Celebrate After Hours

This is Stu Epperson from the Truth Talk Podcast, connecting current events, pop culture, and theology, and we're so grateful for you that you've chosen the Truth Podcast Network.

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Welcome to the Masculine Journey After Hours, and we're talking about a really cool topic this week, but I'm not going to tell you what it is because we have Andy here, and Andy's going to tell us about this topic because he brought it to the team, and it's an amazing topic, Andy. Thank you. Well, thank you. Thank you. I started off by celebrating myself there.

No, I'm just kidding. So now we were, some of us were on the Wild at Heart. They did a Zoom meeting, talk a lot. We listened to them a lot on their podcast, and they're constantly talking about men's hearts, and as they're really wanting to see a move of God nationally and worldwide for men's hearts, and as leaders, they just feel like we, you know, who have walked out the message, who understand what's going on, a lot of the message of Wild at Heart is, you know, you're constantly allowing Jesus to heal you from wounds, and you're basically being discipled, you're growing, you're learning. You're becoming a mature Christian, and in doing so, a lot of times we get weary in that. We just do it and continually do it, and it's always like the next checkbox.

Okay, we've got that down. Let's move on to the other thing, and the focus really is taking time to celebrate. Don't just jump to the next thing, and not only celebrate what God has done in your life, but help others celebrate because sometimes we don't see even what God's done in us, and we need to help our brothers out and help them celebrate and point out what God's done in their life. Yeah, thank you, Andy, absolutely, and we talked about in the previous show, just a couple of the things that kind of get in the way of that, you know, one is forgetfulness, right, or a to-do list, you know, that I want to move on to that next thing, but if you've ever worked in an environment of continuous improvement, which most companies do, at some point, if you don't take time to celebrate, you begin to ask yourself, is it never good enough, right, and that's what you can personally feel, whether you even articulate it. You get this weariness that you described, right, and it's taking the time to celebrate. You know, one of the things that they'll talk about if you're trying to lose weight, you know, it's been a goal of mine, and one of the things that they talk about is you don't measure your goal on how much you have left to do.

You measure it on how far you've already came, because if you can celebrate the three pounds or the five pounds or the 10 pounds that you lost, it gives you fuel for the next leg, right, but if I'm always looking at the 15 or 20 or whatever that number is that I want to lose, you know, it's only down by one, I still have 19 more to go, you lose heart, right, and this whole celebration mentality is very biblical, isn't it, Robby? Oh yeah. Yeah, I thought you had your hand up. I thought you had a point. Oh yeah. Yeah, I thought you had your hand up.

I thought you had a point. I have the answer. It's Jesus. It's Jesus.

Yeah. You know, you had talked about it earlier that when you dig into the word celebrate, it really has to do with how great life is. I mean, if you were to diagram that word the way that I do, it means that life is like great, great. They use the great word twice, and it has to do with how great God is specifically that we're getting a chance to see that as it becomes part of our testimony, and then you talked about journaling, which has everything to do with keeping a chronicle of the truth, and in John Bunyan's genius of Pilgrim's Progress, which, you know, I think about all the time actually, is the hero of the story Christian is trying to go up the hill of difficulty, and he falls asleep, and he drops out of his bosom his testimony on the ground, and he loses it, and he almost can't finish the journey because he doesn't have his testimony, and as I began to think about what that means in my own world, that when things really start to begin to get discouraging, those things that I have written down that are actually when Jesus came to my rescue, whether it was my crushed leg or the night that I got to almost see his face, and I was going through that, and unfortunately for me, those things are written down, and when you're talking about the personal celebration with Jesus, it's actually me and my testimony, like, yeah, you were here for this, and you were here for this, and that's more of a personal level of celebration, but that's kind of where that really comes from. Absolutely, and that's what's gonna encourage you, because, you know, you talked about the journal of truth. It's a record of truths. Well, who's our enemy? The father of lies.

