What Are You Doing With Your Freedom After Hours

This is Stu Epperson from the Truth Talk Podcast, connecting current events, pop culture, and theology. And we're so grateful for you that you've chosen the Truth Podcast Network.

It's about to start in just a few seconds. Enjoy it, and please share it around with all your friends. Thanks for listening, and thanks for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. This is the Truth Network. Coming to you from an entrenched barricade deep in the heart of central North Carolina, Masculine Journey After Hours, a time to go deeper and be more transparent on the topic covered on this week's broadcast. So, sit back and join us on this adventure. The Masculine Journey After Hours starts here now.

Welcome to Masculine Journey After Hours. We are glad that you're with us this week, and we are on our post-Memorial Day show. We're post, well, a lot of things. We're post-Valentine's Day. We're post-Christmas.

I guess post just means after, so, you know, it's after lots of things. We're also pre-Christmas. That's true. Well, assuming we make it that far. Yeah, we haven't quite made the turn. Pre-4th of July. Yeah, we're pre-4th of July show.

We could say that. Robby? It's 4th of July, EVVVVVVV.

About 1000 EVs. No. Prebootcamp. So the reason I brought up Memorial Day, last weekend was Memorial Day, and during the time, you know, we get more patriotic, you know, for most people. You see a lot of flags that are flying and, you know, we talked about the people that had fought for our freedom, right?

It's a big part of the topic. And so the topic of this week is freedom. And in part of the question we asked in the first show is what are you doing with that freedom? Yeah. What's God been asking you to do with that freedom?

Do they match? You know, are you doing the things God's asking you to do with them? Are you kind of doing your own thing or do a little bit of both? You know, I don't know. I'm not making a judgment.

I'm just asking you to think about it. And so we've been talking about that topic and we'll continue to talk about the topic in the after hours and get a little deeper. We did share some of our stories in the, in the first show and we'll continue to do that. But, uh, Jim, you're actually the first clip of the second show. Wow. Wow. I think that's cause I'm the only one with a microphone in front of my face besides you, but it could be, I'll take it.

Yeah. It's kind of like miss congeniality, but still, uh, the way I went at this, first of all, it was, I was thinking of clips and I thought, well, somebody will have that. Some will have that. And I can only had a couple. And then I thought of a song and then I thought of another song and another song. I mean, I had at least half a dozen songs that hit me within seconds and most of them were from my youth. And I did not realize how many of them had an impact on me then. And the first three are from sixties, early seventies.

And the last one I discovered when I thought about, I need something uplifting for my final one, but let's play it and then I'll chat about it. Okay. We sang every song that Javan knew. Just another word. Nothing left to lose. Nothing. I mean, nothing, honey, if it ain't free. Feeling good was easy.

When he sang a blues, you know, feeling good was good enough for me. Find the cause of freedom, buried in the ground. My mother will swallow you. Lay your body down. Gentle voice. I can't evade.

Speaks in the darkness of the heart and whispers. Do not be afraid. You can be free. The price was paid for your freedom. The chains are broken.

The door is open. He is your freedom. When I was growing up, I was a sad kid because Robby struggles with the word morose. It's not just Robby.

Okay. And I basically was borderline depressed. Every once in a while semi-suicidal. And it was because of the times in the sixties. I was looking at this and Janis Joplin, I didn't care much for her voice, but I loved her stories. And this song in particular appealed to me because it was, you know, freedom was just nothing left to lose hit home with me when I was a young teen. And then I love Crosby, Stills, Nash, and then Young. And Find the Cost of Freedom was way up there.

And it was really about Vietnam. And, you know, you're, you find your freedom when you're buried in the ground. And I identified with that. The, and it sounds like I wasn't a totally depressed kid, but my joy, the times I was joyful were singing. I love singing. I love listening to music.

I still do, but I don't do it like I did when I was a kid. And then Jimi Hendrix, he died of an overdose, great guitar player. And one of his songs was Freedom. And his had a little hope in it. He's free to give. And You've Got My Heart, which he was singing to a woman, but I was thinking of it in terms of God by that time.

And then fast forward a number of decades. I love Michael Card. I always have listened to his music, Christian music in the 80s and 90s in particular. And now we're, follow him regularly and go to the Cove and like, well, not Black Mountain.

I stay in Black Mountain. But I got to get to the point, don't I, Robby? Reel it in. Love him to death. And I said, well, he's bound to have a song on freedom.

I had not heard this one until I played it. And it was one I kind of wept through because the freedom I have now is not the sad freedom I had as a child where I was looking for it as, you know, just let me out of here. It is the freedom to follow God. And when you get older, you don't really care what people think about you, which is nearly as much anyway.

