GYC SE 2014: The Daily Battle

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GYC Southeast

Overcoming Escapism: The Life and Death Battle For Your Mind

Nicole Parker

Overcoming Escapism- Part 1

Father in heaven, thank you so much that we can come together and study your word and understand more of its applications to our lives We pray for your Holy Spirit to come now Lord and to speak to each 1 of our hearts cleanse us of sin Open us to your leading and help us to understand more of what we need so that we can be closer to you and more ready for your coming.

Today I'm talking about overcoming escapism.

And my husband and I have an unofficial bet going as to whether I can actually make it through all of these slides or not because he insists that I've never made it through this many slides in this short a time before.

Yeah, except I don't have a cable and I don't have any way to show my slides.

I have other gifts, this isn't 1 of them.

Right, so we're talking about overcoming escapism, and I have a lot of information to share, so I may run a little fast.

Talking about escapism, there are so many different aspects of escapism.

Alcohol, drugs, you know all those things, but I'm not really focusing on those things today.

I'm talking more about the things that good Christians may think it's okay to escape to, mostly.

Because it's a struggle for every single 1 of us.

I remember a friend that I worked with, we were Bible workers together, and he struggled sometimes with movies.

He would just be like, I really just want to watch a movie, Nicole.

And he would walk out and then come back 10 minutes later.

But then later on in life, as he started drifting away from the Lord, there were other things that he was escaping to.

And he said, well, for a while he was escaping to homosexuality.

Then when I talked to him later, I said, how are you doing?

He said, that's actually not a battle for me anymore.

Now what I'm dealing with is just alcohol if only I could stop drinking like this And then there were other times that he would be dealing with drugs and other times that he would be struggling with smoking Just so many different things the thing with His problem was he wasn't just addicted to many different things.

He was really addicted to 1 thing, and that's escape.

He wanted to escape from his pain, escape from having to think deeply about his life.

So when he was escaping, what he was really escaping from, was God.

Allowing God to be the center of his life and his identity and his worship.

Escapism is a problem and it's a very scary problem because It's about worship.

You know, you can tell where a person's heart is by how they use their spare time.

And that's a frightening thing to think about with the way that many of us use our spare time these days.

So I'm going to talk a lot today about socially acceptable methods of escape and how those principles apply to all escapism.

I'm sure the Lord will help you to understand.

First, it's probably useful for us to define what escapism is.

I looked up online for dictionary definitions of it and found a couple of them I thought were very useful.

1 is the tendency to seek distraction and relief from unpleasant realities, especially by seeking entertainment or engaging in fantasy.

The avoidance of reality by absorption of the mind and entertainment or in an imaginative situation, activity, etc.

So you can see that's a pretty broad category, right?

It can be video gaming, movies, music, food, sex, whatever.

There are all kinds of things that people can escape to instead of escaping to God.

Some of them that are very common are like food addictions and that can be anorexia, sometimes a control addiction combined with food, or it can be more of a bulimia, I just give in and tumble, go ahead and gorge myself, and then either feel terrible and get fatter, or maybe purge and set up a dangerous cycle of teaching my body to throw up.

There's pornography or sex or lust, music, shopping.

Shopping is such a socially acceptable 1 that people will just advertise.

It's like it's a common theme that people think isn't even serious, but it can be serious I've known people who are so compulsive about their shopping that they're running up bills thousands and thousands of dollars and their spouse can't even put food on the table for their children.

And then it's finding stashes of expensive shoes and clothes and things that this person is buying because they are compulsively trying to escape and feel better about themselves through their shopping addiction.

We also have movies, social networking, popularity, compulsive behaviors, romantic relationships, substance abuse.

I'm sure some of you can relate to some of these, and all of you know people who have these issues.

These are some of the things that I figure are the most likely to be issues on our campus, but there's by no means an exhaustive list here.

Some research shows individuals have been shown to watch TV when they have a lower need for cognition, or in other words, to prevent them from thinking.

Escapism is the opposite of mindfulness, Wanting to get away from it all.

And that's such a common phrase these days.

You'd think that we in Western culture who have enough food and safe shelters to live in, and for the majority of things, we have everything we need and most of what we want, you'd think we wouldn't be the ones so desperate to escape.

It would be people in other countries who are refugees, who are desperate, who are dealing with grief as their friends and families are killed or missing.

But we in America have a massive problem with escapism.

Because there's a part of us that when we hear that, we're like, but we do need to get away sometimes, don't we?

No, and we'll talk about that a little bit later.

But it is dangerous in the way that we are living nowadays.

But escape in our culture is considered normal and even necessary.

I've had so many times people tell me when I'm like, you know, we need to get something done.

I just want to kick back and go not do anything, I don't want to accomplish anything, I want to go have fun.

And then their way to have fun and escape is some form of entertainment typically.

And whatever that Entertainment is, it's a substitute for what God wants to give us, which is recreation.

He does want us to find a healthy way to rejuvenate ourselves, but escapism is not it.

Now, for example, when I was a teenager, before I had given my life to Christ, I remember I was addicted to movies.

Now we lived in the middle of nowhere, which was a fantastic thing in so many ways.

My sisters and I were out in the woods a lot and working in the garden.

But we didn't have a television, but we did have eventually the opportunity to watch movies.

And my mom would let us pick out a movie at Blockbuster or something.

We'd pick out something to watch and bring it home.