Yeah. Right, so when you're constantly being bombarded with lies, you could only counteract that with truth, and so I want to go back to a story that we had before the break. We got a little bit of a glimpse of it before we went from show, the regular show, to the after hours, but Danny, you've had a time where you kind of had something on your heart, got a little discouragement, but God didn't let you stay there, right? You were telling us a little bit about that story. Yeah, I'd gone to a process of, I felt like God was calling me into ministry, and part of that process, I felt like, was being ordained, and I started in the denomination we were in, and I won't mention it, but they had a process to go through, so it was like mail-in packets that you filled out and that kind of thing.

Well, in one of the packets, the paper was in big, bold letters. It said, if you've ever been divorced, we pretty much don't want you, so I carry it back to our ministry director at the time, tears in my eyes, and going, they're not going to have anything to do with me, and I'm hopeless at this point, and our pastor at the time, he started a process to meet with the state overseer, just forever grateful for my former pastor. But anyway, and in this time, I'm sitting in church one Sunday, and my youngest niece, they're there, we're going to dedicate her, and we're there as a family, and you know, big church, and I think the church took the scripture, be fruitful and multiply, literally, because there was a ton of babies being, you know, crazy, and so they didn't have enough elders to, and so pastor goes, now I'm sitting there in self-pity, not going to be ordained, I can't do this, I can't do that, and God says, but the pastor says, Danny, come up here, I need you. So I have to step in and christen my second youngest niece, who's now 13, and what God spoke that day was, you let me decide where you can go and what you can do. I'm running the show, and it literally has changed my life, because I did go on to, pastor says that the state overseer says, find a little local ministry, pay them whatever it is, if you believe in the guy, and turn him loose, and we were involved in Piedmont Ministries, and so the pastor over that, I called him, and I said, hey, here's what's going on, and he says, I've been waiting on your call, when you want to do it?

Next week good? I'm thinking, what? And so I literally got ordained one week, did a wedding the next week, and went to Brazil the week after that, so what a summer.

Wow. We'll have to celebrate there. Now you got me rethinking about praying, about ordained, because I don't want to go to Africa. You go to Brazil. Because of Brazil, that might be a thing. Yeah.

Now I think, you know, one of the things that's hard about this is, we conceptually understand it, but then there's a practical application. Now you had a pastor that left you, after 18 years, one really bit of wisdom you shared with us in the break. Remember what that was? No. Yeah. Okay. His statement was, information without application will never bring about transformation.

Right. And so we're getting information. I'm talking to us as a team, you know, the people sitting around the mics, and you that are listening, but we're getting information today, but without the application, we're going to be at the same place six months from now, a year from now, and still being feeling weary, feeling like, oh man, there's so much in front of us, falling for the lies, all those kinds of things. So the question I have for you, what's going to be different?

What's going to be different with your celebration? You know, when you brought up the topic, Andy, for me, one of the things that I have not often recognized, and I've mentioned it many, many, many, many times on the show, but you know, the breakthrough of not feeling like I had anything important to say. Now I know that the enemy, and in the movie, The Beautiful Mind, there's a great little scene where the enemy's always around this guy, yelling at him all the time. The enemy's always going to be there yelling those same things at me, I get that, but it's not letting them have a place to land and to stick. You know, and living in the celebration of, thank you God, I do know that there are times that you call me to have something to say, and I believe that to be more true now than I believed the other to be true for the longest part of my life. And living in that reality will help me speak up in situations where I would normally not be as comfortable to do that, right?

Because when I feel God calling, I need to say, okay God, I'm going to trust you and walk with you in this, right? But the only way to do that is to live in that celebration and live in that reality. Yeah, I think, I don't know, I just, I think we just, we don't really focus on taking the time. So you asked how I would do things differently. I'll just give you an example. How are you? How am I going to?