And it doesn't bother you. And I had the freedom last week of confronting a lady. I saw it as confronting, but it ended up being quite loving. But she walked by and said, well, it's just not fair because she didn't have a chair to sit in. I offered her my seat on the wall because there were no chairs. And she said no.

But then I said, well, I need to go apologize. And that turned into praying for her, cheering her up, talking to her about Jesus. And I actually assumed she was Jewish. She was not. She was a Christian and she was Italian.

So there's a New York connection there somehow. But that freedom to step into a stranger's life and make a difference is really what I live for now. Thank you, Jim. So Robby, I'm interested to see how you tie your clip into this topic. Wonderful. Well, first of all, I was trying to dispel moroseness. Yeah. Morosity is a word we made up a little while ago. You know, as I was listening to Jimmy, he was dispelling, you know, moroseness as he was helping that lady get rid of her sadness. I love it.

But I, you know, yeah, I don't have that vocabulary. So, you know, one of the interesting things is I thought about your topic was how do I, you know, how do I actually use my freedom when it comes to time? In other words, when I have free time, am I doing, what am I doing with that? And recently my mother-in-law passed away, which put my wife into a tremendous moroseness. Really, really did. And, you know, God just put it on my heart to go after my wife's heart like I'd really never have before and invest as much time as I possibly could to do that. And we had a chance to go to Montana, you know, to actually carry her mother's ashes up to her brother up there and take a car. And we had, you know, a lot of time together.

And then recently we went, I took Tammy with me to the NRB, to the National Religious Broadcasters Convention. And again, I was just using my free time, which usually, you know, I love to think as I was evaluating this, I use my free time to get with God. Like every morning I got time. And what am I going to do with it? And every evening I got time. And what am I going to do with it? And so I thought, well, you know, that's kind of cool.

And it helps me and encourages me actually to spend more time with the people that I love. And this clip spoke to that because I'm a big, huge Star Trek fan. And so here you got three guys that we all know pretty well in Star Trek.

It would be Captain Kirk and Bones and Mr. Spock. And what do they do with their free time? And they have shore leave.

It's very interesting. Nearly these people have a life of service, right? They've been serving their galactic enterprise, whatever that may be. Five-year mission.

The Federation. Yeah, they've been serving. But when they have a chance and they've just got free time, where do they go?

They go on a camp out. And again, those of us who take our time to do boot camps, it seems to fit, you know, the idea of fellowship, right? And the idea for me of what has happened with my time at boot camp is some of the best investments I could possibly have seen what God did with that and was worth what I've talked about enough is worth dying for.

It really seems to me to be that way. So here we have these three, and it's just comical to me, but at the same point, it makes the point. And you'll hear Jim Kirk describe how he didn't think he was going to die. And when he was with his friends and the fellowship of that, and it made me think of our friend, Vinnie Menino, that Vinnie chose with his freedom to fight alongside of us for his last years of his life. In doing boot camp, standing up on stage, getting mad at me, a lot of stuff like that. Because Vinnie was a fighter. If there was anything you could say about Vinnie, you know, you'd have to say that he was a fighter.

And because he did, he lives in all of us that had a chance to do that. And so I think that if you listen to these three in this clip as they're experiencing this campout, number one, I hate beans. And so it immediately appealed to me because of the whole reference to beans.

And those guys who know me well know they're good for you. You want to make Robby's day making some Texas caviar. It's like a buffet of beans.

So just go play the clip and we'll do that. We're right here. And we're starving. Bipodal seeds, Dr. Beans, Spock, but no ordinary beans. These are from an old Southern recipe handed down to me by my father. And if you stick your Vulcan nose up at these, you're not only insulting me, but generations of McCoys.

In that case, I have a little choice but to sample your beans. You know, you two could drive a man to drink. Me?

What did I do? Human life is far too precious to risk on crazy stunts. Maybe it didn't cross that macho mind of yours, but you should have been killed when you fell off that mountain. They crossed my mind.

And? And even as I fell, I knew I wouldn't die. Oh, I thought he was the only one who's immortal.

Oh, no, it isn't that. I knew I wouldn't die because the two of you were with me. This mystery to me withdraws us together. All that time and space and we're getting on each other's nerves. And what do we do when Charlie comes along?

We spend it together. What are you doing? I am preparing to toast a marshmallow.

A marshmallow. Where'd you learn to do that? Before leaving the ship, I consulted the computer library to familiarize myself with the customs associated with camping out. See, Spock was Googling it. That's what he was doing.

He Googled. What are you doing when you go camping? Well, you know, and then, but you know, the end of that scene, which I cut out, they all say goodnight to each other, kind of like the Waltons and, you know, good night, John Boyer.

