Unity

Hello, this is Matt Slick from the Matt Slick Live podcast, where I defend the Christian faith and lay out our foundations of the truth of God's Word. Your chosen Truth Network 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.

This is the Truth Network. The heart of every man craves a great adventure, but life doesn't usually feel that way. Jesus speaks of narrow gates and wide roads, but the masculine journey is filled with many twists and turns.

So how do we keep from losing heart while trying to find the good way when life feels more like a losing battle than something worth dying for? Grab your gear and come on a quest with your band of brothers who will serve as the guides in what we call the Masculine Journey. The Masculine Journey starts here now.

Welcome to the Masculine Journey. We're glad to have you with us this week, and it's been a while. I feel like I've missed every other week. I know you guys haven't missed me, but I feel like I've missed about every other week. Yeah, we've got the award-winning Sam Main back in the studio.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was kind of a nice thing to go to last week. There was an award ceremony through my work, and our company won something, so it was kind of cool to go to. That's cool.

Yeah, it was fun. So, it seems like we're moving to a new topic, but Andy just plays the same clip, so I don't know if we really are going to do topic or not, but Danny, what's our topic for this week? It's not Braveheart, but anyway, our topic is unity. I got an email from a buddy of mine in Australia, and he was talking about the topic of unity, and I just kind of pulled some stuff out of that, and the importance of unity, and we have clips playing in the background already, so the fruit of its existence, when things are unified and running smoothly, or the challenges of its preservation, because it's hard to keep people and things unified at times.

It is. So, we're trying to just see what we can get out of that topic. Yeah, well, unity is something that companies struggle with, churches struggle with, societies struggle with, just having a common goal. Families struggle with? Families struggle with unity. It's holiday season coming, so.

Yeah, there's definitely opportunities for lack of unity there, or for unity there, and so, anyway, do you want to go ahead and set up your clip, because it's your show, and you chose your clip first, I'm just saying. Hey, you got to get back in the first spot, somehow or another, I just, you know, so slipped last week. The clip is from Here Comes the Boom, and in this particular scene, the star, Kevin, what was it? James. Kevin James. Not Bacon. Kevin Bacon James. Or him. Or him. It looks like he's ate some bacon. Or sausage. Kevin Bacon James. He's teaching a biology class, and I got to get this word right, because I have been crucified before the show.

He's teaching about cells. That's good. That's about as southern as I can do that. Yeah, that's close. That's close. You're really close.

C-E-L-L. How's that? Yes. Because it's multiple.

Yes, multiple. But, anyway, he's trying to unify this class, and he's teaching them this biology lesson, and he's talking about the health of the cells. So you can play the clip. What's going on, Mr. Voss? Biology, Derek. Can someone tell me what happens when a cell's stacked in? Okay, no one's listening to me.

I will try again. Anyone know what happens to a stagnant cell? What's he doing on the table? I don't know. Something about cells.

Malia. It's not good. Did you hear that?

It ain't good. People, a cell that is not in motion is not a productive member of the system. It ends up assuming all the other cells are going to pick up the slack somewhere, but they don't.

In fact, they imitate the stray cell until basically the whole organism begins to die. Yeah. But you know what? Biology is an amazing thing. And here's the good news.

All that decays can be restored. It's just hitting anybody. Like how a cut heals. Like how a cut heals. Brian, my man. Oh, look.

You got one. And once that cell is back on track, it creates energy amongst the other cells. That's what happens. It starts getting a little movement going. It gets a little rumble. Can I get a little rumble from everybody?

Everybody just rumbling your seats right now for me. Just rumble a little bit. It starts banging into the other cells. And the cells push back and go, hey, what are you doing to me?

They hit into another one. Hey, don't do that. Hey, that's my friend. You don't even know him.

You don't know me either. I know you. We work together. Because then they hit a rhythm. They all hit a rhythm. And this is the beginning of the restorative process.

So now, even if the entire system is close to dead, what happens? Martinez, come on. Give me something. Oh, no. Look out. Here we come. Don't look up my pant leg, Derek. You're better than that. Right over you. Come on, man.

What do you say? If all the cells work together, what will happen? Entire system. Entire system. Entire system.

Entire system. It's healed. It's healed. Yeah.

I've got a little clip cutting happy with that. You know, such a great example of unity and, you know, what happens. And even at a cellular level, you know, when the cells are unified, healing begins. And you know, when families are unified, healing begins. And unity doesn't necessarily mean we all agree on everything.

