Greetings to the brightest audience in the country and welcome to Baba Neart Live. Today we are getting into an Agape Kingdom Fellowship sermon series that Will gave at Agape Kingdom Fellowship on the truth, specifically what Jesus said, the truth will set you free. That is way more applicable than we perhaps realize. That’s not just talking about in a courtroom, you know, speak the truth and that will set you free. It’s not just a salvific. The truth will set you free. Of course, both of those are true. However, that truth goes so, so much deeper. The truth will set you free in so many different ways that you have never before considered. With that said, let’s jump right in. This is part one.
SPEAKER 02 :
Welcome to Agape Kingdom Fellowship. So great to see everyone. I am really excited about today’s message. It means a lot to me. I think it has the potential to help a lot of people. And so I’ve been really looking forward to this for a long time. The Bible has influenced and impacted the world in extraordinary way. Something specific in the Bible has impacted the world in an extraordinary way. So much so that it’s actually immeasurable how much this one thing from the Bible has impacted the world. Every single day, and that’s not an exaggeration, people utter phrases in their daily life that originated in the Bible. And most of the time, they have no idea that what they are saying came straight out of God’s Word. So some recent events have prompted me to really dwell on one of these phrases. One of the phrases that people every single day somewhere in the world utter that comes back to the Bibles. Now a phrase uttered by Jesus Christ has made an indelible impression on the planet, one whose mark can still be clearly seen today over 2,000 years later. And just in case you think I’m biased here as a Christian, Let me give you just a small sampling of the impact this phrase has had on our world. It’s carved in stone in the original headquarters building of the CIA in Langley, Virginia. This phrase has been on the coat of arms of the Dominican Republic since 1913. And this phrase is also inscribed at universities across America and Canada. It’s inscribed on the main building at the University of Texas at Austin. It’s inscribed at Parks Library at Iowa State University. And it’s also inscribed on the Victoria College building at Victoria University in the University of Toronto. And this phrase, from the mouth of Jesus, is used as a motto of universities, colleges, and schools all over the world. Certainly I was not able to find them all, but this list should drive the point home at its incredible influence all over the globe. The phrase is the motto at these places of education. Yonsei University in South Korea, Caltech, Johns Hopkins University, Our Lady Seat of Wisdom College in Canada, Canterbury Christ Church University in England, Adelphi University in New York, the University of Portland, Idaho State University, Ottawa University in both Kansas and Arizona, St. Augustine’s University in North Carolina, Southern Methodist University, the University of Tennessee, Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, three colleges in India, St. Thomas College, Maravanios College, and Andra Christian College, the Catholic University of Uruguay, the Catholic University of Cordoba in Argentina, the University of San Martin de Porres in Peru, Doshisha University in Japan, Victoria University in Canada, Albert Ludwig University in Germany, and Lenore Rhine University in North Carolina. You can see the phrase in Greek right there on the official seal of Lenore Rhine University. He aletheia elutherosai humas. And you may have noticed this phrase in Latin on a dozen of those school seals. Veritas vas liberabit. And from our English Bibles, Jesus says in John 8, 32, the truth will set you free. This simple phrase is incredibly profound, and as you’ve just seen, has impacted the world in an immeasurable way. These words have taken on new meaning in my own life. And today, I want to just begin to look at how the truth will set us free in our lives. Set us free personally. Set us free in our relationships. Set us free in our marriages. Set us free from the bondage of sin. Set us free in so many ways. My goal here this morning, is to use my own personal experiences to give others just a taste of the freedom that the truth brings. And to understand this fully, we also need to look at the bondage that hiding the truth will bring to our lives and our relationships even to our own physical health. Now, I’ve had my fair share of health issues in my life. And I finally started to take my health seriously back in 2010. My wife and I, Danielle and I, we flew to Austin, Texas, to go to a specialized medical facility. We only had our daughter, at the time, and she wasn’t quite two years old. And that began a journey, a health journey that lasted a decade. The journey involved seeing all kinds of medical professionals all over the country, trying various treatments, experimenting with all of these special diets, and don’t forget the supplements. There was always a ton of supplements that would never get finished, and they would just take up shelf space in the cupboard. All throughout my journey, my wife kept telling me that I couldn’t fully heal my physical ailments with diets and supplements. She said, I also needed to work on my feelings and emotions. I thought she was nuts. Literally. How can a non-physical emotion have any bearing on your physical health? How could my feelings affect my blood work? And how could it affect how my body digests food? That doesn’t make any sense. I put her in her place. I told her there was no possible way there was a connection between the two. But I did promise her that I would work on my emotions once I healed my physical body first. Priorities. Now, you might not know this about me, but I love documentaries. It’s by far my favorite movie genre, and if I had the time and resources, I would actually make documentaries myself. That’s how much I love them. Now, I was on a business trip back in 2017, and as I often did on business trips, I would watch documentaries