Well, I'll give you an example. I had really kind of gotten stagnant with all the COVID stuff. I've been working the same thing. I've been trying, I've had this one certification two times already. I needed to go for it for the third time. And it seemed like that's a big hill to start over because the material has changed and it's like, so I finally dove into it and I did very well on the test. And to me, that sense of satisfaction of coming through and really doing well, I was like, you know, I make things much bigger than they are. I look at this big mountain and really, you know, it was a challenge to get to where I need, but that celebration made me want to go back and take the next test or that victory made me want to go back and take the test, celebrate that, go on and get motivated again. We, as the way our hearts work, I believe, is that you will get stuck. You will get, you know, just not really making progress in the light. You start procrastinating a lot of things.

It says, I think in Proverbs, hope deferred makes a heart sick. It keeps you from going on to the other things. And I think celebration is a key part of it. You've really acknowledged that it happened. You've made progress.

So I can go on to the next thing and have confidence I'm going to hit the next thing as well. You know? Yeah.

It's when the doubts creep in that the procrastination creeps in that they tend to go hand in hand, right? So, you know, Morgan talks about celebrating the weird and if you know me well, you go, okay, that's weird. Yeah.

You're all agreeing with me. So when I was thinking about different, when you challenge this a little bit is every time I take the Holy Spirit's lead, like he says, okay, you know, you may have heard me describe about how I have this tendonitis and I now understand that it's the M sound of the M and it's actually Jesus calling. So every time I hear this humming in my ears, it really is a, it's a pretty cool thing. I actually celebrate the fact that, Hey, that's you.

I got you. You know, like that's really, really cool. And I had some breakthrough that I was celebrating the other day and Jesus is a very, very phenomenal at giving gifts whenever you get a breakthrough. And he, he came and he held my hand and very specifically, he held my left hand, which I didn't understand that at the time, but as he did, I, I, you know, he has nail holes in his hand. And so I felt the blood that was actually like, almost like the celebration of communion that you talked about Harold, as I was holding his hand.

And so it's, you know, just being totally with a weird person. I am right now. I keep experiencing this. I hear the humming. I hold out my hand. Jesus holds my hand. I feel the blood and I feel part of being in Christ. And the neat thing is, is that all these things keep growing. And what I, and what I'm trying to illustrate, I guess, is that the Holy spirit will tell you some pretty weird things to do, but if you go with it, it's phenomenal.

The way that it changes what you believe is actually going on right this minute. So if you're me and you just chopped up your little finger on your left hand last night, you know, with a hedge trimmer, but it just so happened that that was the hand that Jesus was going to hold. And as I'm laying there getting stitched up last night, what did that mean to me that I'm, I'm literally celebrating as I'm listening to the humming in my ears.

Jesus is holding my cut up left hand. I mean, it's pretty good place to be in spite of the fact that you're in a pretty bad place. And this isn't the medication speaking. This is all part of the experience, but this is the truth before that.

Poking fun, but that's the truth that you live in. Right. That's a journey you have with Jesus and all of us are all of ours is different in our processes.

Right. But I think we need to be consistent in that celebration. One of the things I got to commit to is I got to commit to journaling and I hate to even say that on the air because then I feel like I got to go do it. But there's so much that's robbed from me, so much that's robbed from me, you know, and I think I'm always going to remember, oh, you're going to remember something God said, obviously I got to remember that and then it's gone. Yeah, but you got a victory from last week. I do have a victory. Last week I had made the statement, you know, we're talking about belief, you know, and my word for the year was believe and what do I believe in.

Right. And so I said I was going to do something and I did that. I put on my mirror, what do I choose?

What do you choose to believe today? And then at the bottom below that says, choose truth. And I put it in my bathroom. So I have to see it every morning. You know, it's the only time I actually look in the mirror is in the morning. You know, if you were me, that's the only time you look at the mirror as well. But I look in the morning and then I put it in my car on my dash down by my stereo. And throughout the day, as life – I'm in my car a lot for work. As life comes at me and tries to strip away the truth, tries to get me to believe other things, right now it's acting as an anchor.

I don't think it's a permanent solution, right, but I think it's a solution for now that gets me to a permanent solution. Well, on the journaling issue, you know, I can only offer, you know, what I do, what he did. You know, and again, it was Holy Spirit guided, so here you go. So I use my phone, you know, I use notes. And, you know, part of my daily prayer routine is to ask Jesus, what did you pray for me that day?

