Battle to Fight

Not key to cool off the Russian nightmare.

No, the devil's nightmare here. From its time to man up. Challenging men to step into their true manhood. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few seconds. Enjoy it.

Share it. But most of all, thank you for listening to the Truth Podcast Network. 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 Masculine Journey.

We're glad that you're with us today and we are talking about some of our boot camp topics that we like to do coming up towards boot camp. And before I do that though, last night was a very important eve. Can anyone else here at the table tell us what last night's eve was?

Not you. Yeah, Robby Dilmore birthday eve. Today is Robby's birthday.

Happy birthday, Robby. I've never celebrated a birthday on the show itself, but here we are. Yeah, well I don't know if we're going to call it a celebration yet.

We'll see how the show turns out. But at least a recognition of your birthday. Ah, that's good. Yeah, well happy birthday. Which is actually Halloween eve. Since I was born on an eve, you know, I get it, you know. Yeah, that's why you've got this problem with eves, you know. Which Halloween itself was All Hallows Eve, which was the day before All Saints Day, so it's like a triple eve. Just saying, my birthday was. And God knew that when he set it up. It's all about eve.

So does that make you a Halloween-y? Okay. It could only go down from there, so we'll go ahead and keep talking. My poor attempt at a pun for Robby Dilmore.

Well, that was a good pun. It was just a slippery slope we'll choose not to go down on this show. Maybe after hours we'll go down that way. But no, we are going to be talking about the boot camp topic, and Robby, I think it's important you do this talk at boot camp more than anyone else. And so, why don't you tell us a little bit about it. I mean, you call it one thing, I call it another, but it's really the same talk. Well, you know, the beginning of the talk is a battle to fight.

Right. And so, one of the things that just was critical to me as an understanding was that something has been stolen. And what's been stolen is our image of who God really is.

And as a man, as I sat there the first time, what do you mean? Something's been stolen from me. And I realized that if we could get a good look at God, right, is what this part of the talk is about, then we would get a better look at ourselves. And this image of God was something that had been stolen from me, really had, and I didn't even know it had been stolen. But that God is a warrior. And, you know, this revelation to me really changed everything.

It did. You know, the talk that we're talking about, it's a three-part talk, and we're actually going to do it over the next three weeks. But you call it the heart of man, right. And I've always called it core desires, but it's really the core desires in the middle of the heart of man. Right. What are the things that really bring a man alive?

You know, the desires that are good to chase after in the right context. Right. And one of those, the first one we're talking about is battle. And so, we're going to play a clip. Andy, if you want to go ahead and talk a little bit about the clip. It's a trailer, so there's not a lot to set up, but there's a little bit there.

There's not. It's a Revolutionary War story called The Patriot. It was based on a fictional character, composite character, of like Francis Marion and Daniel Morgan and Nathaniel Green, maybe. But anyway, it really sets the story of really a man who has been to war, has felt like he's sinned in that war and the way he, you know, fought the war. And he didn't want to reengage, or he didn't want to engage in this war, you know, in the Revolutionary War. And he wanted to keep his family safe from it. And it's a way a lot of us go about our lives, I think, is we feel like there may be a war out there, but we choose not to enter in. I have long feared that my sins would return to visit me and the cost is more than I can bear.

A past he wanted to forget. I've been to war and I have no desire to do so again. I have seven children. I do not wish to leave them fatherless.

A family threatened by war. We have to do something. I forbid you to go. Not a child. You're my child.

A son fighting for his beliefs. Father, I thought you were a man of principle. When you have a family of your own, perhaps you'll understand. When I have a family of my own, I won't hide behind them.

Hang him, put his body on display. Colonel, I beg you, by the rules of war. Do you feel like a lesson, sir, in the rules of war?

Or perhaps you have children more. Before this war is over, I'm going to kill you. Why wait? I'll come back. May I request, sir, that you transfer my son here under my command? I'll fire first to start with the officers.

We don't know when or where they're going to strike. Where do you learn all that riding, shooting? I try to talk. How many were there? 51. One man. Sounds more like a ghost than a man.

This ghost, bring him to me. How many men does Cornwallis have under his command? 12,000 redcoats. I'm here to enlist every man willing.