as I fell asleep at the hotel. And on this particular day, I found a brand new documentary and it was called Heal. Very simple title, H-E-A-L, Heal. That piqued my interest immediately. I’m sure I told myself, I need to watch this as it may help me on my own healing journey. I didn’t even read the description. The title was all I needed. I was on a healing journey, and so I’m going to watch this documentary called Heal. The documentary opened up right at the very beginning with people who were diagnosed with all sorts of diseases. Lupus, fibromyalgia, Lyme disease, multiple sclerosis, MS, Crohn’s disease, migraines, stomach issues, the list could go on forever, right? At this point, I am hooked. If these people figured out how to heal from these issues, certainly I will be able to find healing. My own issues are not as severe as a lot of these issues. I’m excited. Then they show a woman And I later find out that this woman is actually the one who made the documentary. And she says this, I’m fascinated with how our thoughts and emotions affect our health. Say what? I gotta rewind. It’s weird. I just heard my wife on this documentary telling me what she’s been telling me all these years. Certainly that’s not what this woman just said. That’s exactly what she said. I was stunned. Something hit me. Right in that moment, I became emotional instantly. And I knew right then and there that my wife was right all this time. Now, If you end up watching this documentary, it’s not a Christian documentary. It’s got some weird stuff in it. But what I try to do in my life is I put everything through a filter. I think this is a good practice. I put everything through a filter, and that filter is my foundational belief that God exists and that God both designed and created our universe. That is my filter. I run everything through that filter. And so in this instance… they were right that there’s a connection between our emotions and our physical health then after I run that through my filter that means if they’re right God designed it that way that was his design and if God designed it that way then he did it for a reason and a purpose and now I want to know why I want to know why God designed it that way and further Again, due to my beliefs that God exists and created the universe, I also believe that sin is real and I believe that sin has consequences. And so when a secular documentary mentions emotions affecting our health, I lump sin in there as well. Because our emotional health and the sin in our life, those are inextricably tied. So this documentary back in 2017 served as my wake-up call, my jolt. It convinced me that what my wife was telling me had merit and was worth considering and was something that I could no longer just put on the back burner and overlook. I had to take a deeper look at this. So this started a new journey for me, and I would one day realize, sorry, it started a new journey for me, one where I was going to seriously consider that I needed to pay attention to my emotions as well, and not just the food and the supplements that I was putting into my body. And so on this journey, I would one day realize that sin in our lives affects our physical health. And that true healing is not possible with undealt with sin. It’s just not. And the culmination of this journey of mine is led me to understand far more deeply what Jesus meant when he said, the truth will set you free. And this led me to do something so out there, so extreme, I had never even heard that this had been done before or had even been suggested to be done. I’ll tell you what it is that I did, but first, I need to start out with a sad story that happened in our family. A member of our family committed adultery. Now, it’s not important who it was. I’m not even going to say if they were in my family or if they were in Danielle’s family. This message is going to be about me and my sin. I’m going to be vulnerable and transparent about my own sin. But I need to start out with this example first in our family because the connection between sin and physical health became so abundantly clear. You could literally see it play out before your very eyes. This family member ended up hospitalized. Hospitalized. And at the time, none of us knew that this adulterous relationship was going on at the time. But we now know it was in full swing. Now, we didn’t know any better at the time, right? You just get a call one day that a family member is in the hospital, and you immediately become concerned and figure out how you can go visit them as quickly as possible. But they say hindsight is 20-20. don’t they? Once we found out about the adultery later on and looked back on the timing, it made sense. Sin is devastating. Sin hurts many people around you, more people than you will ever even know, and sin also affects your own personal health. We ended up losing our relationship with this family member due to a bunch of things. There was a lack of honesty. There was a lack of true repentance. And there was just a complex web of lies and deceit. It’s incredibly tragic when you lose a family member over sin. Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months, and months turned into years. And we essentially have no contact or communication with this family member. And that’s pretty significant, considering over those years, with no communication, Danielle and I were having children. That’s one of the life events that Having children that you normally broadcast to the world, you broadcast it to the entire family, even extended family. And that’s usually one of the things that brings families together, right? That’s usually a life event where all family members, if at all possible, make an effort to come and see the baby. But we no longer have a relationship with this person, sadly. And over the years, after finding out that we don’t communicate with this family member, people ask us, they come up to it. And then when they find out, they ask us and they say, do you think the adulterous relationship is still going on? That’s a natural question to ask. And we have answered that question more times than we can count. And