They were saying goodnight, Jim and all this. And, and you could hear, you know, to me, bootcamp is like a piece of heaven. Actually, the last few weeks I spent with my wife for a piece of heaven, something I'll always remember, you know, I know what I did with my freedom and I made a good investment because it was invested in relationships that really mattered to me. And that I know through the bootcamps, you know, with I'm with you guys, I'm never going to die.

And certainly through my family, I'm never going to die. And that's eternity, you know, because of what God's given me in those relationships. Don't let me get away from what's really important there is that God's given us these relationships and what are you going to do with that freedom? And because of Jesus, you're never going to die.

One of the things you reminded me of with that, and you kind of said it, all of us sort of lean towards things that went to relationships. And the only thing we have here that will be with us in eternity are our relationships with other people, with loved ones, with God. And when you were talking about your difficult time with your wife, coming out of those, when you walk through hell with loved ones, is really when you start to experience heaven and how you love without expectations, you love the way God loves. And that was beautiful and I appreciated that. It's okay. You threw God in there at the end, so you saved it.

So that's about his response to mine too, Robby. Don't feel bad. Yeah, I was more kind.

I was fine. I get it. Yeah, yeah. So Rodney, you actually have the next clip. Okay.

That'd be you. So if you want to tell us about your clip or just when we play it, what would you like for me to do? Oh, I'll talk about it, I guess. All right. Yeah, go ahead.

Is it coming after that? I kept looking at the clock. We still had time.

And he does have two or three pages of notes. Yeah. Chuck, buckle in.

You're gonna be a little wild. There you go. Yeah. So this is from Simon Sinek. The title of his speech here, his talk, or whoever put it together said, help yourself by helping others. And he had, you know, like you had me at hello. He had me at the first line because he's like, I hate the whole self help industry. It's all about me, me, me, me, me, me, me. I'm like, Oh, where's he going?

I like this already. And then he really gets into the difference between happiness and fulfillment. He says, you know, it's not an equation. And when you want to be around those who believe what you believe, that's what you want to do. That's what we tend to do. You know, those kinds of things. And he says, the sense of fulfillment was that it was designed.

And I thought, Hey, he's touching on something here. You know, he's not a believer. He doesn't, you know, ascribe anything to God. He's designed. He says the design is from mother nature, which no, it's just, that's random happening. It's not design.

Yes. God designed it. So that's where I love it when people kind of touch on some godly themes though. But he experimented with like a homeless person in the sign that they had out there all the time and wanted to move that person from a taker and all about me to a giver. And it was a very small little experiment that he explained, but he put on there, if you only give once a month, please think of me next time, basically to make it about others and not about self. And that person actually received more income during that little period of time that he did an experiment.

Don't know if it's really, you know, scientific or anything, but it was just a random thing that he did. And then I like he points out here, a hundred percent of your customers, suppliers, employees are people. If you don't understand people, then you don't understand business.

And what that's kind of what he was doing, I think is probably speaking to a business environment. And then what he does, he says a lot of things to set up his story about the deadliest catch and watching it, which, you know, if you haven't watched the deadliest catch, it's a crab fishing in the Bering Strait, which is very, very dangerous. And they're in the middle of a storm here. And the boat that actually has a camera as a part of the storyline has another boat that they came up on in the storm. And they're watching somebody who's trying to secure the crab pots on the other one, because this boat was already secure.

They were good. They're just watching others to see how they were doing. And there's a man that's crawling on the outside of the boat. And he is all over the pots, trying to get them secure, fasten them down, big wave hits. Where'd he go? He's in the drink. So they go after him. They man overboard, man overboard.

And that's where this clip picks up. And they turn their boat towards where they think he might be. He's a stranger. They don't know him.

They don't know the crew members of the other boat. And yet they react and they turn towards him and they find him in the drink. And for those of you who don't understand how dangerous this is, if the water is so cold that if you're in the water for, I think that it's a minute or a minute 30, hypothermia will set in and you die. And they come upon him and he's screaming, don't let me die.

Don't let me die. And they pull him on board, not out of the woods yet. They strip off his clothes because it's wet and cold and they wrap blankets around him to prevent hypothermia from setting in. And he survives and it's overwhelming. The captain comes down and he hugs this stranger, this young man, his competitor. He hugs this guy as if he's his own son. I lost it.

Everybody is crying. And you realize what happened here was a human interaction. And the reason they risk their own lives to help this other person, even though they spend every other day trying to get ahead and sabotage is because at the end of the day, they're all crab fishermen and they know something about each other. And they know something about the risk that they all take to do this. And when push comes to shove, they will put themselves out there to help each other for no other reason than they get it.

