Core Desires-Battle To Fight

This is Hans Scheil from the Finishing Well podcast.

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This is the Truth Network. The heart of every man craves a great adventure, 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. Andy, take it away.

No, I'm just kidding. Welcome to the Masculine Journey. We are glad to have you with us this week. We're only a couple weeks away from boot camp.

Can you believe it? It's coming up just around the corner. You've really got this next week, pretty much, to register and get on the docket to come see us. And we'd love to have you there.

I don't know what the docket means, but it sounded like the right thing to say. But please come to the boot camp, please pray about it. If you are planning on coming, expect opposition.

There's always challenges on getting there, but it is well worth it when you do get there. Yeah, definitely. Thank you, Andy.

All right, I'm done. We have a great show for you today. We're going to be talking about one of the topics we talk about at boot camp. Robby has traditionally done this talk most of the time.

I would say probably 75%, probably pretty close to that, that he does his talk, and we just couldn't take it anymore. We asked Andy to do it. It'll be one and done with the EM credit. So Andy, if you want to tell us a little bit about what we're going to be talking about on this show in the after hours, and we are doing something a little different this time. We're going to present one topic on the radio show here, and then we're going to do a separate part of that topic in the after hours. So if you want to get the follow-up, you have to download the after hours or listen to it streaming.

Yeah, and we're going to do that next week, too, as well as we continue on. But we're going to talk about the core desires of a man's heart. Really, the thing that probably got us all started is the first chapter we started reading in Wild at Heart and how it, to me—I know Robby likes fishing, and this is kind of—I mean, this is what hooked me.

Where I began to read about just what it meant to be a godly man, and what I had heard before and how the heart needed to be central to that, and that this idea that you have what it takes and God gives you that kind of confidence. But just a myriad of things about a man getting his heart back. John says in the core desire talk, he said, you can't do anything. You can't go out and live the core desires, the battle to fight, adventure to live, beauty to rescue. You can't live those out unless you have your heart restored.

And that's what really we're talking about in the first part of this show is really, what does that mean? Because I believe that in doing—in reading the Bible, you can read it in such a way that you believe, okay, you've got to do these certain list of things. And we make it—we make life into a list of things that we do or things that we obey or dutiful things, and those things are byproducts of what a restored heart can actually do. You can't really do those things, but you've got to have your heart back to do those things, to live out what God called you to do. But it's not the list where you find God. You find God with your heart. Darrell Bock Yeah.

As you're talking about that, I think about—you know, I've always struggled with daily devotionals. Darrell Bock Yeah. Darrell Bock Because it tells you, you have to read this one on this day. Darrell Bock Right. Darrell Bock And so when I would get behind, I would stress. Darrell Bock Yes. Darrell Bock You know, and I would get all this condemnation of, oh my gosh, you're three behind. Darrell Bock Absolutely.

Darrell Bock You know, instead of enjoying the relationship with God and letting Him work on my heart, it was all about getting the to-do list. Darrell Bock Yeah, absolutely. Darrell Bock It's cool to me is, you know, the boot camp experience when the opening comes, right? When you sit down on the stage and all of a sudden, you know, you're sitting down— Darrell Bock Robby appears. Darrell Bock Pardon me? Darrell Bock Robby appears, yeah. Darrell Bock Well, now Robby doesn't appear. Darrell Bock Yeah. Darrell Bock What happens actually is that the lights go out. Darrell Bock Right. Darrell Bock And there are three trailers that play, right? And these trailers are from really grab-your-heart kind of movies that make you, you know, come alive and you don't even—it sneaks up on you because all of a sudden you realize you've really been charged by these stories, just the trailers of these three movies.

And you know, what, you know, John Eldridge says as he comes out on the stage, as he said, this is like smelling salts to tell you, you know, you're not all charged up for nothing. Your heart is attached to these stories, and you've got this heart, right? Because God has that heart.

Darrell Bock Absolutely. Yeah, those stories do hit you, and I think I've said it recently on—I used to watch those movies, the action movies, somebody experiencing adventure, risking their beauty, and your heart would come alive, and then you had to go back to work on Monday morning, and it was—and it was like your heart was disconnected from that. And you're saying, well, how does that play out into your life just because you're inspired by a movie or you got your heart back? Well, whenever you begin to realize you truly are in a battle, and there is a battle, an enemy to fight, not somebody just to avoid, but actually somebody to fight and engage with the power of God in you, it makes life much more. I mean, it's what our heart is desiring to actually do, and that's why it becomes alive. That's the way we were created.

We weren't created to sit on the sideline and be bored with work. We were created to fight this battle. Darrell Bock I remember when I was reading—I think it was in Wilder Heart where John writes this for the first time as, you know, your story is a long, sustained assault on your heart. And when I read that and I sat back and thought, yeah, life continually comes at you at the heart level. It's there to take you out, whether it's a financial thing, whether it's a relational thing, whatever that might be, the attack is always to try to get you to lose heart. And if you question it, just look around.

