best place we could land. There's so much more we could talk about.
But Gary, this has been so good and so thought-provoking and spiritually provoking. And I hope the folks have really enjoyed the scripture. A lot of scripture was used in this program. It points us all back to God's way, God's attitude, and what he wants for us as a father. And this has been terrific.
Thanks so much for being with us. Thank you, guys. And let me turn to the listener. I want to encourage you to get a copy of this terrific resource, The Life You Were Reborn to Live. And you can do that by making a gift to focus on the family of any amount.
And we'll send you the book as our way of saying thank you. Also, we're counting on regular contributors who will work with us month to month to strengthen marriages, equip parents, save preborn babies, and help all of us become better followers of Christ. When you contribute to Focus on the Family, you're delivering hope and joy to parents and grandparents like Janice, who wrote to tell us this. I'm a grandmother now and have listened to your show for many years. I believe the family is under attack, and although my gift is small, I want to support the work you do to strengthen Christian families and save babies.
I love that. May God continue to use you and bless your work. And we're grateful for every gift. We are, and we're so grateful for your partnership. You help strengthen marriages and support parents and grandparents like Janice when you partner with Focus on the Family, so please contribute today.
Donate and get your copy of that book, The Life You Were Reborn to Live, when you call 800-the letter A and the word family, 800-232-6459. Or check the show notes for the links and details. We'll plan to join us again tomorrow as we hear from marriage coach and author Dan Seaborn. He's going to share how God took his marriage from stressed out to peaceful. And so I said, Lord, I'm not dying like that.
I want you to change me. I want you to make me a man that she loves to be around and says, you're blowing fresh oxygen onto the flame of our marriage.
So Lord, show me what I got to do. Thanks for listening to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. God is at work and he's calling his people to rise in truth. Truth Rising is a powerful new documentary from Focus on the Family and the Colson Center.
See how ordinary Christians choose courage in a culture that needs truth. Watch Truth Rising today and find out how you can become an agent of restoration and hope. Visit truthrising.com today. That's truthrising.com.
