Interview With Robby Part 5

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This is the Truth Network. All right, for my YouTube channel, if not for God with Mike Zwick, just like, subscribe, and hit that notification bell, so you'll be alerted when we have our next video. Welcome to If Not For God, stories of hopelessness that turn to hope. Here is your host, Mike Zwick. All right, If Not For God with Mike Zwick. I am glad to be back here today with my good friend Robby Dillmore, and, you know, I gave him two options for this show, and I said, Robby, we can either do revival or we can do waiting on the Lord.

And, you know, it's funny. I just thought about this. There may be a little bit of a connection between waiting on the Lord and seeing revival, because from what I've heard before, revivals don't just happen overnight. It's from years and years of prayer, but we're going to start off with waiting on the Lord. So if you've got your Bibles, and I hope you do, turn with me to Isaiah chapter 40, and we are going to be starting in verse 19, or verse 18. It says, To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness will you compare to him? The workman molds an image, the goldsmith overspreads it with gold, and the silversmith casts silver chains. Whoever is too impoverished for such a contribution chooses a tree that will not rot.

He seeks for himself a skillful workman to prepare a carved image that will not totter. Have you not known? Have you not heard?

Has it not been told you from the very beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, who stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in. He brings the princes to nothing.

He makes the judges of the earth useless. Scarcely shall they all be planted. Scarcely shall they be sown. Scarcely shall their stock take root in the earth when he will blow on them, and they will wither.

Wow! And the whirlwind will take them away like stubble. To whom then will you liken me, or to whom shall I be equal, says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high, and see who has created these things, who brings them out, who brings out their host by number. He calls on them by name, by the greatness of his might, and the strength of his power not one is missing.

Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel? My way is hidden from the Lord, and my just claim is passed over by my God. Have you not known? Have you not heard? The everlasting God, the Lord, the creator of the ends of the earth, neither faints nor is weary.

His understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the weak, and to those who have might, he increases strength. Even the youth shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall. But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles. They shall run and not be weary.

They shall walk and not faint. And Robbie, did you say that waiting on the Lord was, that's kind of you for you this year? Right, every year as we enter a new season, I, you know, come into November, December, begin to ask God, you know, where do you want to go?

What's the advanced word for 2023, as it were? And so this year, interestingly, and sometimes God speaks to me in Hebrew, would you believe that, Mike? Well, you know, so I don't listen to Joel Osteen all the time, but I remember one time he said, he said, did you know that the Bible says that men are supposed to be the one who make the coffee in the morning?

And I said, well, I was thinking, well, why is that? And he says, a guy's wife woke up one morning and took him to the book of Hebrews. There you go. So anyways, God said the word kava to me. Okay. And it was kava in great faith, which is the word actually like amen in Hebrew, amen, right? And so kava is the word that you just quoted out of Isaiah 40. Really?

Okay. And even though it's translated as weight, it actually in its own way has to do with being gathered into the Lord. And it starts with the letter kuv because it has to do with holiness and proximity to Him. And the first time you find that word as beautifully is in the book of Genesis when it says that the waters were gathered together. That word kava right there gathered together is the exact same word that's in Isaiah 40. And so as you, you know, when people think, well, we're going to wait on the Lord, that means I'm just going to sit there and twiddle my thumbs.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This means to draw near, come into me, be gathered. And to be gathered is this idea. But in order to do that, right, it takes great faith.

And so being kava'd in great faith, you know, as you talk about that, there are so many things in my life that I would like to take control of. But as I've discovered this year, more so than ever, as I get older, that I can get great bandwidth if I let God be God and I let Robbie be Robbie. Because I constantly take on his job description.

And when I take on his job description, I use a great deal of my bandwidth that I would have to do on things that I actually should be doing rather than worrying about what things I can't do. And so, you know, I love that line from the movie, I think it was called Rudy, where the boy wanted to be a Notre Dame football player. And he went to see that priest. He was having him, he was praying that he would get into Notre Dame and the priest, you know, he says, do I need to pray more?

Do I need to, you know, he's trying to take control of the situation. And the pastor or the priest just says to him, you know, after 35 years of theological study, I've come to two undeniable facts. Number one, I'm not God. And number two, what? Do you know what it is?

What's that? I forgot. No, I'm not God. No, there is a God and I'm not him. There is a God. Number one, I as a God, and that's true. And number two, I'm not him. You pointed that out in your healing thing.

Yes. And I'll point it out again and again and again and again. It has nothing to do with me, brother. You know, Jesus actually said, he said, I am the, what is it?

I am the vine, you are the branch. He says, apart from me, you can do— What? Nothing. Nothing. Right, right.

So here you go. So waiting on the Lord really has this idea, the fear of the Lord is beginning a wisdom. Because, oh, God is the one that, this is above my job, this is like my pay grade right here. And worrying about this would be foolishness because clearly God has allowed this in my life, for whatever reason, that would grow me.

