Discipleship

Hello, this is Will Hardy with Man Talk Radio. We are all about breaking down the walls of race and denomination. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few minutes. Enjoy it, share it. But most of all, thank you for listening to the Truth Network Podcast.

This is the Truth Network. But life doesn't usually feel that way. Jesus speaks of narrow gates and wide roads, but the masculine journey is filled with many twists and turns.

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

Welcome to the masculine journey. We are very glad that you're with us this week. And Andy, I normally ask Robby the question, but how many weeks till boot camp? I'm just messing with you. I'm just messing with you.

23-ish maybe? The right answer would be until the week before Thanksgiving. That's the easier way to do it. The week before Thanksgiving is going to be boot camp. Sam asking rhetorical questions again.

I was. Ask a question you didn't expect, but Norm might throw those at Robby. The boot camp is coming up the weekend before Thanksgiving. We'd love for you to go register. Come spend the weekend with us. But more importantly, spend the weekend with God. He's got some amazing things he'd love to do with you there.

And go to masculine journey.org to register for the boot camp coming up November 18th through 21st that weekend before boot camp. And it seems like a long way away. But let me ask you this. We're pretty close to the 4th of July already.

And who would believe that? I mean, we're getting there. So anyway, Andy, this is your topic this week. And sometimes I pick on you and call it your topic. Yeah, I know I pick on you all the time, but sometimes I call it your topic when it's really not. But this is truly your topic for this week. Yeah, that's God's topic. He put something on my heart this past week. It was just, you know, we had been talking recently about discipleship and the ministry and where we go from there.

And I hadn't thought. I mean, I'm so engrossed myself in Wild at Heart and all the teachings around it that I've been a disciple as part of that. But I haven't really thought about, quote, discipleship, particularly the way I learned early in my Christian faith. And when I, you know, like I told the guys, I do what guys do at 3 o'clock in the morning. I was up to go into the bathroom, came back. And for whatever reason, I seem to get things from God when I wake up at night like that because I think it's because I allow things to quiet down or you don't have any choice, but you're sitting there sleeping and you just quiet down and he just puts stuff in your spirit. And it was like, what's been your experience? What was your experience with discipleship and how has it changed since you've, you know, began to read the Wild at Heart, the book, Do the Boot Camps?

And obviously it's been a change and we've talked about it on the radio for some time. But anyway, I just wanted to, I felt like what he was asking me to do was just kind of share my heart of where my mind was. Because from talking with you guys and talking with a lot of other people, I think a lot of us, we get saved, we love God, we start learning discipleship. I learned discipleship what I thought was pretty good, but there were a lot of missings. There were things that I didn't understand that aren't necessarily taught commonly in discipleship.

Because by discipleship, you learn how to study the Bible, how to pray, those things. And those are good and those are good for our spiritual practices, for our foundation. But they don't address things of the heart a lot of times to the depth that they need to be. For example, the one I use is like, I didn't think I really had any wounds. I was good. Isaiah 61 and Jesus coming for the brokenhearted, I wasn't necessarily in need of that. But really I was, and to understand that we're all wounded and how to let him to come into that wound and heal it, well I hadn't heard that before. So it was addressing my heart issue. And so that's really what I felt like he wanted me to bring as the idea for the show is just, you know, what do things look like now? What's the fruit of it?

How have I benefited from it? What is the experience of the group? Because I think we all have our stories. So I think we're going to play a clip here, right? It's kind of funny how this went down. This confirms to me that this is what God wanted for us to do today. I had that idea, shared it with the group, we've all been collecting clips. Well, on my drive down today to the triad, I was listening to the latest Wild at Heart podcast, and it was a clip or a show on Jesus stories. And John had people into the studio talking about their experiences, really cool Jesus stories.

But he finished it up. He basically talked about how he felt like he had two conversions. One was like me whenever he first got saved, and then later on in life where he addressed more of the things of the heart and discipleship for the heart or by the heart.

And that's pretty much what this clip is. I was telling my testimony to some folks recently who were asking, and I said, you know, as I look back at it now, I've had two conversions. And my first conversion was when I was 19 and I was practically a homeless street kid at this time. And I had a radical encounter with Jesus Christ. I mean, he just showed up in my life and I'd never read a Bible, never been to church, never had anyone share the gospel with me. And boom, there's Jesus and gave my life to him. Totally changed everything for me, like totally changed my life.

