Core Desires

Hey, this is Mike Zwick from If Not For God Podcast, our show.

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Welcome to Masculine Journey. We're glad that you're with us this week. We are in the middle of our boot camp preparation time. We're about six weeks away from boot camp. I was going to ask how many Eves that would be, but none of us could calculate it that quickly.

So we'll know as we get closer that we're going to be bringing that up. 35. 35. There you go.

A lot of Eves. But still, go register now. MasculineJourney.org. Register for the boot camp. Coming up April 29th through May 2nd.

I had to think about it for a minute. April 29th through May 2nd. And Robby, you're going to kick off the first of the next six weeks. We'll be doing some boot camp talk shows based around the talks that we do at boot camp, and you've got the first one. So yeah, absolutely fantastic. You know, we love doing the radio show, but oh my goodness, if you would come join us at boot camp.

That's where we really have a blast. And God is inviting us all to kind of awaken our hearts. And so the first talk that we do at boot camp, the invitation, and it clearly is an invitation. And when I heard this talk the first time, I can't even believe what it did to awaken like smelling salts, things that I had forgotten that were down in my heart that God really wanted to come after. And so this first talk is very much an invitation. It's called The Core Desires of a Man's Heart.

And we've forgotten who we are in so many different ways. And so the neat thing about this talk is it comes after these three desires that we're going to talk about in today's show and then the After Hours show. But the first of those desires, it's called a battle to fight.

And so it's kind of cool that King David himself, if there was somebody that you might think of and the masculine journey kind of guy in the Bible would be King David. And in Psalm 119 verse 32 is a critical verse that is on display in this talk. And the verse reads that, I will run in the path of your commandments when you enlarge my heart. And what David is saying there is that wouldn't it be just how amazing would it have the freedom to run with everything you have knowing you were going the right way?

Because you're only going to run with everything you have if it's something you really, really, really want. And so there's some desires that need to be awakened that clearly in my own life, I realized through these boot camps that I needed this invitation. And this first invitation is a battle to fight.

So we're going to jump right off with a clip. Sam, if you want to set this up, because from my standpoint, here's an invitation for children of all ages. Sam Yeah, this is from a movie that you would think is a kid's movie, but it's anything but. It's called Secondhand Lions, and it's about a boy named Walter that goes to live with his his two uncles. His mom just drops him off there, you know, and they don't really want him.

He doesn't want to be there. And they develop this relationship. And this is early in the movie. And one of the uncles, Hub, has had a heart attack and has just gotten out of the hospital. Instead of going home, he goes to have some barbecue with his brother and his nephew, great nephew, whatever it is. And so we pick it up and Hub's feeling rather useless just coming out of the hospital after a heart attack. Brother, someday you're gonna have to start acting your age.

Let me. All your life, you've never been frightened of anything. So what's eating at you now? Getting old, dying, what then? Being useless. When we were young, there's always a reason, there's a point, things made sense.

Now there's no point to anything. So what do we do? We garden, we outlived our time, brother. Hey old man, how's that barbecue? Give me some.

We're busy before we get lost, all right? What did you say? Here's a perfect example of what I've been talking about. Since this boy was suckling on his mama, he's been giving everything but discipline. And now his idea of courage and manhood is to get together with a bunch of punk friends and ride around irritating folks, too good-natured to put a stop to it. Hey, who do you think you are, huh? Just dumb kid, Hub, just don't kill him.

Hub McCann. I fought in two world wars and countless smaller ones on three continents. I led thousands of men into battle with everything with horses and swords to artillery and tanks. I've seen the headwaters of the Nile and tribes of natives no white man had ever seen before.

I've won and lost a dozen fortunes, killed many men, and loved only one woman with a passion of flea like you could never begin to understand. That's who I am. Well, we didn't mention he's actually choking the kid, getting his attention fully. Yeah, yeah. Right. So it's interesting that here you've got, like we talked about children, so children of all ages. But there's still a desire to fight a battle.

There is for any young child that you'll ever meet. They don't play army for nothing, right? And they don't play tetherball for nothing. And I would encourage the audience and the guys in here with me, what were the games, what were the things that you when you were a kid that you played that made your heart come alive?

What did you want to do, right? We played army con. Tetherball. We had this, just as an example, we had a tetherball out in the yard that obviously I got a chance to beat my brother's face in with this regularly, because that was part of the idea was to hit him squarely in the nose, if all possible. But I also had this habit of melting my model so that it looked like they were in war scenes. So I had these airplanes that hung from the ceiling in my bedroom. And so I'd regularly take them out there to see if they were going to the tetherball court, because it was rocks. And I would light them on fire in different positions. So they looked like they were crashing, that they had taken on the Nazis and all this stuff back in the day.

