Who's At War After Hours

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Every gift counts and now every gift is doubled. trainapaster.com This podcast is starting in just a few seconds. Enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. The Masculine Journey After Hours starts here now. Welcome to Masculine Journey After Hours and we are continuing our boot camp topic shows that we're doing leading up to boot camp that's coming up in just a couple weeks. It's about 11 days out, I think, from today. And so if they wanted to go to the boot camp, Rodney, what would they do?

Well, if I was trying to sign up for boot camp, I'd go to masculinejourney.org and start to sign up there. And you can get online and sign up and then it's April 29th through May the 2nd, which, you know, trying to get that out right, too, because that's where we've been screwed it up so much. It's like we all slow down, say the right date.

It's Thursday evening through Sunday noon. Yeah, if you've been listening to the past podcast or the radio show, you know, it was a year long. Yeah, it could have been a year long. Yeah, we've had August, we've had all those kinds of dates. Exactly, exactly.

But it is April 29th through May 2nd, coming up in just a couple weeks. And it's definitely a life changer. It was for me, trying to find my way in this path. You know, I didn't know what to do.

I was trying to figure out how the heck am I going to live out the Christian life now that I've been saved and actually realized that there's more to being a Christian than just saying, I believe in God. Yeah. And it's like you find yourself. I'm good enough at that.

I'm poor over here. I need to do more. You just get all kinds of things that feel like you're getting under the weight of everything. And it's like, then I heard this show and I'm like, okay, I hear what these guys are talking about. And there's freedom and restoration and healing the heart and all that. I'm like, I just want to understand what's going on with it, you know, get a little deeper.

And that's where the first boot camp was. Oh, you know, just kind of a take a bunch of stuff in but for me it was, okay, this isn't just about, Oh, go listen to some people talk for a little bit and you're going to, you know, be better or something. It was no, this is a way that you need to go try to address yourself continually and try to work with God on these things and really try to get some restoration, some healing from things that have been in your past. And there's everybody's got different stories, but through other people's stories, you find a ways to get healing for yourself. You do.

I, for me, my first boot camp, actually the topic we're talking about today was a huge eye-opener and we're talking about spiritual warfare. You know, I was raised in a church that never really talked about it. I never did. You know, and so I had no concept of it. And so when you don't, yeah, you hear, you know, there's the devil out there, right? I mean, you know that that's in scripture, but they didn't really teach what that really meant in a practical daily application.

You know, and- You didn't want the boogeyman after you? Yeah. Yeah. You know, but you know, for me, what it leads to, and John talks about it, you know, at the boot camp when we were there was, you know, it leads to this feeling of, well, if it's just you and I, God, and things are screwed up, it's probably all me, right? Or it's, you know, God, you're not pulling your weight, you know, or whatever it is, but there's more in the stage than that.

Right. And that's where the enemies had used our earthly fathers and we tend to project however our earthly fathers treated us onto God, right? You know, like my personal father was always looking for the failure in whatever I did.

So it became the point where nothing was ever good enough. And I kind of felt that way with God. You know, the Christianity is a bunch of do's and don'ts, and I'm going to fail anyway.

So why should I try? And for me, the camp was all about a relationship with God. How you build that relationship, what that relationship, what a healthy relationship with God looks like.

And so you can, you know, I encourage everybody to come out to the camp. And warfare is just one piece of that. For me, the warfare is the enemy beating you down where you're going to shine. You know, God created us for a reason. And only God knows what he created us for. But wherever that's at, chances are that's where the enemy's beaten you up at. And so as you continue through life, yeah, you're going to run into trials and tribulations.

I mean, the Bible tells us that. But where God wants you to shine, that's where you're going to feel the most resistance. Yeah, that's where I always go back to. That's what I love about, like, Robby's analogies that are easy to remember. So when you talk about the whack-a-mole, that's something that, hey, you know, you always relate back to whack-a-mole.

So Satan sees God's glory rising up in you. What's he going to do? He's going to whack you down as soon as he sees you popping out of that hole. And that's what he's there to do.

And that's what we've got to figure out. Oh, I'm being attacked. And how am I going to resist that? Yeah, and he's very, very proactive.

He tries to take you out well before that. I talked about, I think it was last week, that growing up I was an extreme pacifist. But I've always loved war. I've been enthralled by the history of warfare.

I became really a world-class, or at least a U.S. champion at war games. And yet, I don't want to hurt anybody. And one of the things this talk did for me was sort of focused on what the battles are that are worth fighting, and that we are to be in battle. And if you're walking around like I did, and, you know, we're not in a world at war, we're cruising along, you're kind of strolling through no man's land, and you're going to take a bullet. Yeah, there's something about when you realize the context of the world that we live in. You know, John talks a lot about, you know, it's a love story.

