It seemed a stretch for me (a guy) to write about what women think when they watch men. It was my turn at Take It Further, but did I really want to go there?

Relief
Fortunately, as is often the Warehouse way, the sermon was only tenuously connected to its title. Using the example of Muslim law forbidding women to watch men in shorts, we were reminded how ironically easy it is to scoff at other people’s rules, when we are so good at creating them for ourselves. I thought I’d heard this theme before in church. “Rules kill. Jesus brings life.” This statement underlies much that is said from the Warehouse pulpit. And just like other sermon topics, you can find it in World Cup soccer. Nothing new clicked for me in the message about being bound by our self-conceived rules, until Bruce said at the very end: “Where does our fear show itself?”

Fear
What does fear have to do with rules? Everything. Fear is the basic motivator that holds us back from doing or encountering harmful things. Rules function similarly, though in a more formalized way. The two flow together and reinforce one another. Out of the fear of harm, we follow rules in an attempt to avoid that harm. But inevitably, we adopt rules in order to avoid fear itself. If someone has been in a car crash as a child, the fear of crashing may make them extra cautious on the road, and compel them to meticulously follow every drivers handbook rule. If we look at the rules we feel most compelled to follow, we can uncover the specific fears that draw us to them. We may have our surface explanations for the rules we favor, but beneath that lies the heart’s motivation.

As we grow up and become adults, we learn to shed some fears that haunted us as children. Even so, we can retain some fears well past their usefulness for avoiding harm to the point where the fears themselves harm us. Living on within us, they can come to dominate our lives. If such fears need to be evaluated, so do the rules and the boundaries they create in our lives.

As we have heard, the rules of our own making, make for a life of lesser joy and more sorrow than the life God offers us, and display a poor substitute to those looking at us as examples of Christ’s freedom. Our rules also affect the way we evaluate the people around us, as we inescapably hold them to our same standard.

Dissection
So how do we stop clinging to our own rules, and take hold of freedom in Christ? The trick, I believe, is dissection. This means cutting in, searching about, and distangling our rules from the specific fears that foster them; fears of abandonment, shame, poverty, physical pain, and disappointment to name a few. To identify the rules you favor, consider some basic categories of life, where rules and expectations tend to hold sway:
> Our finances, and the limits we impose in our hearts on those around us in terms of spending, saving and giving.
> Our schedule, and the time table we place on others to do what we think they should.
> Our driving, and how we think others should drive (who can’t relate to this?).
> Our level of social engagement, drinking, eating out, and how much freedom we give to ourselves to venture out and meet someone.
> Our clothing, and how cheap or out of touch others appear to be.
> How much faith we exercise, and the line we draw where others go overboard and are not practical.
> What we allow ourselves to hope for, and the hope we allow others to express without answering them with our own doubts.
> Who we allow ourselves to love, and who we let through our boundaries to love us.

Help
What I appreciate about Warehouse, is that each time we hear about examining the rules, instead of being ushered away from the Bible (where rules can indeed be found), we are pointed back to the Bible to examine under its light each of the rules we have already made for ourselves; to question the authority of our own presumptions. We won’t be alone. When Jesus talked about giving us his Holy Spirit to guide us, he said in John 16:8* that the Spirit would “convict the world of righteousness” because Jesus would no longer be around to physically show us himself how to live the kind of life he described as full or “abundant” (John 10:10). This means the Holy Spirit is available to help us understand God’s word (the Bible) and discover how to live it out. He is there to help us identify our fears, to examine our rules, and to replace them both with strong conviction upon what’s true and freeing.

Things to do:
1: Try listing your pet rules in a column. Recall them as you consider the various categories of life. List your fears in another column beside them. Now try to draw lines connecting fears to rules. Are you seeing connections?

2: Consider some choices in life that can be made easy by having a thorough set of rules to follow. In what ways might this “simple life” be in conflict with Jesus’ “abundant life”?

3: Leave a comment on this page about pet rules you’ve discovered in your life.

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We’d love to hear from you. Please share with us below your thoughts and insight. We would love to see Take it Further be a place where as a community we dialog, and together we all take the conversation further.

*Note: If you wish, you can look up this and other Bible passages online at youversion.com
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