The Favor of the Father After Hours

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This is the Truth Network. Welcome to Masculine Journey After Hours, and we are talking about a pretty cool topic today, aren't we, Andy? We're talking about my favorite topic, the favor of God, or the favor of the Father. About a month ago, I was doing my Bible reading and did back-to-back Nehemiah and Ezra, and very related, same story, different aspects.

One was a king, and one was a priest figure, and it mentioned about the favor that they received from the king of Persia to go back and restore Jerusalem, both the temple and the city walls, and how that restoration played in and really God's plan and purposes in that, but it talked specifically about God's favor on it. I've always heard the favor of God, and sometimes people limit it to something like, hey, I got a great parking spot at the mall, God's favor. Well, yeah, there's probably some aspect to it that I've actually experienced that, but I don't really think that that's the broader picture or it's not that discrete. It's much more of how you're experiencing him in his life. Robby, we were talking about it. Just that favor is available to all of us, and we're all going to experience it in different ways, but really the ones that receive it are the ones that are looking for it and looking for God in that.

So that's the topic. Okay, and so when we left the regular show, the regular radio show and now into the After Hours podcast, we were talking about when in our lives we felt God's favor or how have we felt his favor. I'm going to go ahead and play a clip because I want to talk a little bit about this clip, and this is from a movie called The Martian Child. And in this movie, what happens is you have John Cusack's character. He plays like a foster father, for lack of a better term. He's in the process of adopting a boy who was just abandoned by his parents. And the boy has come to believe the story that he's from outer space, and if he can complete his mission, which involves taking a lot of different pictures, then his parents will return from outer space and be there in his life. And so when we pick up this clip, John Cusack's character's in working, and the little boy, Dennis, comes in, takes a picture and something gets knocked off and gets broken.

And so listen to the interchange as they talk there, and then we'll come back and talk about it. Dennis. Was I bad? No, you weren't bad. And you got to stop saying that, all right?

I don't want you to cut your feet. And daddy, I'm in here working. We got to put this camera away for a little while, okay? But I haven't finished my mission. Give me my camera back.

I need it. Hey, you got to calm down. I have to go to work, or you can go to your room. You're going to send me away, aren't you? Dennis, why would I send you away? Because you're mad at me.

Because I broke your stuff. Dennis, I don't care about any of that stuff. That's just stuff. There's nothing you can do that would ever change the way I feel. Do you understand?

I could have ever sent you away. Look, this is just stuff. Come on, break it like you mean it.

Let it go, buddy. Here's two. Oh, just one. Nice one.

The breaking continues for quite a while if you actually watch the video. I never got that kind of favor with my father. The reason I like that clip when we had this topic was I think there's times that things get in the way of us feeling God's favor. One of them is a belief that I have to earn it.

I've got to be good enough to get his favor. And so on the opposite, if I do something that I perceive as wrong, which Dennis did here, there was nothing wrong. He perceived it as wrong, that all of a sudden now I lose God's favor and all my fears come back in, like I'm going to be abandoned and all the things you hear in that clip. The other thing that I think sometimes gets in the way of us feeling God's favor is our brokenness. We're not taking it to him, and we're holding it up kind of as a defense shield or a barrier. It doesn't allow us to really feel his favor coming at us. He doesn't push through that violently. That's not who he is, right? So he's going to try to show you his love, and that's what I loved about that clip is the dad ends up taking him in the kitchen, and they just start breaking all the dishes. He's like, this is just stuff. Darrell Bock And squirting ketchup and mustard and dish detergent and everything else on him, too. I mean, it was bedlam. It was like a Greek wedding or whatever, but they were having a blast.

John Dickerson They were having a great time, and it was letting him know, look, you're more important than stuff. You're more important than all these other things that you believe, and I'm not going to abandon you. And the very cool thing that the Father is doing there, and that's what the Father is doing in our lives. We just don't always have the ability to see that, right? Because our beliefs get in the way. Our brokenness gets in the way. Our doubts get in the way. The things the world tells us gets in the way, right? So maybe we'd be more apt to feel his favor if we just work with him on getting rid of some of those things.

Darrell Bock Yeah, that's true, and I hadn't thought about that. I mean, there were seasons in my life where I sensed it, and then other seasons I did, and we were talking about this earlier. We bring conditions to it. God doesn't bring conditions to it, but we bring conditions to it.

And there's a certain aspect. God's not going to bless a mess, but he's also not totally reactionary to every little thing we mess up when he abandons us and pulls us his favor. He just doesn't work that way.

He's good all the time. But I think a lot of it, there was so much of that where I sensed his favor at times, and a lot of it was probably not necessarily, you know, it could have been where I thought I was doing something good and thought I'd earned it. Well, that's a wrong idea, but I guess the thing is, is the more I go along in this life and the closer I get to him to realize I realize most is I don't have to do anything to receive that favor, and this mindset that makes me feel like I have to is what used to get me so jacked up in the first place.