And then I get a piece of scripture and I get a word and I ask those every day and I journal those. In other words, I'm sitting there with my phone when I get the answer. I put that – you would be shocked at how many times during the day I go back to go, oh, yeah.

Because you totally lost it. Or you go back – man, I know I was thinking about that three or four days ago. And it's right there in your phone, in your notes. You have it all the time right in front of you. But it starts with, in my case, you know, actually saying, okay, in the prayer, asking the questions, asking, you know, where are we going today, Jesus, and what do you want to talk about?

I laugh at you because today I'm out working, right? And so I've got one headphone. It's like separate headphones. They're, you know, wireless, so you can have one in and listen to it.

It's an AirPod. And so I'm working outside and I happen to be listening to some music because I'm not having to really think too much. And the song comes on and I'm like, that is a great topic for the radio show.

I should write that down. And then the next song came on and it was from a different genre. And it was a different band altogether, obviously.

And it was on the same topic. I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is a great topic. I can't tell you what it is.

I got no clue. Luckily, I remember one of the bands, so I'm going to have to go back and look at every one of their songs and go, okay, God, I should have just wrote it down when you gave it to me. But it's like, oh, this is going to be a great topic. And now it's gone. Darrell Bock Yeah, and when those things happen, because you feel like you're really, God really gave them to you. I mean, it's like a revelation in your spirit. And then it becomes, you know, a reverse ear moth or whatever, instead of getting a song stuck over and over in your ear, it's the song that's just not there. You cannot think about it.

You can, you're all around it, but you cannot bring it back. Chris Yeah, it's going to be some, you know, commercial jingle that's in my head now. Darrell Bock Well, I mean, it goes along too with what we talked. I think this was, see, I can't remember from, you know, 30 minutes ago, but I think we were talking between shows is that the Old Testament, there was a couple of examples, I feel like, of celebration. One, for the remembrance part, is build an altar, build a tabernacle, build something of essence to remember those things by. Or the celebrations, the feast. Feasts were key, and they truly are celebrations that remember in the goodness of God, but in how he communes with his people. I think we gave the example of communion, Harold did, but, you know, there's just, it is a concept that we don't think about a lot, I don't think.

Chris But I think you made a great point of talking about we do it naturally with our kids. I think most people do, at least we should, right? We look for opportunities to celebrate any type of thing that they do, right? You know, you celebrate the report card, you celebrate this, you know, and whether it's coming from a C to a B or a D to a C or whatever, you know, it doesn't have to be straight A's. Learning to find reasons to celebrate that are not fake, it's not a participation trophy, right? But it's a reason to celebrate them, you know, but we don't do a very good job of doing that for ourselves. And some of it feels like maybe that's too much self-interest, and I'm not saying that, but it's more of a focus on your own heart. Are you guarding your own heart from you?

Because a lot of times you can be your own worst enemy. Darrell Bock Yeah, to that point, we were talking about it earlier about, you know, what's God's involvement? Is he up there saying, way to go, and we're down like, dang. You know, just looking at ourselves like we're not, you know, worthy, or it wasn't that big of a deal, well, you know, you did it all, God, or whatever. He's one, I truly believe he's probably sitting there just waiting for us to obviously give him praise for it, but to acknowledge the victory that we've had together, you know? Chris So, thank you, Andy.

A separate question that I didn't prepare you for, because I love those. What, I'm trying to think, what type of, gosh, I can't even phrase it, so maybe I need to let God work on it. Right now, what do you feel like you need to go celebrate that God's done in your life, that God's helped you do in your life, that God's helped you achieve? Darrell Bock For me, it's being able to get on the highway and drive without screaming.

And I tried for a long time. But until I really asked the Holy Spirit to help me do what I couldn't do, and so my sweetheart has now agreed to, well, we'll go to Alabama for the, my nephew's wedding. And maybe we'll take that Christmas trip. She's got more confidence in my driving that she had lost. So there you go. That's, that's a big thing for me.

