Your Escape Room

Bible, Pornography

Have you heard the latest craze? Escape rooms.

People pay $30 to be locked in a room. They have sixty to ninety minutes to solve a series of puzzles to find their way out. An escape room in Dallas should clear a million dollars just this year. You can find them all over the world even in Iraq and Iran.

Escapes have always been popular: movies, reality shows, books and songs. What are we escaping from though? Actor Nicolas Cage gives us a clue,

“As a child, superheroes provided an escape for me from my mundane existence, from my lack of friends or my inability to communicate well with people.”

We all have something from which we want to escape.

What is your escape room?

Some of us have socially acceptable escape rooms:

  • television/movies
  • video games
  • exercise
  • Facebook
  • workaholism/success/wealth

Some of us have addiction escape rooms:

  • pornography
  • alcohol
  • drugs
  • gambling
  • eating
  • sex

Our escape rooms become the very thing from which we cannot escape.

1 Peter 4:1-2 beautifully expressed in The Message gives us our true escape room:

Since Jesus went through everything you’re going through and more, learn to think like him. Think of your sufferings as a weaning from that old sinful habit of always expecting to get your own way. Then you’ll be able to live out your days free to pursue what God wants instead of being tyrannized by what you want. (MSG)

We try to escape our suffering instead of going through it like Jesus did. Yet it is that very suffering that brings us our freedom.

Follow Paul’s yearnings in Philippians 3:10:

All I want is to know Christ and to experience the power of his resurrection, to share in his sufferings and become like him in his death, in the hope that I myself will be raised from death to life. (GNT)

So when you feel that temptation to go to your escape room, ask yourself:

  • What suffering am I trying to avoid?
  • How is God wanting me to be like Him in this suffering?

Then remember His promise:

 Then you’ll be able to live out your days free to pursue what God wants instead of being tyrannized by what you want.