What it means is we decide to use our talents and treasures together for a common purpose. And you know, that's kind of where I think the show and the idea came from was, you know, because it is tough to be unified and to, you know, say, hey, okay, let's accomplish this. Yeah. COVID did a lot of things, but it definitely stole community and opportunities for community and ways that we unified traditionally, you know, made it very hard to do any of that stuff. Yeah.

And you're seeing some of the after effects of that because people have become disconnected and choosing really to social distance further than six feet. Yeah. As you played that clip, I thought about how many times in this group, you know, where if we all stayed stagnant, none of us would ever receive healing and restoration, but because Rodney says something, Robby gets healing, you know, Rodney talks about something God did for him or because Robby talks about something God did for him, I know it's available for me, you know, and so the more we engage and don't stay stagnant, the more our collective group gets healed.

So anyway, just thought. Wayne, won't you tell us about your clip? Yeah, sure. This is the Avengers and the Age of Ultron.

And this clip here is towards the end, I'm getting a shaking of the head. Yeah, it's not there. Well, there you go. Yeah. We forgot to load it.

Nice. We'll share about unity. We need a little bit of unity here. We do.

We do. At least I don't see it. Nothing's impossible. It's not it, right?

No, that's Robby's. Okay. All right. So what are you gonna do now, Danny? Oh, man.

I've been bombed all over the place. Yeah, it's back to you. Oh, my goodness. I noticed you said cellular. Okay, though. Cellular. Never mind.

Okay, who wants to pick up the rest of this topic because I have just become un-unified. Let's go to Robby's clip. All right, this is from a movie, Nothing's Impossible, great new movie on pure flicks. And it's a story about a guy that was the ultimate basketball player, sort of a Rodney in high school. And then he went to college and was a star there. And everybody thought that he was gonna be, you know, first round draft pick in the NBA.

And it didn't happen. And of course, because he was so popular, he was, you know, dating a very rich girl that actually her father owned the local professional basketball team. And when he doesn't make it, he checks out, right? And, you know, life just didn't give him what he had planned.

And I don't know how many young athletes get their dreams just crushed, whether it's in high school or college, or they say the NFL is not for long, you know, however that works. So he goes out, you know, gets in all kinds of trouble, ends up the janitor back at the school where he was the star and the trophy case is full of his trophies, but he's totally checked out. And, you know, they're trying to get him to be back to who he was and they make him the assistant basketball coach. Well, the coach is in anger management, okay? He's really struggling with some things of his own. As you'll hear at the beginning of this clip, the team's down by like 20, right?

They're clearly not in unity. And the coach just unloads on them, which does not bring unity, obviously. And then he just walks out and leaves it with the assistant coach who's the janitor. And you know, with him checked out, he just says, you know, like, boys, you just go out there and have fun, you know, it's not a big deal, it's just a game, right? Because he's explaining what life is for him and he watches them go out, the locker room just totally dejected to probably go get their brain speed in.

Well, all of a sudden he decides or the cell decides to move like Annie's point and he engages and when he does, everything changes. And so I just want you to listen to how they would have left the locker room versus what happened when one cell or one person quit being disengaged due to his own failures and decided to, you know, go into somebody else's life. You know what, coach Scott might have something to add.

Coach Martin's working through some stuff, okay? So yeah, just, you know, go out there and have some fun with it. You can't take this all so seriously. It's just a game. Go on.

Wait, come here, all right. You guys do have heart, but to win, you got to use your heads. You have to be smart, you have to think, average height of a Clayton player is what? They're a big coach.

Yeah, they're bigger than us, right? Half their points are off rebounds. So every time a shot goes up, what do you do? You find your man and you box him out every time. For if we control the boards and this game is ours, bring it in.

Our fun three lines on three lines on three, one, two, three, yeah. So what a difference it makes, you know, when just one person, you know, decides to come up off the bench, however that looks and, you know, so much for our lives, we sit there and, you know, maybe sat in a few meetings and you're like, man, they're going over the same like, uh, uh, but at what point in time, you notice God gets your attention like, wow, I have something, the spark, right? Just not be a dead cell, you know, like, like Danny was pointing out. So the good thing is anybody could be the spark, right?

It's not preset. So go to masculinejourney.org. We have a bootcamp coming up November 17th through the 20th.