Yeah, I am going to disagree with you on one thing. I think the one thing you do have to do is seek him. Yeah, of course. Right. I mean, I think that's the only thing you've got to do is make yourself available and seek him, because that's what Robby was talking about with his study, that all the favored, right, was the ones that were seeking the Father.

Yeah. I don't mean to say that, that you sit back and passively just receive it, but I think it's the active mindset where you think that it's all conditional, and I think whenever you really get into that point to where I'm going to seek him, and then I'm going to just leave the results up to him and be the benefactor, that's when it gets good to me. Yeah, and you look at Moses' life, right, from what you read in Scripture. He makes a bad decision in his world and kills a guy and then has to flee. And then there's that season where he's gone for 40 or so-ish years, and he's gone for 40 years. But during that time, it's not like God's not working on him, because honestly, Moses is a little bit of a mess, right? But until he can work through those things with God and find God as Father out in the wilderness, playing pickleball with the goats or whatever he's doing out there, he's out there, and God's fixing him to where he's in a place where he can receive the favor. He has to go through all the stuff with Aaron and Aaron, him not being able to talk and the disbeliefs he has about himself. And God goes right at that stuff, right, so he can put him in a place where he can feel the favor of him when he truly really needs it. Darrell Bock Yeah, and where does the feeling come from originally? It's coming from God. God put that in you. And so even when we're seeking and we're desiring, it's still coming from God.

He's the one that puts it there in you that says, hey, I'm the one that you need to be going after and puts that desire and quest for you. Because again, we're the adopted sons. We're the ones that were grafted in, you know? We came along later. We're not Jewish, any of us in this room. We weren't the original part of the family, right? Mark Bailey Robby's close.

Darrell Bock Well, he's trying hard. But that's what it's, you know, the beautiful part about the whole picture. And that's what I love about your clip there, too.

It's, you know, it's a picture of the son. No, you're grafted in your mind now, you know, and that's where we have to walk in that and believe that. And that's our part of the trust and the, you know, being able to sit there and say, you know, like you're just talking about, you know, stories of, you know, where have you found favor? And it's just, like where you're at, Andy, it's like just when you walk every day and you become more and more content in that Christian maturity that you have, it's like you learn and learn more about him, you get more and more comfortable in that skin. And it's just every day I feel like, oh, I'm more in favor than I was yesterday, more than last year, more than a few years ago. It's just, you just, it just grows in you because you're abiding more and more in him. And that's just a feeling that no one can describe except for that they know where they're at with God and their personal relationship.

Robby? I knew, you know, growing up, my father loved to trout fish, right? And so, I don't know, it was really one of the coolest things to do was to go, my dad would say, you want to go trout fishing? And oh, man, that was an adventure that I think a father and son, it was absolutely beautiful. And it put something into my life that to me was high favor that like I can sense it from my father.

But then later in life, God really used that favor to give me favor I can't even really begin to put any price on that. See, I would easily, somebody called me up and said, let's go trout fish. And they'd say, we're going to meet tomorrow at 4.30.

I'm going to be up and I'm going to be ready to go fishing. You could just count on it because of the anticipation of the fun that I was going to have. And I can remember God asking me one time like, Robby, do you think you could get up that early to come fishing with me? And me thinking, well, you know, that's a lot different God. But I, you know, I took him up on it. And then what adventures he has taken me on, like, it's, there's no doubt in my mind that that's, you know, my favorite time that that he showed me stuff. And, you know, clearly just this week, I mean, he knows how much you know, I just become like, I don't know how to put it other than just totally full and well fed and all that stuff and just so excited on the ways that he has illuminated himself to me.

And so this last week, he was like, Robby, we're going to start on the 119th Psalm. And I was just lost in the weeds horribly, trying to understand how these words were just going, coming again and again and again and again. It seemed like the same words.

This just isn't making any sense to me. Obviously, the Hebrew wasn't enough for me, I needed something more. And so the question just was pinned on me. So I said, God, you just got to help me out. Well, he sends me to Chabad.org.

There's no doubt that I found this. And I find a two hour teaching on all these different words and what specifically the Hebrew culture has talked about those words over the years. I know that may lose some of you. But what I'm trying to get at here is, it poured into me like, my wife tried to come in the middle of me watching this video, it's really got our feelings hurt, like, honey, I'm sorry, but this, you know, it would be like, you walking in when I have a 20 pound, you know, trout on the line, like, you know, we're not being interrupted right now because I am gone fishing with God. And he's showing me the coolest things of ways that dots connect in the Bible and things and concepts that just like, oh, man, do I feel favored?