Who's with us? This is not the conduct of a gentleman. I'll take that as a compliment.

That's a good clip, Andy. I think you talked a little bit about it before the clip, but I think that's where some people find themselves. I know there's a battle, but I really don't want to enter in, or I just want to stay neutral.

I don't want to be Sweden or Switzerland. Which one is neutral? I never remember. One makes knives, and the other makes chocolates, and one of them is neutral. I don't know which one.

I want to be that person. I want to stay in the middle, and you can't. I think each time we think that the battle is new, but the battle is as old as time.

It is. Literally. From the Garden of Eden, the battle has been raging. Exactly. What happens is, as an inactive warrior, somebody that wants to sit on the sidelines, the enemy doesn't play fair. If you're not going to engage, he'll be glad to go after your family members. He'll go after all parts of your life to where the enemy's pretty stupid, but he continually does it. He'll do things to draw you in. I mean, it's like Benjamin Martin, the character here, he got tired of being picked on and his family being picked on, and finally it pulled out of him what was always in there, and he actually had to engage. I think that's where I was for so long in my life, is I felt like, don't engage. The devil will leave you alone.

You're just a nice, happy family. Just kind of have Garden of Eden, or just make it as easy as possible here on earth, and we'll get through this. You can't live that way. That's not how we were created, first of all, and the enemy won't allow that to happen.

No, he won't. When you named off all those people, I don't want to be here and be a poser. I've heard of Nathaniel Green, but I would have called them all furniture makers, so I really wasn't sure who you were talking about, because they sounded like, we're nowhere in a furniture area here.

They all sounded like you drive down the street, and look, it's whatever that first name was. Either that, or they make paint like Benjamin Williams, or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sean Williams, Benjamin Moore, paint company, something. I'm not really sure. All the good names must have been taken. I was definitely posing there, no.

No, I didn't know the names, except for the one. I don't think you have to look far these days to see how far the enemy is dividing families. Pick any social issue, right? And I bet you can go through your family and say, yep, this one's on this side, that one's on that side, this one's on this side. The great division is what we're living in right now, that just dividing everybody on everything.

Yeah, definitely. I think that is where Jesus called. He said that there will be a division, and people will choose truth and righteousness in Jesus, and some will choose the enemy.

But he definitely wants unity within his community, within his family. But we are being drawn out. We're given every opportunity to fight over things that really don't matter, that really don't pertain to the gospel. But I think we are also at a time where you are having to choose more so than probably ever of your truth or not truth.

Yeah, and that's where every warrior needs a good king, the king that leads them into the right battles. Right, right. Because there's not a lack of battles out there to fight, but you said it very well that there's so many of them that at the end of the day, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, they're really going to matter.

Right. Right, when we stand at the end of our time on earth in front of God, is it really going to matter? You know, that's a good point. And I used to always seem to fight the wrong battle. And I do find myself, just like anything else that comes out of what we've learned through this masculine journey, is you go back to the commander in chief and find out what he wants.

Because, you know, it's not a one-size-fits-all. Oh, I was supposed to engage at that time, so therefore I engage in that same way every time. We know Jesus was creative in the way he went about.

But with humanity, he didn't always heal the people the same way every time. So there's a time when you're to engage in battle, and there's time to where you stand down and learn to fight for another day. Yeah, Robby, I wanted to ask you a question, because you do this really well on the talk at camp. You talk about, you know, sometimes as adults, we get confused, but as kids, we're really not that confused, are we?

Yeah, I mean, that's a neat thing when you consider that we're made in God's image. And so if you take little boys, right, and, you know, just watch how they play, and you'll see that they're little warriors, right? It doesn't – they'll make a – Jim was talking about he made a gun out of his graham cracker to go around shooting people. If you take them away, they'll figure out some way to make a gun.

How many people didn't sword fight with sticks? You know, whatever it was, and when you think about your own childhood, right, you played army, you know, the whole bit, well, all you have to do is look at little boys, and you get an idea that God must have made this – this wasn't an accident right here. Like, you take a bunch of teenage boys, and you put them in a swimming pool, and will they break out into synchronized swimming?