And so let me wait on what he is going to do rather than me think that I'm gonna worry my way out of any given situation. That's it. Well, Charles Finney, and I'm sure that you've heard of him, right? The great revival preacher back, was it 1700s or 1800s? But he, he actually, the reason he started going to church is because at that time, I guess everybody went to church. And he wasn't a born again Christian, but he went to church because he was a young attorney. And he figured if he went to church, he would be able to get clients. So as he started going to this church, he became outspoken and he actually asked the preacher, he said, well, preacher, he said, if, if this whole thing is true about God, he said, how come your prayers aren't being answered? So he was asking good questions. He was engaging. And so everybody in the congregation, they prayed for him, they prayed for him, they prayed for him. And then finally, you know, they wrote, hey, this guy, he's, he's not going to go for it. He wants to, you know, he wants to live a, he wanted to live his life the way he wanted to live his life.

Let's put it that way. And, uh, finally one day he, uh, he went out to the woods, Charles fit in and it bothered him so much before that he actually, uh, there was something for his job where he actually had to read a few Bible verses. And so what he would do is he, he, as he started to read these few Bible verses, he got a Bible and he would start devouring the Bible and just reading the Bible like crazy.

And what he would do is he would have these papers. And when he would see somebody coming to his office, he would cover up the Bible with the papers because he didn't want anybody knowing that he was reading the Bible. And so one day he said, he, he, he, the word of God was actually speaking to him. And so he went out into the woods.

Ah, quiet, completely quiet with God. And he said, God, he said, I just need to know. He said, if you're real, he said, I need you to show yourself to me. And he said, so all of a sudden there was just a rustling in the, in the bushes over there.

And he went over and there was nothing there. Immediately, he gave his life to Christ. And they said, when he came back from out of the woods, he was a different person. And from there, he became one of the great revival revival preachers of, I believe the second great awakening. And I want to say it was the 1800s with him and, uh, and, and the rest is history.

Um, but it wasn't until he decided to get away, get alone and seek God quiet. When the Lord showed up over, over the Christmas break, I got violently ill, extremely ill. I was concerned about some stuff.

And one of the things that I was concerned, I said, well, I've got to want to, I want to make good money this year or whatever. And I said, now I'm not able to make any money selling insurance because I'm sick and I can't even leave the bed. I look for, there was a couple of days there where I couldn't even move.

I, it hurt to move from one side to the other. Um, and, uh, so what had happened was, was that I sat up in my bed and I started praying to the Lord, but when I had, I spent so much time with the Lord, uh, that, that I, I saw, I don't know how to explain it. I don't know if it was a vision, but I saw this bumper sticker. I hadn't seen in a long time and it said, no Jesus, no peace, no Jesus, no peace. But then what I actually, I think I saw that bumper sticker out somewhere, but then what I saw to myself, um, was something that was very similar. It was, if you're following somebody really closely, you can only see this, but it said, are you following Jesus this closely? Have you ever seen that bumper sticker? I love it.

Yeah. So finally, when I got out that night, the first night I went out, I went to Walmart and I actually cut somebody off and I got right behind somebody and guess what bumper sticker I see? Are you following Jesus this closely? And that's when I started, I decided I need to spend more time in the secret place.

And it's funny when I started doing that, um, the beginning of January, all of a sudden business started booming. And so it's like, you know, there is, there's a Bible verse, Matthew 6, 33, and it says, seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things shall be added to you. But I think we kind of do it the opposite. Some way, Robbie, we try to seek all these things and then we hope that the kingdom of God will follow. But, uh, many times it doesn't, it doesn't work that way.

Yeah. It's interesting that, um, when I lost my job, um, at Bob Neal years ago, before I started the dealership, um, a good friend told me, he said, Robbie, I know you're terrified right this minute. And he goes, and it's going to seem like it's the absolute wrong thing to do, but I promise you that it's the best thing to do. He said, you ought to take a month since you have the time and you have a severance package. You ought to take a month and go study in something in the Bible that you always wanted to study, but you never had the time. And I took him up on that.

I didn't have a job, but you know, didn't really know for sure what I was going to do. But interestingly, I, I, I went and decided for whatever reason, I was just going to study the book of Matthew. And guess what verse stuck out to me as I did that study, I'll never forget it, that it just came to me like, Oh my gosh, if I'll just seek God, then I, I got it made. And, and it, and it speaks back to waiting on the Lord.

In other words, here's the answer to your problem, right? Kava it's, it's pushing into God and he'll draw near to you. And, and what, what possibly could harm you, right? And the other thing that's beautiful about that passage that you, you mentioned in Isaiah is you remember what you're going to rise up like on wings of what? I'm an eagle. Aha! Well, an eagle is throughout Scripture, you know, very prominent bird, but it actually in Hebrew is like this Lord of the fire.