Go register now. For me, describing bootcamp, when I heard the stories from the stage that the other men had, and then during my prayer time, I'm getting a download from God on where my life is and how I have wounds and I have a place in his story to know how I heard from God is one of those things. He really does communicate with us. Register today at masculinejourney.org. One of the things that's been a true joy to me is having my sons go with me to bootcamps and watching them get an understanding that I wished I would have had at their age.

It took me several years and I'm still probably learning it a little bit as we go, but watching them get a good foothold into manhood and understanding what's important, what their role is and how to stay away from the enemy to receive healing and restoration in the way that you love on others. Register today at masculinejourney.org. The color of your skin don't matter to me, as long as we can live in harmony. I can't be be friends, I can't be be friends, I can't be be friends, I can't be. You're going to say something, Sam? No, it's your- Why can't we be friends, Sam? Well, we could try. That means we both have to want it. We just found out why we gave me friends.

I didn't say I didn't, I just was making an observation. Anyway, that was your bump, so tell us a little bit about that. Real quick, my daughter, we spent a lot of time together when she was in her, well we still do, but whenever she was in her teen years and we would go and her best friend would usually be with us in the back seat, and my daughter, that was about the time she knew everything, I knew everything, and we got to get into some healthy debates, and sometimes they would escalate, and the girl in the back seat would just start singing why can't we be friends, and the first time I heard her I was like, you shouldn't know what that song is, that was before your time, but I just busted out laughing when I heard her say it. But still, if me and my daughter are debating back and forth now, I'll just stop and say, why can't we be friends?

Well thank you, that's a good story. That would be a vociferous conversation. A vociferous, yeah, we've had some vociferous.

Yeah, I took some penicillin for that one too. Touché. So Danny, back to you. Back to me. Oh no, it's me, I just want to give you a hard time. Oh, yeah, you can play your clip. All right, that's all I wanted to hear. You have my permission. Thank you, that's all I wanted to hear.

Not Andy's friend. Not yet, we're working on it. So this is from Remember the Titans, it's a true story, based on a true story, and so you had a busing and integration of two teams, you had a traditional team that was all Caucasian and another team that was all African American, and they have to come together and become one team. And even the coaching staff has to integrate or chooses to integrate.

And so they go out outside of Gettysburg, and they have a camp up there, and the players are just refusing to try to get along to try to become a team. And so this is Coach Boone at lunch one day asking one of the team members about his roommate, and it kind of goes from there, and then we're going to come back and talk about it and on why I chose this clip. I want you to tell me something about one of your black teammates. Sir, yes, sir. I'm rooming with blue, sir, and I noticed that he wears those leopard spotted underwears, bikini style, sir.

Okay, maybe somebody who's not your roommate. Sir, I eat lunch with rev. That's Cherry Harris, sir. People go on rev because he's always praying he won't abide a foul tongue, sir. And what is the rev going to do after high school? I don't know. Go to college and all that, I guess. What about you? You going to go to college? Oh, not me, Coach. I ain't a brainiac like rev.

Think you got a future in football? Oh, heck no. I just figured if I got to be in school, I might as well hit some people while I'm at it. All right, I like that. Self-aware, man. I like that.

Well, if you don't go to college, it's not going to be because you're not qualified, so I want you to bring me your test scores at the end of every week, and we'll go over them together, okay? We'll keep that between you and me. Sure. So, what kind of music does the rev like? Oh, me and rev both think on the temptations. Oh, yeah? I know you want to leave me, but I refuse to let you go. If I got to pray, please, or your sympathy, I don't mind, because to me, that much to me ain't around to beg.

Okay, all right. Stop begging. Anybody else? No volunteers? Campbell?

Bertier? No, huh? If any of you will spend time every day with a teammate of a different race, you will learn about him and his family, his likes, his dislikes. You'll report back to me until you meet every one of your teammates. Until that time, we go to three-a-day practices.

You continue to ignore each other, we'll go to four-day practices. The reason I chose that clip is I think that leadership has definitely got to be involved in unity, whether you're talking about the leadership of a church, leadership of a business, the leadership of a society, whatever that might be. You need to have the leadership involved, the leadership of a family.

If you're the leader of the family, then your number one job should be a find a way to try to continue to provide unity of that family and shared purpose, that type of thing. I just love the way Coach Boone does that. It's a football team, so he has the ability to do discipline, which you can't always do, and it works. It works for the team because it forces them to listen to one another. Most of our issues are we just don't listen, so that makes them listen and have to understand one another. They don't have to like each other, but they have to know where the other person's coming from. In that, you can have people that don't necessarily personally like each other, still have unity because they understand where the other person's coming from.