every single time we answered the question with brutal honesty. We tell them we don’t know. That’s the truth. We have no way of knowing. I mean, on one hand, we hope it’s not going on, but maybe it is. We don’t have communication. We just don’t know. And then we get another call. This one is years later. And this call is that this particular family member is really sick again. And so it makes us wonder. could this be because of the adulterous relationship? We start to think, could this mean that the relationship has gone on all these years? And come to find out, that’s exactly what was happening. Their illegitimate relationship had indeed continued all those years, and was finally now coming to an end. It was the other person that was ending the years-long relationship with our family member, and right at this time, what do you know, another severe decline in health. So with this situation in our own family, we have had the opportunity to see firsthand the damaging effects sin has on one’s physical health, and I honestly consider that a good thing. While they tell you growing up and even after you’ve grown up that you should learn from your mistakes, it’s actually better if you can learn from the mistakes of others. Now, it’s easy to stand up here and talk about someone else’s sin. So let’s get to me now. Many of you know, as I try to not hide this at all, that I became addicted to pornography at a very young age, around the fifth grade. And that sin plagued my life from then on for decades. By the way, I did a sermon series that you can find on YouTube called Life Beyond Porn, where I discuss that sin in great detail. But in the context of today’s message, my sin was affecting me, obviously. It was affecting my marriage, obviously. It was affecting my children, but it was also affecting my physical health. You see, sin has consequences. Sin has layers of consequences. It has consequences on top of consequences. And I knew it was affecting me. There was no question about that. For starters, it turned me into a liar. And what do I mean by that? I mean, I chose to continually lie in order to hide my sin. I definitely knew it was affecting my marriage. I couldn’t be normal with my wife. I couldn’t be real with my wife. I also knew it was affecting my children in so many ways, including all of the above, right? How can you be the dad you are supposed to be when you are living in sin and hiding it and lying about it? How can you be the husband you want your sons to become and you want your daughters to use as a standard when you can’t be normal and honest and real with your wife, their mother? So all of this just flows straight down onto our kids. And then, at least for me, I could not just flat out be a hypocrite to my children and so i would avoid talking about this particular sin with them because i knew the truth of what was going on in my life and let’s face it even if i was a person that could have brought myself to just be a hypocrite straight to their face which i couldn’t do that would end up hurting them in the long run as well either one hurts the children There is no good option. There is no good option when you are living in sin and hiding it. So here I am, spinning my wheels, trying very hard to work on my health issues, but at the same time living in sin. And I’m frustrated with the fact that that I’m not making more progress with my health journey, at least the progress that I wanted. And at the time, I believe that I’m not making more progress due to the fact that I have the wrong doctor, due to the fact that I have the wrong supplements, due to the fact that I have the wrong diet. I just need to fix the diet. I’m telling myself that I just need to keep trying as hard as I can to figure out what’s right for me. What’s right for my body. And then I can heal my ailments. Little did I know at the time that my sin was eating me alive. Literally. From the inside out. Now I’m telling you right now. I would have never… believed this at the time. Never. But in hindsight, it’s crystal clear. Let me give you an example. I would be flying home from a business trip and I would be sick to my stomach knowing what I did while out of town. And so this actually includes physical pain in my gut. And I would know that in a short amount of time, Danielle is going to be picking me up from the airport, and I knew I would have to do everything in my power to try to act normal to her. Just those two things alone, being sick to your stomach and knowing what you’re about to face with your wife, that takes quite a toll on the body. Now, my wife knows me very well. And as hard as I would try to act completely normal, she could tell that something was still off. And so then I would have to resort to lying and assure her everything’s fine. You’re crazy. Whatever you see, you don’t really see that. What an absolute mess. Here I am with stomach pain, fighting the pain, trying to act normal, and then lying on top of it all. It’s no wonder I was struggling with stomach issues and digestive issues among other things. I was a hamster on a wheel, spinning and spinning and spinning and not getting anywhere. Just as an alcoholic can tell you the exact date they had their last drink, I can tell you the date that I last participated in this form of sexual immorality. And it was March 17th, 2018. And I guarantee you That it is not a coincidence that I did not really start to make serious strides in my physical health until that date. Now, to be clear, I am not saying that all physical ailments are caused by sin in your life. That’s not what I’m saying. We live in a very broken world. We live in a broken world, one where even little children end up with diseases like cancer. It’s heartbreaking. What I am saying is that sin in your life
SPEAKER 01 :
Stop the tape. Stop the tape. Hey, we are out of time. If you want the rest of this sermon, you can get this sermon and all of Will Duffy’s sermons and all of my sermons, Dominic Enyart, and all of Bob Enyart’s sermons by going to enyart.shop. That’s E-N-Y-A-R-T dot S-H-O-P. Click on these sermons. You do not want to miss it. Hey, may God bless you guys.
