Two words right upfront: pipe down.

Seriously, before you start flooding my inbox and comment box with what a jerk I am for pointing out anything negative about what could arguably be the most popular animated movie to ever come out of the Disney camp, let me give you a few disclaimers.

Disclaimer #1:  I like to have fun.  I’m not THAT Christian.  You know, the one who makes it his mission in life to rain on every parade possible no matter how many people are enjoying the floats and catching the candy getting thrown from them.

Disclaimer #2:  I like Disney movies.  In all honestly, I like them A LOT MORE now that Pixar is around, because the Pixar guys really raised the bar, and when Disney realized that and brought them on board, it’s upped their animation game tremendously.

Disclaimer #3:  I liked Frozen.  A lot.  I didn’t want to, because everyone else did and so I didn’t want to be THAT guy, either.  You know, the kook-aid drinking guy.  But, I was already liking the movie by the time we met Olaf, and then I was as close to being the creepy 48-year-old man who wears matching Olaf socks and slippers as you can be without actually doing it.  Thankfully, I didn’t become that guy.

So, after all the hype on social media about how great the movie was and how awesome the song “Let it Go” was, I think it’s safe to say that I had my “don’t get that ONE SONG stuck in your brain” guard up as I watched it with my kids.  And yet, for days afterwards, I’d wake up singing it, I’d make coffee singing it, I’d post stuff on Facebook about it.  Heck, in a moment that I’d like to forget, I even choreographed some of my own moves for it.  Wait, I’ve shared too much.

But the longer I’d sing it, or hear others sing it, I’d be lying to you if I didn’t start to feel like there was something that just wasn’t quite right about it (and I don’t mean my choreography!).  Something about this song – sung with amazing talent by many on YouTube and without amazing talent by many, many more on YouTube – just wasn’t adding up, and then, like getting smacked in the face with a snowball from a sneaky little Olaf, it hit me.

The theme song from Frozen is the exact opposite message of the Gospel.

There isn’t anything intrinsically evil about the phrase “let it go.”  In fact, you could almost make the case (as I’m sure someone will later in the comments) that Paul wrote about letting it go when he penned his letter to the Philippians.

“But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on…” (Philippians 3:13-14)

But here’s the critical truth (and yes, I know that by pointing this out, I’m running the risk of ruining the Oscar award-winning hit song forever for a whole host of kids and their videoing parents):

Christ followers let go of rights for the sake of relationships.  Queen Elsa let go of relationships for the sake of rights.  It sounds so subtle, but it makes all the difference in the world.

Wait, didn’t Jesus “Let it Go,” too?

In that same letter to the believers in Philippi, Paul wrote about Jesus making a decision to let something go.  Paul said that even though Jesus was equal with God, “He made Himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant” (Philippians 2:7).  In other words, Jesus let it go, but in the EXACT OPPOSITE way that Queen Elsa did.

When she let it go, she turned her back on the very people who needed her the most and walked further from them.  She turned away and slammed the door and made a decision to let the storm rage on.  Bottom line?  As she sang her signature song about letting her responsibilities go and finally finding the freedom to be who she was, she not only ended up living in a prison of one, she left an entire city captive in her wake.

It sounds worse now then when your kids are belting it out in their royal robes, doesn’t it?

But look at what a different picture the Gospel paints.  Jesus let his equality with God go so that he could walk closer to us.  Elsa walked up a hill away from the hurting, but Jesus stepped down from heaven closer to the hurting.  If anyone had the right to stand off at a distance, it was probably Jesus, but the Bible is clear that He lived as a servant Who was constantly trying to see how close He could get to those whom others deemed untouchable.

Queen Elsa slammed the door to escape the storm.  Jesus opened the door to calm it.

So, what does this look like in everyday life?

I’d say it looks a lot like Sister Frayer.  She was an elderly lady with thinning white hair that attended one of the first churches where I served as a youth pastor.  She might have stood a little over 5 feet if she wasn’t so stooped over by age, but time had left her with a bit of a hump in her back and eyesight that needed very thick glasses.  What I remember the most about Sister Frayer was that she would cry every time we talked, because she had lived long enough to say more goodbyes than hellos, and she couldn’t wait to leave this life and start the next one with Jesus.