No, they will not. It's dunking and splashing and fights and – Sports, something. Right, right.

And so naturally, they get involved in sports, and naturally, they become those. And unfortunately, most of my life, I had no sense that that would have been godly stuff, right, that that image of Jesus, you know, meek and mild, that's not the picture that we had of Jesus, but the patriot actually, because, you know, when he came, and he picked some fights, right, with the – big time, he came to pick some fights, and it ended up, you know, he gave his life for it. Yeah, he did. When you look at little kids, it's funny, I've shared this story before when we've done the topic, but I remember my brother's wife, my sister-in-law, was like, my son's never going to play with guns. Never – don't ever buy him a gun, right?

And so this one lived in California, and I had one of those wheel locks, you know, you put on your wheel that will lock, you know, and it was sitting in the back seat, and all I hear is something I hear from the back, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo. He's pointing this wheel lock at all the cars driving by, you know, he's never played with a gun in his life. He's got to be about four years old, you know, and there's just something wired, right? And so maybe you're out there and you're saying, well, you know, my son isn't really into sports or my son really isn't into those things. I promise you there's something that he's willing to battle for, right?

I promise you there's something that's there. Even look at the game of chess, right, chess is a warfare game, right? All the things that we do is warfare-based in one way or another are the games that they play on the computer, warfare-based typically, and it's this battlefield mentality we're going to talk about when we come back and how it's always been a backdrop of our life and the lives before us. Go to masculinejourney.org to register for the boot camp coming up November 18th through the 21st. What if one weekend wasn't up to you that you could go and God would orchestrate it all? Masculine Journey Boot Camp, basic training designed to give men permission to be how God made them, passionate warriors for the kingdom. Based on John Eldridge's Wild at Heart, experience four days' purpose for God to come after and perhaps reawaken dreams and desires He uniquely placed in your masculine heart.

Fall Boot Camp coming up November 18th through the 21st. Go to masculinejourney.org and register today. Hi, this is Sam with Masculine Journey.

I'm here with my son Eli. We're going to talk about ways that you can help support the ministry. One way, you can go to smile.amazon.com.

Go to smile.amazon.com. There's information on our website there on how to do that. You can go to facebook.com and click the donate button or you can go to masculinejourney.org and find the donate button. Masculinejourney.org. Or if you want to mail something in, mail it to P.O.

Box 550, Kernersville, North Carolina, 27285. We fired our guns and the British kept coming. There wasn't as many as there was a while ago. We fired once more and they began to run it. On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. Yeah, they ran through the priors and they ran through the brambles and they ran through the bushes where a rabbit couldn't go.

They ran so fast that the hounds couldn't catch them. On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. I got to say, I love that bump. You know, I know I picked it. It's a great memory from my childhood. I remember hearing it in my dad's A.M. radio in his car all the time. I'm going to say that second guy singing was definitely from the hills of the Blu-ray.

Definitely. I think we met him at boot camp a couple of times. He's a rabbit hunter.

Yeah, definitely known at least his cousin or something out there. It's a song called The Battle of New Orleans from Johnny Horton from 1959 is when it was done. It was around the same time we were talking before the show where they had Snoopy and the Red Baron was one of the songs back then. And Jim, you had one. The Green Berets, The Battle of the Green Berets.

That was yours. It was just a time when we understood I think a little bit more that battle was essential. To the point we celebrated the victories in battle. You know, going back and looking at the Revolutionary War. If it wasn't brave people that fought that and risked everything, none of us would be here. Not in the way we are now. Maybe better or worse.

I'm thinking it would probably be worse. So just being grateful for that. I really love that bump. I'll get off the bump now. That's great. Yeah.

So back to the first clip. One of the things I thought was interesting about it was Benjamin Moore, Sherwin Williams guy that was – what was his name? Benjamin Martin. It was a fake name, but I mean don't mess it up. Well, I saw the movie.

I didn't remember his name. He didn't necessarily enter into the battle because he wanted to do it for himself. I mean you could argue it was very selfish because he wanted to avenge his son's death.