And the leopard is like Lord of the water. Yes. Well, water and fire, you put them together. They do not, I don't know, they just don't mix well. You either, you put water on fire, you're going to get steam, you put fire on water, right? It's going to put it out.

However you, however you look at that. They don't mix well here on the earth, but in heaven, for some reason, if God's going to rain down something, what does it usually rain down? It rains down fire. Or it rains down water, right? Oh, oh yeah.

Right, right, it does. It's either fire. I was thinking, I just read this story. Was it Elijah? Elijah, he rained down fire?

No, you're exactly right. He did rain down fire on Sodom and Gomorrah. He rains down rain. Those are the two things that come out of heaven. Well, in, if you've ever heard this word, in heaven, in Hebrew, is Shemaim. Now, what does that sound like? Does it sound like shalom to you? Which is peace.

Well, heaven is kind of peaceful. Shemaim. There, that sound that you hear right there, that's a shin, that's fire.

That mem, that mm sound you hear, that's a mem, that's water. Okay, so heaven is fire and water. And so is shalom. And oh, by the way, you know what the word name is? Your identity in Hebrew is said shem.

Once again, you get this idea of a shin and a mem. Because when you can bring fire and water together in harmony, you know what you get? Peace. Now, can you do that? Apart from me, you can do what? Nothing.

Nothing. How are you going to get fire and water to come together in harmony? Is only through, obviously, the Prince of Peace, okay?

So think about this now. It's beautiful that this eagle now is, it's a nun and then a shin and then a reish, which means that he is, that this is the head of fire, okay? A leopard is the exact same letters, only a mem. Instead of a nun, a mem and a reish. In other words, they got the same basic concepts of, here are these two things, unbelievably powerful, right?

You could tear up almost anything. In fact, when God judged the earth the first time, he did it with water. And we all know when he comes back the second time, it's going to be fire, okay? And so it's really unbelievable to me how many times when you read prophecy, you'll find leopards and eagles. Because there's the two ideas. But when you can get those two in harmony, right? Then you get peace.

And the only way that happens is when you wait on the Lord, because he's got that together. I don't. Yeah. Well, I saw some... That's good.

And I saw something recently. It says, when you're sitting down in a chair, you're transferring your weight from yourself to the chair, which is what we're doing now. It says, when you trust in Jesus, you're transferring your sin from yourself to Jesus. Not only your sin, but you're also transferring your worry. Because if we go back to Matthew chapter six, I had mentioned verse 33, but right before that, what he's actually talking about, starting in verse 23, 24, 25, is he's telling us not to worry or not to take thought, because it doesn't do any good. But when we take our worry, when we take our troubles, when we take our yoke and we cast it on Jesus, oh man, it's as light as a feather.

I mean, it's absolutely as light as a feather. I remember hearing a story one time where there were these two different sets of guys. And one of the guys, he actually bought and sold homes, bought and sold and bought and sold. And I'm going to give you the number.

I don't know the exact number, so I'm just going to give you this number. But at the end of the time, when he was in his last home, it turns out that he had made a million dollars buying and selling all the homes. And so he told the second guy who had never bought and sold a home, he told him, he said, see, look at all this money that I made by buying and selling the home. Well, the first guy, he bought his first home for say 50,000 and he got up to a million dollars. The second guy bought his first home for $50,000 and now it was worth a million.

So you say, well, who came out ahead? Actually, somebody may say, well, they came out even though they didn't because every time you buy and sell a home, there's expenses. You have moving fees.

You have realtor fees when you're selling them. So the guy who just sat there in his home and didn't do anything over the course of time, he actually came out of the head, ahead of the guy who was constantly moving and shaking. Now, am I telling you to sit around and do nothing your whole life? Don't go to work, don't do anything? No, absolutely not. That is not what I'm telling you. I mean, as you know, on this show, there was a show that we did, Robbie, called Do Do Doers, where we believe in absolutely, we have to have a sense of urgency to get the word out there, to get the gospel out there. Jesus is coming back soon, but I tell you what, you can keep yourself so busy that if you're not spending time alone with the Lord, man, you're going to miss out.

You're going to miss out. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's just, I can't, I'm with you. I wish that I could, in fact, I pray constantly. God, show me how to get more of letting go and letting God, right? Because as we can let go of let God be God and all those things, in fact, I started this, oh, maybe 10, 12 years ago, of taking a nap very intentionally every day when I would go home for lunch. And when I laid down, I wasn't originally just so I could take a nap because what I was trying to do was let go of my world. And so what I would do is I laid down, I go, okay, God, I'm giving it all to you. I'm going to lay down here because you're going to have to just take it for the next hour because I think I'm supposed to get rest. And for me to get rest, I've got to let go of all the things that I'm struggling with.