Andy Weil That is a big one. Yeah, for me, I think it's recognition of the healing that's happened, that's changed my propensity to go to anger right away. I've had calls from both of my sons recently, you know, one had a fender bender, the other one got a ticket, you know, that type of thing. And, you know, 10 years ago, that would have been anger. It would have been what, you know, once I knew they were okay.

The first question was, is everything okay? And then it would have been anger. You know, and it just wasn't that way. It's like, all right. I mean, they know they made a mistake. They know what they did wrong. They don't need me reiterating it. You know, they need me to say, Okay, what do we do now? Right.

You know, obviously, in the back of my mind, I'm like, Oh, I can't afford my insurance to go up. Right. I mean, that's on, but it wasn't on the forefront, that would have been the predominant thing of being angry about something, you know, and I was such an angry person so much of the time over the littlest things. You know, and I really think that's changed. And I see that dynamic with my sons. And the fruit of that is, I think they bring more things to me now. Because they can trust my reactions. I don't think they ever just trusted dad. They just didn't know which dad they were gonna get on a given day.

And I think they're they're getting a more consistent dad more of the time. And that has nothing to do with me other than being willing to enter into things, letting Jesus do the work, you know, and celebrating and that's more the guy I want to be. And it would be more of that guy a year from now than I am today and even more that five years from now.

And the only way to do that is to keep entering into those things with Jesus and letting those things go away that the enemy wants to poke at that hurt and cause the anger. I think I thought a lot this week for some reason, December, my wife and I have been married 18 years. Both of us been divorced twice.

And when I think about that, we don't celebrate that enough because I can remember we got married. I love to read. I struggle with the journal thing. Somewhere in one of my journals, I wrote at the top of a page, what robs you of your time? And there's nothing under it because I didn't take time to figure out what robs me of my time. Journaling.

Journaling robs me of my time. But celebrating the fact that we have a good relationship that we don't celebrate enough. She's put up with me for 18 years thanks to your prayers now, Sam. But she met Darren and Sheila at church Sunday. And she's still going to let me hang out with y'all.

So I shot at Darren because he's not here. That's an answer to prayer. Yeah, an answer to prayer. But those are the things you celebrate. You celebrate your children. You celebrate your, you know, I have two great kids.

And I think those are the kind of things I want to focus on and celebrate. Robby, anything for you? No, I'm just throwing it at you. You're just kind of sitting there and I'm thinking, I'll just like trip him up because I could have some fun. Well, yeah. I mean, I certainly can think of, one of the things I got from this show, you know, it's kind of actually from LeBron James, is making sure- You got name dropping again. Yeah.

My old buddy. No, it was actually, how can I help my brothers to see how special they are and recognize when they're getting beat up and try to speak into that? Because a lot of times, you know, we're walking around and you can see it in their eyes, that they're not feeling, you know, what God's feeling because, you know, you're not believing what you're believing. Well, it really, really does help when a dear brother, and I'm talking about, I liked what Brave, I mean, Wild at Heart talks about an ally is somebody that when they're at war, you're at war.

When you're at war, they're at war. And so when you see that war going on in their eyes, to actually enter into that, not just from a standpoint of, oh, you know, you're special, you're actually probably going to have to enter into it and celebrate with them, but it's going to take some battle in order to get to that celebration. So what is it that God's prompting you to celebrate? What is it that He's calling you to risk right now?

To step into a place of risk is maybe you need to risk a little bit before you can celebrate, or maybe saying, no, you've risked a lot, you've risked much, take some time, celebrate, enjoy this with me, and then we'll take on that next step, right? But where does God have you today? And only He has the answer for you. We don't have it. We can just prompt you and say, take it to Him and say, God, I know you got something for me. And one of the things He probably has for you is going to the next boot camp, November 12th through 15th, go to maskonjourney.org to register now. We'd love to see you there and we'll talk to you next week. This is the Truth Network.