I liked to let my sister go and blockbuster with my mom and get her to pick something, because she was better at persuading mom to get something really fun.

My sister's over here, so I can talk about her behind her back.

And you know what we would say as our prime way to persuade my mom to let us watch a movie?

You guys are familiar with this feeling, right?

Overcoming Escapism- Part 2

All right, we're talking about Overcoming Escapism Part 2, the life and death battle for your mind.

Let's bow our heads for a word of prayer.

Father in heaven, We just know we need you so much.

I pray that you will come and speak to every single heart, that you will bring those who need to hear this, that you will bless those who listen, whether they're here or whether they listen online.

Give each 1 of us, Lord, a special sense of your spirit and an understanding of Your Word and Your will for our lives, that we may be able to break free from the debilitating influence of the devil on our minds, and that we may be in heaven because we've applied these principles to our lives.

Now I want to just recap a little bit for those who weren't here in the first hour.

We're talking about escapism and why it's such a big deal.

And the bottom line is, escapism is a form of avoiding the conflicts and the problems of life by going to something instead of to God.

Instead of casting all our cares on Him, we try to pretend our cares aren't there and find something to make us feel better temporarily.

It's a painkiller with deadly results on the mind.

Love God first, love your neighbor as yourself, right?

And escapism cuts right to the heart of our relationships.

It leads us to feel like there must be something more interesting and important than talking through things with this person, working through conflicts, doing the hard work of relationships.

Instead, When I'm going to be an escapist, I already assume this relationship is not worth working on unless it makes me feel good.

If my escape makes me feel better than working through things with God or with others, why would I turn to God and others and build those relationships biblically?

I'm going to pursue pleasure, something that makes me feel good.

I don't want to say you can be happy or you can follow God.

God gives us the happiest way, but it doesn't always feel the happiest.

It's not the most pleasurable way sometimes.

The pathway to true pleasure, true happiness, is often through working through our pain.

God's perspective on wasting our time in escapism is very serious.

God grants men the gift of time for the purpose of promoting his glory.

When this time is used in selfish pleasure, the hours thus spent are lost for all eternity.

That's counsels to parents, teachers, and students, page 354.

In the Review and Herald, June 15, of 1886, says, moments are more precious than what?

We have been redeemed by the blood of Christ.

Wouldn't it be the saddest thing possible for you to miss out on all of eternity with Christ, who paid for you with his blood because World of Warcraft or movies or the internet was more pleasurable at that particular moment.

You didn't feel like working hard to have a relationship with God and so you didn't bother.

Escapism robs us of life's greatest pleasures anyway.

It's a debilitating influence that makes us feel like, oh, I can't do it.

You know, the person who is at the gym going, I can't pick up this 200 pound weight, so forget it.

I'm just going to go home and binge on ice cream, is doing the same thing as the escapist who says, I know I need time with God.

But I just don't feel close to God right now, so I'm going to call somebody, or I'm going to go open the refrigerator.

We do the same thing, but we do it inch by inch, and so like the frog in the pot of water that slowly boils, we don't realize how devastating this influence is upon our spiritual lives until it's just saptice of all our spiritual energy.

And we think it's normal to live prayerless, godless lives where we study the Bible by simply reading a few verses or a chapter and going, Lord, please help me have a nice day.

If I had a relationship with my husband in which every morning I said, have a nice day, honey.

And I greeted him in the evening and said, here's supper, I hope you had a good day.

And that was the extent of our communication.

And a relationship with God works on exactly the same principles as a relationship with other human beings.

When you're struggling in your relationship with God, you feel far from him, you don't know how to connect, think, what would I do if this were a person I were romantically interested in and I was trying to build a relationship with them.

They wrote me a note or a letter, I would study it.

When you don't actually know God, you know about him, you have to really work to connect deeply with him.

Now, I know some people have in the back of their minds now this feeling like, so she's saying, I can never have a good time.

Every moment has to be enslaved in spiritual exercise, right?

I know the devil told me that when I started deciding I wanted to follow Christ, And people would say things like, no jesting or joking is acceptable.

Following God, I might make it to heaven, but I'm going to have to dress in black and be sober down here all my life.

I decided to follow Christ, but then I discovered that leaving behind some of the shallow, empty fun exchanged it for true joy, true peace, the excitement of knowing God and knowing He's doing something purposeful with my life, that I'm preparing for eternity and I'm going to reap benefits for eternity in the people that I've brought with me to heaven.

There's nothing more exciting than the Christian life.

It's recreation that God wants us to have.

Now, I really liked some of the balance things that Ellen White's written about this topic.

Testimonies for the Church, Volume 1, page 514 says, I was shown that Sabbath keepers as a people labored too hard without allowing themselves change or periods of rest.

Now that may have been true more in the 1800s than now, but it's certainly true for some of us, right?

And students in college can find themselves totally laboring too hard on stuff, slaving away on assignments and things you have to do until you're just drained and then you're driven to escape.

Recreation is needful to those who are engaged in physical labor and it is still more essential for those whose labor is principally mental.

It is not essential to our salvation nor for the glory of God to keep the mind laboring constantly and excessively, even upon religious themes.

See, God is not demanding you're gonna have to live a dull life and every spare minute is gonna be studying the Bible.

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Overcoming Escapism: The Life and Death Battle For Your Mind

Overcoming Escapism- Part 1

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Overcoming Escapism- Part 1

47m

Overcoming Escapism- Part 2

50m

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