But really it was about protecting his other kids and avenging his son's death and righting it wrong. Yeah. He was on the sideline, but he realized the enemy is not – he's not going to give up. He's going to keep coming, and I can sit back and let him pick off one by one without retaliating, without doing anything else in response, or I can get in the battle. And the enemy underestimated him. Yeah, definitely.

Right. And that's the thing about everyone that's in the studio, everyone that's listening to the show right now or listening to it on podcasts later on, the enemy underestimates you. You're a critical part of this battle, right? You are needed to fight for the hearts of the others.

You're needed for the fight for your own heart, right? And the enemy knows that, but he underestimates you. God doesn't underestimate you. No, and if you think about it, that's just as much a part of the image of God that we get.

That's part of the package. God's a warrior. We're a warrior. And we can choose, again, not to go to war, but we won't be living out of our whole heart if we're not doing that.

See, I kind of go the other way. I don't think the enemy underestimates us at all. I think he knows us better than we know ourselves. He knows what God has created us for, for that battle. And because of that, he comes at us. We can tell, and this is one of the things we talk about in the boot camp, right? You can kind of tell what you're geared for and what God has planned for you in the way that the enemy attacks you and the way he comes at you. In my own life, one of the things right now that I'm going through, I'm not dealing with all this very well.

We talked about it last week, the different emotions you go through, anger, blame, all these different things. And I was talking with God. I was like, God, what is going on? What is happening here? And it was that thing where the enemy was trying to get my attention on myself. And in that still small voice, I heard God say, Look, I had you do this last year. What are people doing now?

And now you've got people quitting their jobs left and right all over the United States. Well, immediately I went into warfare for them and for the emotions that they're going to go into. I started going into prayer for all of these people that I've never met.

I will never meet many of them. But I started to war for them. Again, what you just mentioned there, warring for our brother beside of us, stepping out into battle for them. So, yeah, I think the enemy does know what we're made for. I think you make a great point.

Probably the only person that underestimates us is us. And the ability that God gave us to fight well in it. One of the things that came to my mind, we were talking about, we're all looking for battle. And over 50 years ago, I started playing war games. My first war game was Avalon Hills, Battle of Gettysburg, and I loved it. And there were many combat games, and I played a bunch of them over the decades.

But one of the things that the games I loved best were the ones that had production, and you built things up. But then you had to defend them. And those are the battles that are worth fighting, where you have something you're defending against the enemy. Just fighting to fight is a terrible thing to do. But most of our wars in this country have been for a cause that was righteous. And that's the important thing for us to do in the battles we fight today.

Agreed. So looking back, Jim, you can keep the mic for a moment. When's the first time we really see battle in the Bible? Or how often do we see battle in the Bible?

All the time. The first one, I guess, was, well, the first one was Eve and the serpent. That was a battle. And that was a battle that Adam hung out of, and that cost us all.

Yeah, he stood on the sidelines on that one, right? Indeed. Yeah, but the whole backdrop of the Bible is battle. Eldridge's team, Wild at Heart team, talks about, it's a love story. It's a love story between God and us, but it's in the midst of a background of battle. It's set in a scenery of battle, that battle's always going on around us in the middle of this love story. Pearl Harbor, for me, was one of the lousier war movies made. But it illustrated that beautifully. You had a love story in the midst of the battle of Pearl Harbor. And so it appealed to women and men.

And you had the great scene of him standing up out of the wheelchair. Isn't that in Pearl Harbor? I don't remember that. Oh, yeah, I thought FDR. Oh, FDR. Yeah, that was FDR, I think.

Or maybe, I don't know, I didn't see that whole movie either. I didn't see all the Patriots, though, so we'll talk about the Patriots. We can go back and talk about that one. So, Robby, we have a clip from you.

And I want to really just, we're going to feel like we're changing direction, but we're really not changing very much a direction. It's about battling for others. Right, and you can hear the battle. The clip is from the movie Good Will Hunting, and I hope you all have seen it. It's a fabulous movie, but the main character, who is Will, is a genius. And he's got this phenomenal mind.