We were always fighting the Germans or the Japanese. It was just what it was. So this particular day, the model just wasn't burning like it should. And so there was a gas can I used to do the lawn.

It just seemed natural that you would use this gas. And so I failed to realize that the model was still smoldering. So as I'm pouring the gasoline on the tetherball model, all of a sudden, the flame goes up into the spout of the tetherball and the can starts to shake. Like, and I realized there's going to be a bad explosion. So I kick the gas can over, at which point in time, five gallons of gasoline pours down the driveway, lighting up 8, 10 feet in the air. And this happens to be the exact moment that my parents are coming up the driveway in their car.

Yeah, did you ever clean a driveway with a toothbrush? It's hard. But the point of it is is that there's a battle to fight.

And whether it's the Germans or whatever out in the tetherball court, there's stuff that has to go on. But Sam, a lot of time, pastors think that came from an evil heart. Yeah, when I think back to that clip we just played, the boys are trying to find an adventure. They're just picking the wrong things to be adventurous with, or they're trying to pick a battle. And they're picking the wrong battles because they don't know what to do with these desires that are healthy. And that's where the church kind of a lot of times falls back to the passage where it says in Scripture that the heart is evil.

It's wicked, right? Which is true before you accept Christ as your Savior, your heart becomes a new heart, in new creations in Christ, all those other things that we hear about as we become Christians. But sometimes the church wants to try to keep people from sinning. And so the focus on the heart is wicked instead of helping them understand how to move into those desires in a healthy way.

Yeah, I mean, you talk about Scripture. Proverbs 4 23 is, Guard your heart with all diligence, for out of it comes the issues of life. Well, the point is that it's saying it's not like that it's talking about evil being in your heart. Your heart is the source of all your being and what you want to do. And if your heart is dead because you've killed all desire in it because everything is evil, you'll never be able to really live and experience. It's just a matter of fixing what the object of your desire is. I think that's the biggest thing is we get confused on what our object of our desire should be.

Yeah, I think we either end up killing them, or we misguided take them to other places. Right. So John Eldredge says, you know, the passage in Genesis chapter 1 where it says we were made in God's image, both male and female, is one of the most important things that you'll ever read in the Scripture.

And the point is that we were made in his image. And so some of the things that we see come out even in the smallest child, right, are in fact the way that they were designed. And so if you put any group of little boys, right, in a swimming pool, do they break out into synchronized swimming? I mean, do they? No, no. I mean, it's cannonballs and dunking because they're going to find some kind of battle. Put them in a field full of snow, give them a football.

What might happen? You know, it's going to be on, isn't it, Jim? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I grew up out west where the dirt was nice and clay-like, and all too often we would find ourselves in the construction areas of new homes, and this made perfect places to entrench and completely bloody each other with dirt clods.

And, you know, if it had a rock in it, the bonus. So one of the hugest enlightenments for me in this whole subject was, oh, my goodness, you mean to tell me that this something that, you know, people have been trying to take out of me my whole life is this battle to fight, whether that's emotionally or whatever. And I know some people are saying, well, I don't like the bloody scenes in war movies, but let me ask you a question.

When somebody cuts you off in traffic, okay, how do you feel towards that person right that moment? Like, are they zipper merging on Harold over there, right? He's a computer programmer, and I get it, but believe me, you don't want to be on the other end, and so are you for that matter, Jim. Right. I mean, to me, the problem you have nowadays is there's too many counterfeit battles. If you, you know, know what's going on, Facebook is full of them, that the battle has to have integrity. It has to have a reason for a heroism to right a wrong. And all too often we get caught up in the wrong fights, the wrong battles, and they're counterfeit.

All right. So a battle to fight. We got a lot more to talk about than the second segment, but the whole idea is this is an invitation for an awakening. Coming to the bootcamp April 29th through May the 2nd, go to masculinejourney.org and register.

That's what you're thinking about. Masculine Journey Spring Bootcamp coming up April 29th through May the 2nd. 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 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. So, Andy, we're talking fighting the good fight here. So, you know, you picked that bump in and... So, yeah, I like that song.