But then there was a second conversion and I call it the wardrobe door. And it was the realization in my thirties, it was somewhere in our mid thirties where we began to go, wait a second, all of this Jesus stuff in the Bible and in the stories in history of the great Christian people around the world. Like that is actually normal.

That's all meant to be normal. And so we started seeking it and asking for it. And a lot of it had to do with the opening of our hearts, like bringing our hearts into the equation and not just our minds and opening our hearts to him. Honestly, it was like walking through the wardrobe door where you're like, there is a whole world of life with Jesus. There's a whole world of life with our Father, life with the Holy Spirit. But my God, as Tamara was trying to say, come into agreement that God actually wants this for you in greater and greater measure. Yeah, and that's exactly where I was. I'd had a hunger for God early in my life and it's kind of like that parable about how the seed falls on good ground and it had fallen on good ground. But there were some tears in there, some things that got in the way to choke out the word, the cares of life. And I needed to prepare my heart and provide good ground again. And that's what I think coming and anytime your mind gets exposed to something that it wasn't aware of, you really get excited about that.

And you're like, man, this is where I was missing it. And that's what this was for me. Again, I want to point out that we only have one conversion. We only get born again one time. But this, you know, being coming a disciple out of the heart is almost like a second conversion, like he explains.

That's my experience. Yeah, I think, you know, at least from my experience, you know, I accepted Christ as my Savior, you know, as a teenager, right? And the thing I'm told is, you know, go read your Bible, right? Well, first of all, reading for me, yes, reading the Bible is a good thing. I'm never going to say it's not a good thing, right? That's not what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is that's a logical kind of thing. You know, I'm reading, I'm learning, I'm getting knowledge, and that's good. I need to know my Savior, my friend, my Lord, those things.

I need to know that. But I was never explained how to walk with him. And that's really what my heart needed because my conversion was not a logical decision. It was a heart choice, right?

I mean, really, I mean, you can't think your way into a relationship with God. It has to be a heart choice, right? But then also, walking with Jesus needs to be a heart choice.

At least in the church, I grew up with a lot of really great people. That was never taught to me in any way. It was just pray and go read your Bible.

That was pretty much the instruction I was given, and then everything else seemed to fall short. And with that heart choice is the faith that comes behind that, the stepping out and believing that I can hear from Father, from God. I can hear from him.

That response that I got when I asked that question, was that him? Well, taking that step in faith and testing it. He tells us to test the spirits to see if we're hearing from him, you know, doing that.

You know, we haven't been taught to do that, to look for that. You know, I'd read those passages like, the sheep know my voice. And I'm like, my sheep know my voice. And I'm like, great, I wish I did. Because I never would for a long time. He talks to sheep, but he doesn't talk to people.

Bad, bad, you know, come over here. But, you know, when I, again, the vehicle that brought us through a lot of this was the wild heart stuff. But it let me know that it was a normal thing to expect to hear from God.

Robby, I mean, that's something that you talk a lot about, was it's an exception, right? Yeah, the idea that they taught early on is that the Bible is a book of examples, not a book of exceptions. And when you look at all these people, they clearly talked to God. And they clearly heard him.

And they clearly had a relationship, just as you said, they walked with him. And when all of a sudden I thought, well, wow, I'm not the only one. Because I really thought that I was weird, crazy. Maybe that's the word Wayne would use, is I was crazy. Because I thought that, you know, I heard these things from God. I thought that these were directions I felt him put. But nobody I knew would admit to anything like that until I started, you know, hanging out with you guys. And I was like, what? And there you go.

Harold? Well, I think that God speaks to us not just through words. I just love the way my sweetheart will see the bluebirds at the box that's just off our deck. And she smiles and says, God is happy with me. And so for her, having the bluebirds come to an area where I told her they would never nest, it's too close to the house.

So two or three times a season we have bluebirds. And we see that as, and I think that's one of the things about growing in discipleship, is you see God everywhere where agnostics and atheists see God nowhere. And yet we're looking at the same thing. If you look at what he has created, we live in a beautiful, beautiful world.

The variety of flowers, the variety of birds, the variety of animals, the variety of people. God loves variety. And he made this world so that we could enjoy it. But it's not our home.