A photographic mind can remember all these books. But he's had a very traumatic childhood. And he's been an orphan, and he ends up with this real anger problem, like any warrior would. Like so many of us do. You're supposed to be fighting battles, and so you end up with this anger problem. And he's sent to Robin Williams, of all people, for anger management. Although it's a lot different setup. And it's a very serious role for Robin Williams.

To me, one of his best ever. And so here we have Robin Williams. Just imagine with me for a moment that you were born a genius. And you have all these mental abilities that you see the people around you don't have.

And so the idea of iniquity, the idea of everybody is below me, would be a huge struggle for anybody. But when you put the childhood he had behind it, you've got a problem. So here we've got Robin Williams, who's going to enter into this battle with this genius, with this struggle of iniquity, and try to rise above his arrogance to get to his childlike heart that needs to learn how to love. And it's a brilliant, brilliant speech. And right before this doesn't will the – Yeah, it makes fun of – It makes fun of his painting.

Yeah, he tears his heart out pretty much by making fun of his artwork. I thought about what you said to me the other day about my painting. I stayed up half the night thinking about it. Something occurred to me. I fell into a deep, peaceful sleep and I haven't thought about you since.

You know what occurred to me? No. You're just a kid.

You don't have the faintest idea of what you're talking about. Why, thank you. It's all right. You're a tough kid. When I ask you about war, you probably throw Shakespeare at me, right? Once more into the breach, dear friends. But you've never been near one.

You've never held your best friend's head in your lap and watched him gasp his last breath, looking to you for help. You don't know about real loss because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much. I look at you.

I don't see an intelligent, confident man. I see a cocky, scared kid. You're an orphan, right? Do you think I know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are? Because I read Oliver Twist.

Does that encapsulate you? Personally, I don't give a bit about all of that because you know what? I can't learn anything from you. I can't read in some book unless you want to talk about you, who you are. And I'm fascinated.

I'm in. But you don't want to do that, do you, sport? You're terrified of what you might say. You move, chief. So I absolutely, you know, here he's coming after a genius, right? And he comes after him with a chest-like move of going after his heart because, and so many of you that are listening right now, me, myself, you know, we've isolated ourselves with our intellect to live out of that rather than live out of our hearts. And so in order to go after that place that we were meant to operate from, it is going to take that what you had when you were a little kid, that battle mentality and usually for others, which is what we get to do at boot camp. But by the same token, I can't tell you how many times at boot camp somebody has battled for my heart, right? And so as we enter into this thing, I mean, what an opportunity for all of us to come after what God's trying to set free, right?

Same freedom. Yeah, a couple things on that from a boot camp perspective. If you're sitting out there and you're saying, I don't need a boot camp, you really need a boot camp. I'm just telling you, if you're living from your head, isolating your heart, you know it.

You know something's missing there. God's wanting to come after that heart, right? God comes after our heart at every boot camp. He comes after the guys that are there. It's an amazing time.

This is not about trying to just get bodies in the seats. It's about getting people set free, right? And God's trying to set you free. Please go register masculinejourney.org. And in that scene, you heard a guy that really knew a lot about battle, but needed a king to give him good direction. And that's what the king's waiting to do for you, to give you good direction in your battles, first for your heart and then the heart of others. Go to masculinejourney.org to register. We'll talk to you next week.

This is the Truth Network. Say, what would you do if you were a new Christian and you didn't have a Bible? It's Michael Woolworth, by the way, from Bible League International, and you'd probably say, well, I'd hop in my car, I'd go to a Christian bookstore, or I'd have one shipped to me.

What if those weren't options? You'd say, well, I'm new to the faith. I mean, I need to know what it means to grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus.

You know, you would pray that someone, anyone would bring you a Bible. And that's exactly the way it is for literally millions of Christians around the world. They're part of our spiritual family. They're new to the faith.

They want to know what it means to grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus. But God has them planning where it's very difficult to access a Bible. And that's why the Truth Network and Bible League have teamed up to send God's word to 3500 Bible-ist believers around the globe. Our campaign is called, The World Needs the Word. $5 sends a Bible, $100 sends 20, every gift matched. Make your most generous gift by calling 800-YES-WORD. 800-Y-E-S-W-O-R-D. Call 800-YES-WORD or give at truthnetwork.com