And I have to be honest when I say, where do you feel the most favored? Oh, I definitely feel favored when he is showing me his word to be actually, which I know, Jesus is a word and word is Jesus. And so you're actually getting to completely commune with Jesus in the study of his word. Yeah, I was just thinking about, I told before the pre-show about a story when it comes to God's favor. And I don't know, I was sitting here thinking about our, we have one of those digital antennas that hangs up in a window at the house. And God's favor is always there.

The digital signal is always there. It's my receiver that has issues sometimes. And then I don't know what sense that makes, but it made sense to me at the moment.

So, but, you know, back when I felt like I was supposed to be ordained back in 2010, you know, I always do this journey with the church I was in and their structure and that kind of thing. And it was really rough on my heart because I was trying to earn something, I think, and, you know, then I get this piece of paper that says, oh, you've been divorced, you're damaged goods. Well, I'm like, I've been damaged twice then. So, you know, this is really bad. And so I just extremely, extremely damaged, you know, my receiver. That's the D2.

The D2. Yeah. So anyway, what happened was God showed me favor with the pastor of the church who was there and the, you know, through a niece of mine who, you know, I dearly love.

She's 14 now. But in that moment, there was, I'm looking at, I had already looked through this paperwork and there were levels of ordination. I can't say that word. And what I realized was I had already done, God had allowed me to do things that man was saying, oh, you can't do till you do this. And his favor was, and basically what he said was, you let me choose where you can go and what you can do. And obviously one thing led to another.

And I'm like, Robby, the adventures I have been on, the adventures I'm on now are incredible. I mean, and when I look back and I go, man, I wish I'd have recognized his favor a little more then, but what was it that I might not have learned in the journey? You know, I mean, we we've done some incredible things and we were just talking the, the, the real estate market is nuts right now, but he might've tried to buy a house at the beach and we sold our house in Ashboro and moved to King at just the right moment in the middle of COVID-19.

We got a house ready to go and sold it and it sold and we bought just as right. His favor is God's favor that, and favor isn't fair. I don't know why it happened the way it did, but I'm glad it did because I wouldn't want to deal with some of the stuff you would have to deal now. Yeah. I think one thing to maybe consider is that people get greater portions of God's favor like in scripture.

Right. But it doesn't mean that we're all have been absent of his favor. I mean, obviously, you know, one of the things I was thinking about as you guys were talking was, I don't think I've ever asked God the question, God, remind me of when you've shown me your favor and just let him answer. You know, when I was sitting here and I was listening to you guys, but that's a question I was kind of prompting. And he's bringing back memories of me being with my kids and the times that we laugh about stuff that's just things that we like to laugh about, quoting stupid movies or, you know, throwing things out there. And it's one of my favorite times. You know, I got my daughter's wedding coming up and one thing I'm really looking forward to is three of my kids are going to be able to be there, you know, and being able to have at least some portion of that time where we can just get together and laugh about stuff. Because that's one of my things, you know, laughter is a great love language, you know, for us. And that's something that tends to happen when the kids all get together. And so I'm looking forward to that as well as a wedding, obviously.

But that's one of the things in addition to the wedding I'm looking forward to. Have you got plenty of regular milk? I do have regular milk. Plain milk's fine.

I do have that. Yeah, that's one of the quotes we use a lot. Whenever somebody doesn't get their way, it's from the Santa Claus. And so they're at Denny's and he wants chocolate milk and he wants this and everything's out. And she's like, we don't have any chocolate milk. And he's like, plain milk's fine. And so that's, that is a quote.

Thank you, Robby. I knew that. The plain milk's fine is one of his, you know.

We'll probably use that quote a bunch of times that week. But yeah, no, I, and that's times when I'm with my kids that I really feel favor because he blessed me with them. Right.

And blessed you with the memories that go with the plain milk is fine. Yeah. And, and, and, and being able to share life. Right. It's, it's an amazing thing.

Really, it's just like, wow. You know, for those of us, but unfortunately there's some people that don't appreciate their families and, and they don't necessarily appreciate the favor of their parents. How many movie clips could we use where, where you see the father reaching out like crazy to a son, you know, that doesn't get it.

But fortunately the prodigal, you know, himself turned around and he got it when he came back. But it was always there. Yeah. You can also see a lot of clips where in their own way, sons and daughters are reaching out to their parents and the parents have no clue. Right.

I mean that, that is, you know, a lot of the movie clips you see is unfortunately the, the dynamics of that thing in relationship. Well, in the story of prodigal son, the older son, the first born, what was his complaint was you're not throwing a party for me. I've been here. I've done my duty.

And the father tells him, all I have is yours. The signal was there. So you just need to turn the receiver on. Good point.

Yeah. We were trying to, we're talking earlier about that whole first born and that's where the blessing typically comes, but that's not the case. Whenever you look through the Bible, there are quite a few examples and nobody pointed that one out.