Yeah, it's a great love story between us and God, but it's cast in the midst of war. Right? The enemy was defeated, but he was cast down. He's not dead.

He's still active in life. And when you don't act like he's active in life, it's so easy to get taken out. You know, you've got to realize that he's out there trying to trip you up. Well, I think that the best lie the devil has is that he doesn't exist. And as Christians, you know, we don't take that in when we first become Christians. People don't talk about how, you know, Lucifer was thrown down with a third of the angels, and those are the demons, you know, traveling the earth. And I know that sounds like hobgoblin.

This ought to be a Halloween show. But for the most part, it's true. There's, you know, a lot of stuff that is self-inflicted, if you will, right, based on agreements that we've made in the past. But there's a real enemy out there, and he will take you out if you let him. Yeah, and the other side of that coin is, okay, Satan has way more power than what everybody thinks he is, because he's not omniscient. He's not everywhere. He's not all-knowing. He goes about, you know, seeking who he may devour, but he is limited in his power.

He is a created being. Yeah, he can't read your mind, right? But he can read your reactions. Oh, and he's been reading reactions for a long time.

Yeah, for generations, right? And he's known your whole story longer than you have. He's studied you better than you've ever studied you. Right, and so he knows exactly what works on you. Exactly.

That's what we talked about earlier, about it's very personal with him. Well, that's what he's so good about. He figures out how to get you to fight the wrong battle. In my case, he had me fighting everybody else on the highway. He had me throwing my tennis racket all the way across the court in anger. Oh, you were good at that, though? Oh, yeah.

I could throw it a long way. But he chose to find ways to get me to fight myself, as opposed to fighting him like I should have been doing. And he's a master at it. We don't realize, unless we really have somebody tell us about it and teach us, that there's this whole other universe that's right past the end of our nose with characters in it that we can't see. But they're there.

They're real. And there's a war going on. And we're a part of it without realizing it in most cases.

Yeah, that's back to what Jim just said. When he can convince you that he doesn't exist, or that he's either got more power or he's something other than what he really is, he's winning. The shame is, I can only go off my personal experience when I came to Christ. There was a great celebration in the church, but there was no teaching behind it to say, oh, this is what you're really in for now. And so what happens is you have this great high, and then all of a sudden, life smacks you in the face again, and the enemy ups his game, and you just think even deeper how big of a mess up I am. But Sam, nobody's going to come to Christ if you tell them up front, hey, by the way, there's an enemy out there. When you come to Christ, you're a target now. Yeah, but you're still a target anyway. It's kind of one of those things that, I mean, you're right, you're probably more of a target at that point, because you could convince others to kind of come to Christ.

But he doesn't leave you alone. Let's say you're listening to this show now and you're not a Christian. Is life easy? Not mine. It wasn't before, it's not now. It's not easy for any of us, and the enemy hates us because we're God's creation, even if we don't believe that we're his creation.

And that's the best part, at least now I get to finish well. Yeah, you can do something about it, right? You can stand up and say, all right, you're men, ain't you?

And fight. One of the things that, and this is leading to another story, but we are spiritual beings in physical bodies. And in this country, we're not, most people will say, well, I'm very spiritual.

Well, yeah, that's no surprise. But one of the things that has amazed me in counseling is how many people will say, you know, I've never talked to anybody about this. And you're going to think I'm crazy, but, and I know what they're going to say. They're talking about a demonic attack or something in the spiritual realm that they were totally unprepared for. And I've encountered demons in a very literal sense. And it's not as uncommon as you think, but you ask nine out of 10 people, oh, no, you're crazy. In fact, there are people out there right now.

He must be crazy. That is the world we're living in as a spiritual one. The physical is just, to me, it's like the governor on an engine that keeps you from going crazy. That it's not, that we're not this body, thank God, we're not this body we're all suffering in right now. Well, it's also safer to not believe that you have an enemy, that there's not somebody out there who's working against you.

It's, you know, it becomes more comforting that, oh, okay, well, if I just do the right things and I make the right decisions and everything will be okay. And not realize, no, there's somebody out there shooting at you. Yeah, you know, I'd rather know there's a sharpshooter out there. You know, but I guess just if you get hit, right? Ignorance is bliss. You're taken out, it doesn't really matter. You know, the After Hours show is a place where we kind of go deeper into some of it.