I always have. It's not fully scripturally accurate, but that one particular part is in the chorus. And, you know, we are in a battle. You know, just to speak a little bit about the whole battle to fight, as I had grown up and understood spiritual battle at an earlier age, and when I started coming to boot camps, I realized that I really hadn't been engaged. I had pretty much tapped out and just wanted a nice, quiet, peaceable life, which Scripture wants us to have that for ourselves, but we are in a battle. And I think what we struggle with as men is, what does that look like? We know we're not supposed to go shoot somebody like it's Saving Private Ryan, but we do have a battle, a spiritual battle to fight, and we have to keep our heart engaged to do that.

Darrell Bock Oh, there clearly is. And the reason why we actually talk about that very first thing at boot camp, it's one of the entry points, is because you're going to be fighting a battle your entire time while you're at boot camp, right? You're going to be contending for your desires. You're going to be contending that, oh, I didn't really need to, you know, there's going to be a battle all along the way, so we want to set this place like this is a good thing, that you do have an enemy, and we're going to get into that a lot throughout the boot camp, but at this point in time, let's just realize that God put this in us. We are trained from birth to take this on.

So did you have something, Ronny? Ronan No, just along those lines, we always talk about men wanting to fix things. Well, that's a part of the battle of the fight is fixing things, fixing the wrongs that are in the world, the unjust things that are in the world, and wanting to fix them.

That's a huge part of your heart. Darrell Bock So we've got a clip here that I want to get to. It's called The Contender.

I call it The Contender. It's from the movie Santa Claus, and we had the old guys, right? But here we're going to come back with a kid by the name of Charlie from the movie Santa Claus that I'm sure many have seen with Tim Allen, but I want you to listen to this scene with new ears.

You've heard the scene probably or seen the scene many times where Charlie finds Santa on the roof when he slides off, and I'm hoping you're familiar with the scene. But when God calls Israel in Deuteronomy 6, he says, Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one. Well, the word Israel means contender, okay? Israel, Jacob wrestled with God, and so he got the name God wrestler, and so this is a battle. Darrell Bock And so one of the people that we love to battle, if we had good fathers, and I hope many did, like me, like I love to wrestle my dad.

He was like Iron Man. Like I could really test my strength when I wrestled my dad, and I know that Sam's boys love to wrestle Sam. And so one of the ways that we wrestle with dad is we wrestle emotionally. Now, when you listen to this, you may think that Charlie's not respecting his dad. He's not obeying. There's a lot of things that you may think that we would want to take out of this particular child, but don't take out of him the desire to believe and to see what he's believing as he contends, you know, with his dad, Scott Calvin, later Santa Claus. Come on, let's go back to bed. Somebody's on the roof.

Maybe it's Santa. Not now, Charlie. I want you to sit here, and I want you to stay right there. Hey, you.

What's up? Hey, buddy, you should just stay still. Perfect. You got him. Charlie, stay where you are. Charlie, would you listen to me?

Stay up there. It is Santa. You killed him.

Did not. And he's not Santa. Well, he was. He's got some ID on him, I bet. Well, if you can hear me, I'm just looking for your identification.

Once you figure out who you are, I'll give you a lift back to the mall. Look here, Dad. The Rose Such a Gladder Company. Out by the roof, there's a Rose Such a Gladder, just like a poem.

Just like a poem? Charlie, come on down from there. Charlie, get down from there. Dad, you gotta see this. Don't touch anything.

It's great. I'm just going to call the police. I'll carry this stuff up there and let them deal with it, okay? Dad, check out Santa's sleigh. There's no such thing as Santa's sleigh.

Of course there is. You said you believed in Santa, right? I did. I do.

What about the reindeer? Hop out of there, please. I don't want to go. Listen, Charlie, I'm not kidding. Let's go.

Let's go. So there you go, Sam. I mean, you know, you've got this young boy whose heart is coming alive. Like, if you saw the beginning movie, he wanted nothing to do with Christmas, wanted nothing to do with Santa, and all of a sudden, that desire has awakened in that boy, and he not only obviously gets a chance to go on the ride of his life, but he takes his dad along with him.

Yeah, I think it's an important time. I think it does start initially in the household. You know, you guys have been around my boys and I at camp, and it's constantly one of us punching each other or shoving each other or whatever, and it's out of love, you know, that it's done. The other night, Eli would just not leave me alone before he was going to bed, and he just kept flipping me, hit me, until he made me get up, and that was his whole goal, so he could wrestle with me a little bit.

You know, my kids have long been able to beat me in wrestling, and I know they probably realize that, but that still doesn't mean they don't want to test themselves with dad. You know, we were talking earlier on the social media, and I think if you just really look at social media under this topic of battle to fight, you realize there's a desire there, and it's all over the place. You know, a lot of you go, I wouldn't pick that battle or I wouldn't pick that battle, but it's not a lack of people having a desire.