And yet every month when our youth group would have youth night, there was Sister Frayer.  She’d shuffle in wearing white shoes, white pants, and our white Crossfire youth group tee-shirt (which had big crosshairs on the back that perfectly encircled the hump in her back!).  As a twenty something youth pastor who constantly dealt with parents who wanted me to cater to the needs of their teens, I was curious why an elderly woman with no stake in teenagers would venture out to youth night proudly sporting a youth tee-shirt, and so I asked her why she came so faithfully to something that was probably too loud, too long and too late for her.

Her response is something I’ve never forgotten…

“I’ve had my time.”

If Sister Frayer had the energy (and wasn’t more gracious than me), she’d probably punch Queen Elsa in the throat for singing so beautifully about something so ugly: our eagerness to let responsibility go in order to feel free even though Jesus showed us that freedom comes in laying our lives down for others.

Will your kids still sing the song?  Probably.  But when they do, I hope you’ll think of it differently, and perhaps even share with your kids why letting go isn’t a bad thing as long as we’re letting go of the selfish tendencies that so often keep us from moving closer to a world that desperately needs to see Jesus.

After spending yesterday behind the wheel for well over 9 hours, I got home last night just in time to see North Carolina State choke away a 16 point lead, but not in time to get my Thursday blog posted.  And as frustrated as I was about State not being able to hit free throws at the end of the game to pull off the upset, the truth of the matter is that – if they had won – it would have been an upset.

But when Dayton beat Ohio State, and Harvard beat Cincinnati, and Mercer beat Duke, well, those weren’t just upsets.  Those were the perfect illustration of what may be one of the most peculiar verses in the Bible.

Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes that ruin the vineyards, our vineyards that are in bloom. (Song of Solomon 2:15)

It seems a little weird to find gardening tips in the Bible, yes?  And then to think that somehow it can apply to March Madness may seem even odder, right?  But stop and think about this: it’s never really the BIG THINGS that get us, is it?  Isn’t it almost always the LITTLE THINGS that trip us up?

This is a principle that applies to so many areas in life, and every time March Madness rolls around and the country jumps on the bandwagon of the latest version of “the little engine that could,” I think of this verse, because of Duke or OSU or Cincy had paid attention to the little foxes, they may still be in the hunt for a national championship.

Consider the following scenarios that I’m pretty sure you would say a BIG FAT NO to:

• Being asked to steal ONE MILLION DOLLARS from the Federal Reserve.
• Waving goodbye to your CRYING WIFE AND KIDS as they watch you jump into a sports car and speed off to a new life with a younger woman.
• Knocking on your neighbor’s front door and then BLOWING HIS HEAD OFF with a shotgun blast when he opens it.

Not only would we all say a hearty NO to those situations, we probably wouldn’t really even be tempted to say YES.

But what about a LITTLE WHITE LIE on your TAX RETURN?  Or a QUICK PEEK at a REVEALING IMAGE of a swimsuit model?  Or some JUICY GOSSIP about what your NEIGHBOR DID?

So many people say yes to those situations, and even if they don’t ACTUALLY DO them, they’re A LOT MORE TEMPTED than they would have been in the first ones.

The reason is simple: it’s easy to defend against the big attack because we make sure our guard is up.  But the smaller ones?  The little foxes?  The Mercers and the Harvards and the Daytons?  Just like Duke, Ohio State and Cincinnati, we let our guard down on the small ones, and the results are so often disastrous.

Here’s the bottom line that we all need to remember.  Long before there was Joe Lunardi and Bracketology and Cinderalla stories, God knew how the real game would play out.  He knew that we would look to him for the BIG THINGS, and yet never bother to ask him to help us with the LITTLE THINGS.

Sure, he’ll be there to help you find a job when you’re UNEMPLOYED, but if you trust him and ask him to help you develop patience, perhaps you’d find him helping you KEEP THE JOB YOU ALREADY HAVE even though it drives you crazy some days.

“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5)

The guy who wrote that was one of the guys that hung with Jesus A LOT.  The more he was around Jesus, the more he started to realize that he needed to have Jesus close to him in EVERY SITUATION, whether it was a BIG TRIAL or a LITTLE PILE.

So do we.

Want to make sure that your life doesn’t end up looking like Duke or Ohio State or Cincy?  Are you ready to stop losing out on BIG OPPORTUNITIES because you didn’t take care of LITTLE RESPONSIBILITIES?