And I was going to share a story that on the surface seems like a really silly story. I do a lot of streaming of TV. I don't have cable anymore and I don't have any of that and I have a lot of different apps. And I have apps that will freeze, you know, on me, you know, as I'm trying to watch something, especially at sporting events and it drives me crazy. And you would think that, you know, my anger is because the app's freezing. What my anger when it really gets down to it is I've read and I've put in place this type of switch or I've put in this type of, you know, new, it's not RG6, it's like 8 or something that's so much faster.

You know, and I've done all these steps that should prevent it and it doesn't. And the reason I get so angry is because the enemy tells me, yeah, you really are stupid. You're not going to get it.

You're an idiot. You know, other people get this much easier than you. And the anger is really not at the thing freezing a little bit because, you know, you want to see the punch or you want to see the throw or whatever it is. But it's more the anger of the warfare that's going on underneath it, right? It's those things that, you know, you should be smarter than this.

You should be able to do this, you know, all these kinds of things. And that's where the battle is fought because what I can find is I can get in a really crappy mood and the dog will even start running, you know, because he hears my voice change and I use different words and boom, he's gone. You know, you know, my son just kind of looks at me and shakes his head, you know, it's like, you know, it'll unfreeze in a minute, you know, and I'm like, no, it's not the point. He doesn't get it. The dog knows you're a fierce warrior. Yeah, yeah. The dog's smarter than I am, obviously, but yeah. But that's where the warfare hits on those little daily choices because once you agree to that, yeah, I should be smarter than this.

Why can't I figure it out? Boom. Then the whole thing's different.

The whole shift is different. I've now stepped into this new identity of Idiotville that I'm going to live in for a while. Chances are, Sam, it's not on your end. I'm just telling you from an IT perspective, chances are it's not on your end. Thank you. I feel a lot better.

I feel a lot better. If it is on my end… Let me help you break that agreement. Chances are it's not on your end. But that's what those little things look like in warfare, right? And it's all these little pieces of evidence that the enemy will give you to try to get you to believe something deeper and deeper and deeper. Here's another example of this. Here's another example of this.

Here's another example of this, right? And as long as you're just gobbling them up, you're just eating that poison and it's going to come out not only at your own heart, but to everybody else's heart around you. Expectations are the big problem for me as well. I spent almost 44 years as a computer programmer systems analyst. And when I get on a website, I just have fits smashing my fist against the desktop with the way they've done it, which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. And I drive my poor wife just crazy with my antics, my unrealistic expectations as she refers to it, where I want it to work the way I think it should work, not the way the idiot programmed it. So there's other idiots than just you.

Okay. Normally the warfare is like, I'm an idiot, but I guess Harold's like, let me jump on there. There are a lot of idiots in IT, I'm sorry to say.

Yeah, we've got several here on the team. That's right. Everybody who resembles everyone, Mark, raise your hand. So I know we want to get to the Ben Hur clip. It's basically the movie, this is the trailer, and it's a movie set in the time of Jesus' crucifixion and everything where basically the Roman occupation is the larger war, the larger battle going on that brings these two men that are Jewish into a fight with one another because one decides I'm going to go with the flow and I'm going to go be Roman and becomes a big war hero and things like that. War hero and things of that nature and battles in the arena and the chariot races. And Ben Hur is the one who's basically battling for righteousness in the Jewish land with his family and all these bad things that happened to his family that gets betrayed by this guy who we thought he was basically a brother to him.

That's how close he thought of him. And he gets betrayed and he gets sent to where he's rowing in the galley down the decks, but he kind of works through that in his life because he's a good person and he finds that he gains favor. It's kind of similar to Joseph's story a little bit. And he kind of comes along and people want to help him that he's working for and people want to build him up.

And then that's kind of where this trailer goes through and at the very end he gets a chance at battling the ex-brother that he had that he's saying, okay, now we're going to battle in the arena, the chariot races and a chance to actually get his revenge. What is your name? Ben Hur. My family was one of the most respected in Jerusalem.

Welcome home. Please, I need you to tell me who one's enemies are. Messala, I won't name names. Until we were betrayed by my own brother.

Messala! You know we've done nothing wrong. Rome's calling for blood. Crucify them. The world you live in is Rome's.

Their laws, their power. I won't let Messala go and punish for what he's done to us. Our mother and sister, was it a quick death? Go, go, go! Count!

My family, they deserve justice for what's happened to them. There is a way. In the arena, there is no law.

Racing is a blood sport. But you lose, you die. If your brother is to cry to Rome, defeat him and you'll defeat an empire. Then you will have your vengeance. You have a voice. People would follow you. I would follow you.