It's a lack of knowing where to put it. Darrell Bock Right, and there's three core desires, and talk a lot about in the After Hours show, the other two, because we're just sticking with battle, because we want to highlight that one being that's the one that really you carry into boot camp going, okay, I need to fight for my own heart. You know, God made me very uniquely with the desires that you have, and quite often the movies that you love, the games that you played when you were a kid, they are giving you an indication of the things that God put uniquely in the way that you do life. And I'm lucky I have a little brother, and we talk sometimes because he went to boot camp with us. Like, you remember the time we got the BB gun and we shot Skipper Wagner? I mean, who could forget? We'll never forget it. Anybody who's come to boot camp has heard that story, which you don't get to hear unless you come to boot camp, right, Rodney?

You got to go to boot camp. I mean, think about how many battles you've been in over your lifetime to this date. They're not stopping. They're coming.

There's more coming after this. Knowing exactly, like Sam was saying, how do we choose? And then once we choose, how do we enter? You know, it's not to go in and beat people up, and it's not necessarily for you to go win. The battle to fight is to get in there and do what's right, and be more righteous in what you're trying to do rather than just, oh, I'm going to show you, I'm going to make a name for myself, you know, and I'm going to call somebody else out. No, no, no. You're in the wrong, wrong place. Get your heart right.

I'm sorry. I was just going to say one of the main things that we do in this talk is we hold up two pictures, is we figure if you could get a good look at a Jesus, if you could get a really good look at Jesus, you would find out what God had intended for you if we could become this man. And so we hold up two pictures, and you've often heard us use the scene with William Wallace, you know, calling those men into that particular battle and saying, does this sound more like Jesus or do you think that it's Mr. Rogers? Not that Mr. Rogers wasn't a wonderful man and all that other stuff, but so many people think that a good Christian man is supposed to sound like Fred Rogers.

Well, when Jesus was clearing the temple, right, he had a little different sound to his voice. And when you hear William Wallace in that speech, what he says is, right, that, oh, yeah, lying in your bed someday, right, well, you wish you could trade all of those so that you could come back just one day and face your enemies. And the idea is straight out of the gospel that he will lose his life, will gain it. And so there is a battle that is more important than the physical life that you have on earth and believing is seeing. And I think we lose track of who we're battling. We have an enemy in this world. And that enemy is constantly trying to separate us from our Father.

And, you know, I have a scripture verse on my wall in my office. I do not battle against flesh and blood, but against the powers and principalities of this dark world. And it's so true. We often want to personify the evil in this world when in reality it's the enemy, it's the devil that's our true enemy in this world. And that's who we're constantly fighting. Darrell Bock Yeah, and why would we have armor if we didn't have a battle, right? Who needs, you know, a shield or a breastplate or a helmet or, you know, the belt of truth if you didn't need it? Dr. Darrell Bock Well, I think one thing that's important is that we, if we have younger kids or teenage kids or whatever, that we enter into that when you see them rise up to battle, right?

And you don't squash it, right? You may try to give them some advice, but you let them step into that because it's training ground. It's training ground for them when they have to face the next big battle and the next big battle. Darrell Bock Right, that first bully, you know, it's coming, right? The kid and God calls you out. Dr. Darrell Bock I was reminded this weekend that it's like John Eldridge says, look, when it comes to spiritual battle, there's no practice. It's all live fire that we're receiving.

It may come at a younger age and it may be different, but it is all live fire. So the training ground is an enemy truly trying to take like what I think Jim said was your connection with the Father, but also your hope. If he can steal your hope to where there's no point in battling, he's got you. Dr. Darrell Bock For eight months, Billy Kilmer squished my lunch. Every day at school, that was his deal. I'm going to squish his lunch. And that went on in one snowy day. I'll never forget it. He squished my lunch once too often. Was it soup that day?

And I just punched him in the nose and it bled. And I was, oh, man, look at that. And then it was on. He had to have the big, you know, shootout at the OK Corral.

That fight literally changed my life. You know, at some point in time, they can't keep taking away your lunch. And so we get a chance to do that, don't we, Sam? We do. And we encourage you to go to masculinejourney.org, register for the boot camp. We barely even scratch the surface on this first core desire. There's so much more that we're able to unpack when we're at camp. And more importantly, God can unpack it at camp and say, this is where I've called you to be in the battle. This is your unique place and how you should uniquely handle it. Masculinejourney.org. And then after hours. This is the Truth Network.