Welcome to 10 minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life.

In the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Patrick Miller. How do you think about the roles and responsibilities

that characterize your life? Maybe there's social roles, employee, employer,

student, teacher, coach, athlete, chef, restaurant, patron, pastor, or church member, or maybe their

family roles, son, daughter, brother, sister, father, husband, or wife, whoever you are, you are

a role player somewhere.

And with that role comes unique responsibilities and even rules and expectations.

When you're in that role, you're expected to act a certain way and to do certain things. If you cuss at someone on the street, it wouldn't be very nice. But if he cuss at a ref during a game, you'll get thrown out.

If a parent tells a child to brush their teeth, it's hardly worth noticing, but if an employee tells an employer to brush his teeth, well things might get interesting.

If you stop and think about it, you realize that you spend most of your life playing a myriad of roles.

And for many in our culture, this is a profound problem.

Because when you play a role, you aren't being authentic.

You aren't being true to yourself. When you play a role, you aren't being true to yourself.

When you play a role, you aren't expressing your true deep-down feelings.

Perhaps the oldest roles in human history are those of husband and wife, and then of course, son and daughter and all the other family roles that come along with it.

These are pre-political roles because you need families before you can ever have societies

and you can't have families without

procreation and people raising children together. But marriage is no different

than the other rules have described. I recently heard someone describe someone else as brave for getting a divorce.

And when I heard that, I assumed that the person they were talking about had experienced something

traumatic in their marriage, physical abuse,

...