Our home awaits us through the wardrobe door, so to speak. How can you put to words when you see something that's truly just breathtaking as far as nature? It speaks to your heart in a way that nothing else does. And you know that that's got to be coming from God.

There's just this unity that you have with him in his creation. We come back, we're going to talk more about discipleship and really helping us understand, you understand more what that means and what it means to walk with Jesus. In the meantime, be thinking about going to the boot camp that's coming up in November the 18th through the 21st, masculinejourney.org. We'll see you after the break. coming up November 18th through the 21st. We'll see you after the break.

coming up November 18th through the 21st through the 21st. Welcome back to the masculine journey. We are talking about discipleship today. And Andy, it's really kind of been something that's been on your heart for a little while now. Anything you want to add to what we've been talking about? Well, just that bump right there. I've heard that song quite a few times lately.

It's on the radio now. But that really is the essence of discipleship, which if I'm following somebody, I'm surely in relationship. And that's what I think sometimes we get off track on is we're in relationship with an idea, a culture, an expectation. And if you really look at it, the people that got so messed up and that were supposedly disciples of God in the way were the Pharisees and all. And they were not living out of their hearts. They were not living in relation to the one who said, come follow me. So I guess it really is as simple as that song, follow me.

The problem is we hear a lot of other voices and start following those voices. Yeah, you look back at Paul when he was saw, or the name change thing. He knew the Scriptures intimately. He knew them as well as anybody. It didn't mean that he had a relationship with Jesus.

He didn't. And I was thinking of the disciples that he didn't say, hey, come read this story. Come read these books here and I'll be back to see you in a couple weeks.

Pray in the meantime. He taught them all those things, but it was the walking in relationship that was the part that the disciples did. A cool thing, too, I was going to talk about Robby here for a second. Whenever I joined the ministry and we started doing a radio show, and I was traveling and stuff.

I remember a time I was just binging Wild at Hard podcasts. I remember Robby saying, what I see in you, he said, is a disciple. We don't talk the disciple talk a lot, but I said, really? He said, yeah, that means enthusiastic learner. I'm like, you know what?

I brag. That's just, I mean, enthusiastically learning this new content, this new idea about the heart and its importance. And that him speaking into my life made me just want to go that much further. And it's funny that we've all become kind of disciples and listen to the podcasts and stuff. And then it's kind of funny how we tie that to the, I mean, we give a lot of credit to the Wild at Hard team.

What they provide, the guidance and content that they provide. Any of you had something on that? Yeah. Paul says in Corinthians, follow me as I follow Christ. And for me, it was a matter of, like you were talking about, following Jesus was one thing, but I needed something with skin on it. And you follow people.

I heard a phrase years ago in actually a 12-step program that says, if you want what we have and are willing to go to England to get it. And that became like a philosophy of my life. I'd see people who had a walk that I wanted.

And I would basically get in their back pocket. But because you emulate those things, you see somebody who's happy and joyous in the Lord. I can remember, God forgive me, but we had a choir director at the church I used to go to, and he looked a lot like the Grinch.

And I thought, if that's Jesus, I don't know if that's what I want. But the fact is that you see people with joy in their life and everything, and it's infectious. And so following that, and it's kind of like a fountain that pours from one level to the other. And that sets up a clip. It does.

It does? Yeah. You want to tell us about it? Yeah, this one is from the karate kid. And he was in this apartment complex with this man that he saw a new kung fu. And so he needed to know that because he was getting beat up at school.

And so he was willing to climb in his back pocket, as you said, and see what it was he had to offer. What he didn't realize is that the teacher had been watching his actual habits. And so when you hear this discussion, you'll hear him talk about taking on his jacket and putting it off a thousand times.

His teacher had seen him just throw his jacket on the floor. And so he instructs him how to put that up by making him do it numerous times, which he thinks is just overkill. What he doesn't realize is he's actually teaching him kung fu with the moves that it would be to take on and off the jacket, which you'll hear through the earlier part of the clip. But actually, the young man is brought into this to learn kung fu, he thinks, or to learn how to fight. But actually, what the teacher has in mind is much, much deeper.

And, you know, when we get into the faith, we come in there for one thing, but what God has is just a whole new set up for you. Yes, Sam? And this is not the original Karate Kid. No. This is the remake.

This is not Wax On, Wax Off. This is a similar scene, but it's actually Will Smith. Smith's son. Will Smith. I didn't want to say Farrell.