That's a good point out. So anyone else got any stories of God's favor when you feel it? Harold, what about you? You've had a little bit more time to experience it. And I've had a lot more experiences of it. I would, I would dare say, but, uh, my sweetheart and I had a somewhat similar experience to what you described in the burn and the housing market when, uh, when I determined that we needed to leave Columbus, Mississippi, and I found a job in Knoxville, North Carolina, our home there. So about the first week that it was on the market, the market there was on the upswing. We came to North Carolina and Knoxville, the market was in a downturn. We ended up buying a house that had been, this was in December. The house had been finished and I think maybe February and sitting there empty. So we sold our home in Columbus with a profit that we put into a savings and loan. We moved up here and took that money out and paid down on the new house that was in early December and either January or February that SNL went belly up, not FDIC insured. People couldn't get a nickel for at least a couple of years. And then I think it was like 20 or 25 cents on the dollar that they recovered.

We sold high, bought low and didn't lose a nickel. So that's just one instance of when I see God's favor. He let me bounce off the asphalt when I had my motorcycle wreck.

Just got a few skin places and nothing else. I could go on and on for a lot longer than you'd care to listen. But, you know, the fact that I've been married for 57 years to my sweetheart, that's God's favor because I was planning to be a Navy pilot and I'd have made it.

I might not have survived Vietnam. So on and on and on I could go. I just, I still go by my statement of before. If you're looking for God, you're going to see him in everything. Every bush, every sky, every bird, every bee, he's there.

But if you don't know God, it just happens, which is ridiculous. Darrell Bock You know, in the podcast at Wild at Heart Dead, Sherry Snyder was talking about that we have a tendency when crap flies, nope, for lack of a better word, in your life to stop being relational and stop looking to the Father when all of a sudden, you know, they pull the rug out from underneath you. And then she made the point of Stephen. Like somebody had his rug pulled out, right?

He's getting stoned to death, right? But when you think about it, when you think of the light that was shining on Stephen's face, just picture that in your mind. You couldn't have as much thrown at you as those rocks that were being thrown at Stephen.

Yet, he stayed relational. And in that moment, he was looking, right, for the favor of God. And because he was, he had this look of an angel because that the very glory of God, like, you know, the Aaronic blessing, right, that made the Lord's face shine upon you. Well, he was looking up to see that face, the face was shining on him, as he was literally being stoned to death. And she said, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could live our lives realizing that no matter how many stones were flying our way, that, wow, we could look up, and it would still be shining down on you.

Oh, aren't you so cute? Well, then you made the point, you know, in the pre-show we were talking about this was, you know, Paul was probably there to witness that, right, and how that had to have a definite impact on his life, and at least, you know, throw a little bit more things in there to work him towards, you know, when God redeems him on the road to Damascus, right, that there's something there. He's seen it firsthand. And so, you know, I think that when you see the favor and you don't get jealous, right, you know, there's something in it that makes you say, I'd love to have a little bit of that, too, right? You know, it's the jealousy part that gets in the way so much of the time, and that's what we see scripturally, Cain and Abel and those types of things where Joseph and his brothers, you know, jealousy plays an ugly part.

It does, but Robby pointed that out a few weeks ago. It's in that, I think it might have been in that iniquity discussion that jealousy also can be a good thing or an envy. Let's say envy, and you see that blessing of God, and it says, well, okay. It was the same way with me when I saw you guys, and I was like, okay, this boot camp stuff must work.

These guys have testimonies, and these men are walking free. Well, there was something in me that said, well, I want a little bit of that, you know. And the more you progress, you're like, okay, what they're saying is really true because it's happening to me. You know, you thought you walked in the Word all this life, but then you hear a testimony about the favor of God in a different aspect, and it does make you desire those things. Now, not everybody sees that and desires the same thing.

Some people say, well, that's too hard, or I don't want to be, I'd rather hide, or I'd whatever. But you have that opportunity. God says, choose this day who you'll serve or who you'll seek after, you know. Yeah, I think it's that magical, pivotal point, though, that, you know, I can appreciate what someone else has, right?

But when I think they shouldn't have it because I should have it, right? And then I'm turning that focus away from the Father and turning it more towards the world, right? And I'm starting to look at what Satan wants me to think in that situation, and then bad things really just kind of roll from there. You know, so this week, one thing I'd like for you to go do, and I'd like for our team to do that, and say, God, show me where you've shown your favor to me in the past, and where are you trying to show the favor to me now in my current situation, whatever that situation may be, and let Him speak into your heart. Let Him love you. Let Him show you what He's trying to do. And maybe He's going to get some stuff out of the way. But let Him work on that. But take those questions to Him, and go register for boot camp, maskonjourney.org. This is the Truth Network.