Go, go, go! You should have stayed away. You should have killed me. I will.

Remember. First to finish. Last to die. Are we having fun now, brother? Stand and fight!

Stand up now! So at least here, you have an example where he's going to stand up and fight the evil. And that's where he had to first recognize what evil looked like. And unfortunately, what it turned out to be was basically someone that was so close to him, a friend, that he called brother.

And he had betrayed his whole family and ended up basically putting them all in chains under Roman occupation. And that's one of those things where, hey, really understand what is worth fighting for and then stand up and fight for that. So, after hours, agreements, what's some things that you battle against on a daily basis? That you have to protect your heart so that you can rise up and fight.

If you're living in that place of agreement, we go back to the open range clip. I'm just a shopkeeper. I'm just a freighter.

I don't qualify for one reason or another. So if you don't protect it at that level, you can't rise up effectively and fight in the bigger fight well. You may fight quickly, die quickly, right? Fight bravely, die quickly, yeah, whatever.

I've butchered that up pretty good. So what are the things that you guys have to guard your own heart against to be in a place where you can fight well? For me, it's being taken advantage of. Growing up, I was the nerdy little kid who got stuck on the front line of the football team because I was heavier than everybody else, couldn't run that fast. And so I had basically so-called friends who would stab me in the back. They'd act one way when it was just me and them, and they'd act another way when they're around other people. And so it became getting used.

We want to hang out with Jim because X, Y, Z, right? And that continues on into my adulthood. I was getting used in my first marriage, and I let that go on for years.

I'm not telling everybody, go out and divorce your wife, is that what I'm saying? But what I'm saying is for me, it's something I constantly struggle with. Even today, I struggle with making an effort to help somebody out and them being ungrateful in the process.

And then that all comes rushing back while I'm just getting used again. And I'm letting them do it. I'm letting them pick on me, so to speak. And so I struggle with that. That's one of my personal struggles. Yeah, I resist entering into the battle. I let the enemy take me out before I ever even get in. So if it's with my kids or my spouse, it's just a matter of there's that agreement that I've made that says I'm always this way and they're always that way. That always and never could pop up so often in my life where it's like, well, I already know the foregone conclusion. And when something happens, I go from mild and meek, you know, not wanting to enter, to just going overblown and just jump in and go with both feet right into the fire, and I explode. So that's where I've been working really hard at being able to recognize it earlier. Understand that, okay, so this is where it's going to go. If I'm going to explode on this, how do I basically be able to change my attitude and view towards this? And one of the things that helps me the most is to understand that there is this larger battle. And it's not, this is somebody accusing you. And are you going to believe what the accuser says? Are you going to believe what God says?

Right. One of the things that's been an issue in my life is I'm either 100% or I'm 0%. And choosing the 100% isn't always a wise choice in my life. But what the earlier conversation reminded me of and one of my favorite, most contemporary Christian musicians and Bible teachers is Michael Card. And he has what he calls bullet theology. And basically he won't argue with you about anything if the outcome isn't so important that he's willing to take a bullet for. So, will I take a bullet if somebody says, you know, you admit Jesus Christ is not the Son of God who died for your sin or I'll shoot you?

Pull the trigger. But we fight over so many things that are so inconsequential. Red and blue, God doesn't care what the politics are here. He cares about the outcomes. But what he really cares about is the relationship with each one of us as individuals.

And we're all unique. And he will meet you at your point of need and he will walk you through it if you're seeking him. And if you're not, you're on your own.

And that's not a good place to be. But the battle is won if you are following him and the battle is lost if you're not. And if we could focus on that instead of who became mayor of Whoville, those things just aren't important.

And we can fight the right battles if we'll focus on what is important. You can't be idiotville because I'm residing there. You could be mayor, Sam. I could be mayor.

I could be mayor. Well, I almost bursted out in laughter realizing that you and I are the contrasts in the group. You're the biggest, I'm the smallest. And yet, when you said a hundred percent or zero, I almost laughed because my wife is always talking about how I'm all or nothing. The thing that I would ask you to do as we head off from this show is to go out there and ask God to say, God, help me understand these agreements that I've made. Where has the enemy been tripping me up? Where has my woundedness played into this? Help me to see how he's taken me out. Because if not, you're going to end up fighting the wrong battles with the wrong people and really just causing a lot of damage. You know, he wants you to fight evil, and evil is not your person across the street from you typically. It's not the person across the dinner table from you. It's the person that hates you the most, our enemy. Go to masculinejourney.org to register for the boot camp now. This is the Truth Network.