No, it'd be different. Will Smith's son. Will Smith's son. OK, there you go. Check it on. Strong. Check it on. Pick up your jacket. He lives in how we put on the jacket, how we take off the jacket, and lives in how we treat people.

Everything is kung fu. Yeah, so one of the surprises, one of the gigantic surprises for me as, you know, we got into this, I started hanging out with Sam and Darren and this group. And going after the heart and going after Jesus and healing individually, and then what happens is what he said there, how you treat other people. Because next thing I know, I find myself literally in a band of brothers in a relationship that I could really have only dreamed about. Actual, deep, close, intimate friendship with people that you really do life with, that you really do share battle with. People that literally, as I talked about a few weeks ago, if they were going down a stairway and you knew that you could die at the end of that stairway, you know, these guys do that. I'm following them because I know what their hearts are.

I know how good they are. And what started out as something that seemed to be, you know, for me, turned out to be so much more a community and actually what I believe God has in mind for everybody not to be alone. The other thing he says as part of that, I believe is true, is you start to see others that you don't know differently, right?

In building houses, sometimes someone will buy a house very late in the process. You don't get time to really build a relationship with them. And, you know, a while back I had built a house, never met the person, talked to him on the phone a couple times and met him and it was really easy to tell that they had a very distrusting spirit, right? And me, before walking through a lot of this and having God do this stuff and disciple me with a lot of you guys and through him and a lot of different ways, I just sort of wrote the person off as being bitter. You know, but something in me just said, okay, there's a hurt in her past that doesn't allow her to trust. So how do I go at that? Do things that build trust. You know, and over the next few weeks as we finished out the process of building her home, closing her home, that kind of thing, she just opened completely up to a different person with me.

And it was funny, I was talking with one of the other people that does the after work with him. He's not gotten to that point yet. He's only met her a few times. He's not gotten to the point where he even knows that he needs to build trust. He's like, that's a very difficult person. You say, yeah, on the surface.

He's outside the circle of trust. Yeah, exactly. You know, but that comes from walking with Jesus and Jesus doing the work in your life and going, man, I know how I was.

So there's got to be more that's going on underneath the hood of the car there. Right. You know, and so I'm going to give that person some grace, you know, and ask Jesus how to handle them. You know, and it just changes everything.

Wayne, you want to add something? Well, I was just going to say, like, you get into what we talked about earlier with the, with the discipling. Them seeing how you operate with this lady would actually help with that, right?

Or having that conversation with that gentleman, explaining it to them, walking them through the process. Part of the discipling thing, walking with Jesus, you know, the disciples walked. I think you talked about it earlier, Robby, how it was the dust of the feet.

Yeah, you wanted to walk so close that it was the dust of the feet coming off. It's the seeing people actually walk this out, actually hearing the stories, actually getting together and having the conversations with the community. I think it is, but I think it's also hard for them to really relate if Jesus isn't doing that work in their life. If they're not at a place with him of intimacy, that he's showing them those things firsthand.

You know, because they can see it, what you're doing, but for some people it's just like, eh, I don't want to go to that effort. You know, and it's like, okay, you're dealing with somebody's heart here. Yeah. Anyway, just off on a tangent, I guess.

Andy, back to your topic. What would you like to add to the topic that we just kind of took on a little rabbit trail? So, I mean, just on that point, I think it is just this thing if we, as a disciple, learning, I think, to really understand what he's doing. I mean, these people are what Jesus dealt with constantly along the road, and I think it's great testimony what you're saying, Sam, of just being aware of that. We sometimes walk so much in our own, and if we're hearing from him daily, if we truly have this relationship, that is what is available to us, the kindness and generosity to take the time to be that to somebody, because the world is hurting right now, and they need to see a representation of Christ. I mean, you hear that quite often from the church, but we really do.

It's our opportunity to show that love, and if a disciple is somebody who learns from somebody else, they've got to see it from the people who claim that that's where the truth is coming from. Absolutely, and we've got so much more on this topic. If you listen to us on the radio show, go to any of the podcast outlets and pick up the After Hours show that'll be continuing on on this topic, talking about more of our stories, and you can do that at our website, masculinejourney.org. While you're there, go ahead and register for the boot camp, or you could do it at any of the iTunes, any of those places you can get podcasts. We'll talk to you next week.