They're one of the same. I will promise you that every single member of that crew that day went home with a feeling of fulfillment. I promise you that every single person on that crew that day felt more good in their hearts and in their jobs than the richest days they've ever pulled in. My question is, is what are you doing to help the person next to you? Don't you want to wake up and go to work for the only reason that you can do something good for someone else?

Wouldn't you want them to do that for you? And so as Christians, we all know what Christ did for us. And you know, he sacrificed himself. He said, okay, I'll take on your sin.

I'll take the wrath that you deserve and I'll give you my righteousness. Because what rattled in my mind ever since you started this was he came to serve and not to be served. And I'm like, well, what should I be doing with my freedom? I should be serving others. I know, you know, before Christ, it was like, what am I getting out of it?

And truly to have that changed your life and go, well, it doesn't matter what I'm getting out of it. I'm here to serve. I'm here to give.

Perfectly? No. But I do it more. I want to do it more. And I love to, you know, serve you guys, because you guys are family. You guys are not the traditional family, but you are brothers in Christ and my sisters in Christ and serving them. And when I can bring all that together, when you have both, that's a huge thing to be able to serve. You know, because Jesus came why? To do the will of the Father. And he wants a cheerful giver, not just, you know, okay, well, I've got to do it.

All right, I'll do it. But then— So is that Carolina girl over there, the sister? I'm just wondering, you know, since you chose to— Yeah, he's a Carolina girl. You said brothers and sisters.

We're just wondering who you're isolating there. David. It was David. It was David.

There are brothers and sisters outside this group. Oh, no. It's kind of like your favorite podcast. Oh, yeah, okay. There's many.

There's many. Sorry, I just had to— Yeah, I know. Robby had the urge. So when he starts talking in here, I love the fact that there's a few things in here that, you know, like, ooh, there's really good stuff, like, turn towards him. I'm like, there's repentance.

He doesn't know he's talking about that. But I'm like, there's that thing. It's like, yeah, I had to go through that human interaction. I'm like, yeah, there's human interaction. It's better than animal interaction. Yeah, but spiritual interaction is so much better, right? I mean, heavenly interaction.

When you can be with God in a moment rather than just being with brothers and sisters, that makes it even that much more important when you bring him in. I want to hear more about the animal interaction. Only if it's legal. Well, talking with your dog. I mean, I love my dog.

I love, you know, playing with the dog, but it's only going to get you so far. Yeah, that's true. You know? It's not going to get any better, and we just need to stop.

Yeah, go ahead. Well, I know where you guys are going. Oh, I know. I know.

You guys are my brothers. God spelled backwards as dog, right? Oh, good thing we're in after hours, folks. It is. It is. Yeah. At the end of the day— Still things I can't say in after hours. He goes, at the end of the day, they're all crab fishermen, and they kind of get each other, right?

That whole scene. It's like, well, as sons and daughters of the Most High, that's what we are. We are people who actually get each other. People that are not in Christ do not understand believers, but believers very much usually understand unbelievers because we were once one. Right.

And it's so easy to see that, but by God's grace, he would still be there, lost as ever. Right. But that's what we want to do is help and extend ourselves to others. And first, it's in the family of God, but then also to the unbelievers to try to extend ourselves and evangelize and try to help them see the light because we never know who's actually in the Lamb's Book of Life. So it's one of those things that we should always be serving to try to find that out. And I love how he ends with that question, what are you doing to help the person next to you?

There's a lot of truth in what he has to say in here, but he just doesn't describe it to the right place. And I'm the person sitting next to you, and I'm going to help you out because crab spelled backwards is bark, which takes us back to dog, which is backwards God. So it was all about God. Jim, we don't need you to get started on dogs again, please. Yeah, yeah. I'm getting the roast. Is that the one about the size of a mouse? Yeah, yeah.

He jumps the fence and everything. Yeah, yeah. Hey, well, Chuck, we didn't get time to get your clip in, but we can talk to you about what's God got on your heart on this topic of freedom or fighting for the hearts of others? Well, just the freedom itself. I have my freedom, physical freedom here in America, just because of those who've gone before me and fought that battle. People that don't even know me have fought that battle, and the same can be said in the Christian walk. There have been many that had gone before me and fought that good fight of faith and have brought me into the family of Christ.

That's what's important to me. But when I talk about freedom, it's just an amazing thing to be in Christ. And honestly, I'm ashamed to say I haven't totally walked in that freedom, because I know many years back in 2003, I could feel God calling me in the full-time ministry, and that's 2003, 20 years later.

So I haven't walked in that freedom. So I've got a lot to say on that topic, but you got it. Well, we do. We do. We'll talk with you next week. Enjoy your week. This is the Truth Network.