I got to get done today and I got to get done today and all that I could do. But what it actually turned out to be was simply, Mike, it was simply a discipline of me turning over the reins to God. And what I just learned here in the last couple of weeks was Jesus said the last words on the cross that he said, you remember what they were?

Oh gosh. Into thy hands I commit my spirit. So, you know, the big proponent of the 119th Psalm and one of the big questions if you study that Psalm a lot is what in the world is a precept? Okay, it's a pakudim in Hebrew. And I've studied it and studied it and thought about it and looked at it to see what does that really mean because I understand the word in English, but I want to feel for what that actually means, right? And so the other day I was struggling in prayer actually to let go. And I was trying to find the word surrender in Hebrew, right? So I started that and you might not be shocked to know the word surrender isn't in Hebrew in the King James Version of the Bible, so I wasn't there. And so I started to think, well, what does it mean to surrender from a Hebrew perspective? And I said, oh yeah, fallen into someone's hands.

You've fallen into someone's hands. I just, you know, went into my Bible search and I said, fallen into someone's hands. Oh, it went right to the 31st Psalm. And you know what it says in the 31st Psalm? Into thy hands I commit my spirit. And I saw that the word to commit was the word I was probably looking for because into thy hands I commit, so I must be surrendering right there, okay? When I looked up the word commit in Hebrew, you know what it was? What's that? Surrender.

It was pakutim. It was precept. And all of a sudden it was like bells went off in my head, like ding ding ding ding ding ding ding. Because the idea is now I am going to fall under God's authority. I'm going to turn it all over to you, Father. I trust you completely.

You're my dad, right? And you've got this. So when you commit like that, when you commit, it's actually almost, in fact it is, a military term to muster. So, oh Lord, I want to be in that number. So you're falling under God's authority, because you'll find that word translated many times as number in the book of numbers. So Lord, I want to be in that number, but that number is people that are falling in under the authority of whatever commander, right? So when Jesus said, into your hands I commit, it was like, I'm taking God's authority, the whole thing. And since I came to this understanding, in my prayer life, and when I lay down for my naps, and when I go down to bed at night, I say, Lord, into your hands I commit my spirit.

Because, oh Lord, I want to be in that number, don't you? When the saints come marching in. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, one of the things that I think it makes it a little bit easier to wait on the Lord is if, I think if we put things in perspective.

And the perspective that I'm talking about, I'll use John Piper as an example. He says that the greatest book in the world is the Bible. He says the greatest letter in that book is the book of Romans. He says the Romans chapter 8, and he says the greatest verse he believes is verse 1. You know what it is, Romans 8, 1?

As I recall, off your—no, go ahead, what is it? There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. And so when we put it into perspective, and when we think how short this life is, the book of James says that your life is like a vapor, or like a mist that appears before you for a moment, and then it's gone. The troubles of this world seem a lot smaller. The problems that we deal with, Robbie, on a day-to-day basis don't seem nearly as big or nearly as large when we have that proper perspective, because we realize that by trusting in Christ, we're going to be with our Lord and Savior forever and ever. And it's like, you know what? No matter what the enemy tries to throw at us, and the enemy is going to try to throw all sorts of stuff at us, no matter what he tries to throw at us, what lasting problems is that really going to cause us?

He can't do anything that's going to hurt us permanently. We always have a choice. And right now, if you're listening, you have a choice of whether or not you're going to follow Christ, whether or not you're going to surrender your life to Christ. Maybe you've said a prayer when you were younger, but are you really following Jesus?

Are you following Jesus this closely, as the bumper sticker says? And if you're not, then I want you to pray with me right now, Lord Jesus, I repent, which means I apologize. I turn from my sins, Lord. I surrender my life to you. I give my life to you completely, Lord. And I thank you for the free gift of salvation that you're giving me right now. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, there you go. And, you know, there, and gives you the opportunity, if you just said that prayer, that now, when you wait on the Lord, He's in there. He's in your heart, right? And He can give you a peace that transcends all understanding as you begin to exercise that idea of, let me give this to you, Lord. I'm just going to trust you with that. I'm going to wait on you.

I think this one's above my pay grade. And, oh my goodness, the things that I could have worried about since I've been working on this for years and years and years, and, you know, God's given me the grace to have a winner too. But man, I can tell you, I have so much more peace. I have so much more peace. If I could just turn and commit it all to Him, you know. Turn your eyes upon Jesus.

Look full in His wonderful face. And the things of this world will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace. Amen. If not for God.

If not for God. For my YouTube channel, if not for God with Mike Zwick, just like, subscribe, and hit that notification bell so you'll be alerted when we have our next video. So you don't miss out on any of our latest videos. We'll see you in the next video.