Stop only asking God for help when you face the BIG GIANTS, and start letting him help you with the LITTLE FOXES, too.

Currently, the people who sit in cushy offices high above the empire that is NFL football are kicking around the idea of penalizing teams 15 yards every time one of their players uses the N-word during a game.  Like most people, I think the N-word should be stricken for all time from every language known to man, but something about this penalty just feels bad.

I think it’s because it can’t go far enough to deal with the real problem.

There’s an interesting conversation recorded in the Bible between Jesus, his disciples, and a really big crowd.  Ultimately, the topic of conversation turned to the religious leaders who were always walking around looking all uptight and stuff, and Jesus started using word pictures to help the crowd understand the truth about religious people (and themselves).  He compared them to tombstones, to dead bones, and at one point – in an image that almost all parents of teenagers can understand – really bad dishwashers.

I know what you’re thinking.  What do religious dishwashers and a 15 yard penalty for saying the N-word have in common?  A lot more than you think.

Back in Jesus’ day, the religious leaders loved to throw flags because they were very concerned with how things appeared.  They started with the 10 commandments and then over time that got bloated into 613 rules that they felt could help them live out the heart of the original 10.  I’m not saying that they were wrong in their desire to be holy, but I do think it got a bit out of control.

Ultimately, the people were getting flagged for all kinds of stuff that they never even knew was wrong because of how much the rulebook had been tweaked by these guys.  Take, for instance, the command of God to have clean hands.  By the time the religious leaders were done with that one, they were flagging people for not washing all the way up to their elbows.

Imagine, you’re standing there with clean hands feeling pretty good about yourself and then the whistle blows and you’re penalized for not doing more than you even knew you had to.  You’d be about as confused as the Raiders were over the tuck rule or Calvin Johnson when his game-winning catch was ruled a non-catch.

Religion, even with the best of intentions, always results in rules.  It always polices, which leads to policies.  And while most of us love to throw off on religion because of that, when Jesus came, he said that he had come to fulfill the law, not ignore it.

And he started by pointing out why the N-word penalty can’t be effective in dealing with the real problem.  It’s because – just like all those other rules – it deals with the wrong side of the cup.

Remember the picture Jesus used to describe the crazed flag-throwers of his day?  Bad dishwashers?  Here’s the way he put it:

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites!  You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence.  Blind Pharisee!  First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean. (Matthew 23:25-26)

Jesus knew that keeping up the right appearance without first dealing with our  wrong heart was just a show.  It makes us like the lazy teenager who washes dishes just well enough to get out of the kitchen but not well enough to actually remove the crusty food from the plate.

Penalizing behavior without purifying the heart behind the behavior just delays the inevitable.  So while a 15 yard penalty may shut the mouth of a racist for the rest of the game (and make the NFL appear to be more politically correct), temporary change isn’t what Jesus is after and ultimately won’t make our society better.

But thankfully, Jesus had a better plan.  He didn’t come to sanitize our mouths.  He came to purify our hearts.  He didn’t come to make us better for a day.  He came to make us new forever.  He didn’t come to give us more rules, but to be the ruler.  And Jesus never intended to rule us with penalties.  He came to rule us with peace.

The apostle Paul put it like this in Colossians 3:15:

Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful.

The Greek word for “peace” means “to act as an umpire.”  In others words, to referee.  That means that the closer I get to Jesus, the more my heart is changed by him and the peace he gives, the less I need other people to police me and the less I need to police other people.

It doesn’t mean that we don’t have laws or the need for accountability.  But it does mean that Jesus’ plan is that we would all grow to the place where we would flag ourselves more than we would need to be flagged by others.

In religion – just like in the NFL – the people with all the power referee behavior.  But in a relationship with Jesus, the peace of God referees the heart. It challenges us and changes us.  And instead of marking off 15 yards for making God look bad, he leads us in peace toward a life that is more holy for all the right reasons and brings God more glory as a result.

And that is the biggest difference between flagging the N-word in the NFL and truly allowing Jesus to rule our hearts.  Because when Jesus rules our hearts, we don’t need to try and keep a bunch of rules so we can look a little less like the dirty cup we really are on the inside.

What we say will match who we are, and when it doesn’t, we’ll find ourselves repenting faster than a referee’s flag can hit the ground.