He shoved the mic my way, so I'm guessing my clip is next. This is from the Two Towers, Lord of the Rings. It is a desperate situation, and King Theoden is down and he doesn't see any hope, and they're trying to save the women and children, but they come together and you'll hear Gandalf.

He's not there, but they're remembering what he said, and he should be showing up soon. The unity of the fighting forces takes defeat and turns it into victory by being one with one another and fighting together. Go for it. Send word for the women and children to make for the mountain paths and barricade the entrance. So much death, what can men do against such reckless hate? Ride out with me.

Ride out and meet them. For death and glory. For Rohan.

For your people. Your sun is rising. Look to my coming at first light on the fifth day, at dawn, and look to the east. Yes.

Yes. The Horn of Helm Hammerhand shall sound in the deep. Let this be the hour when we draw swords together, felt deeds awake. Now the wrath, now the ruin, and the red dawn. There's a battle cry there, fourth Aeralingus, that is unifying for the humans in this.

And there are, they've been at odds throughout it. And they came together to turn a defeat into a major victory by following the king. And that's what we can do. We have a king and we need to charge the enemy and they're fighting against evil. And that's the battle that we're in. And that was, I mean, I get chill bumps every time I listen to this clip and I've heard it or heard it in the movie a dozen times easily, but it means a lot to me that all of these different folks came together for a common purpose and accomplished that purpose. You know, there's a lot of things in society that causes us to focus on our differences.

Right? If you just, even just look at the church, right, that's broken up into denominations, which is, you know, we're going to think about this thing maybe a little bit more than this thing. And, you know, we value this a little bit more than that potentially, right? And so you have all this division, instead of unity, I've been thinking about back when, went to set up Good Heart Ministries, which is, you know, the parent company, I guess, a mask on journey. You could call it that, I guess I just did, but very intentionally it was set up as a non-denominational because I didn't want to say, okay, whether I went to this church or that church or that church, there would be another denomination that would judge the ministry based upon it was affiliated with a particular denomination. You know, in some circles, oh, it's just that type of denomination or that, you know, how they are, you know, and there's jokes and there's all that, but it's, there's so much time we spend focusing on our differences that we need to focus on our unity that we're all Christians and sons and daughters of God.

Darrell Bock Yeah. Recently I was interviewing a young lady from Ukraine, and she made mention of how as soon as the bomb started dropping, you know, there was no more Pentecostal or Baptist. In other words, the church came together in unity, and I remember interviewing somebody from Lebanon back when the same thing happened to them, and they talked about that, you know, the Catholics had a, you know, a building that wasn't infiltrated, and so everybody ran to the Catholic church, and so they all became, you know, they were all there, you know, what are you going to do? You know, because of what? Because of a common enemy and an understanding that, you know, love conquers all that, right?

Paul Jay Yeah, absolutely. You know, and yeah, there's lots of things. That's what I find very interesting about our dynamic is we all come from different backgrounds, different denominational backgrounds, but yet God chooses to bring this group together, He formed it, you know, out of people that didn't necessarily go to church together.

It wasn't, you know, in small group together. He chose to put it together with a bunch of us, and we could focus on our differences if we chose to, because we all have opinions, you know, we're all men and we have strong opinions, you know, some of them are stronger than others, but we choose to focus on the unity, right? We choose to focus on the things that God's done in our life, which is why this group works. Instead of looking at how we're different, we look at how God's brought us into the same places. Paul Jay I think I read somewhere when you talk about denominations that we all agree on 95% of the things, it's the 5% that divides us, which when you look at those figures, it's just sad that, and I think that's probably across humanity, it's probably 5% of the stuff that we disagree on, but that's what we choose to focus on. Darrell Bock Yeah.

That makes sense. Jim? Jim We want so much to show that we're right, that we dismiss other people as being wrong. They're not. It's a different opinion. In Romans where our church is now, it's all about unity, and the things that divide us, if they're not eternal, then they don't matter, and that is a real key to that.

Darrell Bock Yeah. God just calls us to love one another, and we need to do that pretty well first and foremost. Go to masculinejourney.org to register for the upcoming boot camp. That's coming up November 17th through the 20th. If you'd like to reach out to any of us, just put our first name at masculinejourney.org, and that's our email, so Robby, Danny, any of them, send that to us. If you have any questions, just please let us know, and we look forward to talking to you next week. Enjoy your week. This is the Truth Network.