Look at around the people you know and how many have lost heart and how many have to try to pump up so that they can get going again or who has to pump you up so you can get going again. Darrell Bock And you could look at the characters in the Bible too. You can see where the enemy came in, the ones that were victorious and the ones that weren't, weren't really, where they got taken out by their heart. Darrell Bock Yeah, that's a really—and the first time I really started to process this in my mind, John comes out and he says, you know, right here in the very beginning of Genesis, it says that you were made in God's image. In his image, you were created male and female, and he said, this is the most important thing that you might ever learn that God puts it very first in the Bible.

And I'm like, really? This is the most important thing that you would learn? Is that you were made in his image, meaning your heart, and it takes a while to digest this. Your heart reflects. The reason why you're affected by things is because God made you in his image. And that's a critical understanding, and the more I've, I guess, studied the Bible, thought about this message and all those things, the more I realize how right he is, and understanding like, oh, this is why I get taken out by this, and this is why I gravitate towards that, because we were made for that core desire. John DeWitt Yeah. The problem is, not only have we lost sight of who we are, we've lost sight of who God is. Right? And that's a big part of the issue, is really understanding what's God's heart like.

Darrell Bock Yep. Absolutely. You know, another thing. There's so many nuggets there in the heart, and you know, these things, this book that John wrote, I mean, it's always been there in the Bible. He just helped pick it out. He just pointed it out, and it's given us context and understanding. But one of the things that I think is cool, too, he also talks about the wildness of man, and I had never seen this before.

Do you realize Adam wasn't made from the garden. He was outside of the garden, and John takes that back to where men are different than women, and they're made for the wildness, the frontier, the wilderness. John DeWitt Yeah, not that women can't do it. Darrell Bock No, no. John DeWitt No, no. Darrell Bock It's not stereotyped. John DeWitt Yeah.

Adam was made outside the garden. Darrell Bock Yeah, right. John DeWitt We probably want to get to your first clip. John DeWitt You want to do that first?

Yeah, okay. Darrell Bock You can do it after the break. John DeWitt No, no, no. What are we going to do? John DeWitt Yeah.

What? What have we got? Five minutes. Darrell Bock We got about four minutes. John DeWitt Okay. So this clip, you know, is this the quintessential?

Is that how you say it? Core Desires clip. It's about – we had it on a couple weeks ago when we were doing the masculine journey in Braveheart, but it's William Wallace at the Battle of Sterling, where he's really calling out me, and we're going to kind of give you two images of what different aspects of what Jesus could look like, and William Wallace gives us a picture. A lot of people wouldn't go there and say that's really what Jesus looks like, but if you look at Jesus when he cleared the temple, it could be a little bit more like William Wallace and what we usually perceive, but this is the Battle of Sterling. He's the Scottish are really not wanting to fight. The clans are not really wanting to come together and fight and come against England, and this is his speech to him. John DeWitt God, man, do not flee!

Wait until we've negotiated! William Wallace Can't be. He looks tall enough. John DeWitt Gilmighty says this must be a fashionable fight. It's drawn the finest people. Where is thy salute for presenting yourselves on this battlefield?

I give you thanks. This is our army. To join it, you give homage. I give homage to Scotland. And if this is your army, why does it go? We didn't come here to fight for them.

Home! The English are too many. Sons of Scotland, I am William Wallace. William Wallace is seven feet tall.

Yes, I've heard. He kills men by the hundreds. I am William Wallace, and I see a whole army of my countrymen here in defiance of tyranny. You have come to fight as free men, and free men you are. What will you do without freedom? Will you fight? Fight against that? No! We will run! And we will live! Aye, fight and you may die.

Run, and you'll live at least a while. And dying in your beds many years from now, would you be willing to train all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom! So when you hear that, you think battle to fight, and that's what it's about. But really, if you think about it, yes, it's getting to the battle to fight, but it's preparing guys' hearts to find out, do you really care about anything enough to fight for it? And that's really what the first part of the core desires talk to me is, is about really realizing that you have a heart, a masculine heart, that was given to you by God to be a warrior.

Yeah, I think it's pretty cool, and you set this up in one of your many, many Brave Heart clips throughout the last few weeks. But this one I asked you to play. Yes, I told you I would let you off the hook.

This one I asked you to play. I'm interested to hear this recap on my previous tape. No, on this one, it's about restoring identity first. That's really Sons of Scotland, you talked about it on one of the other shows, who reminds them they've never been defeated in battle. They've never been defeated by a foe, and so he's given them that identity, things that they would say, oh, yeah, that's true about us. And that's what Jesus does. Jesus comes in and helps us see our identity, or identity, but I should say it right, our identity and who we are in him, the Sons of the Father. Anyway, Andy, you want to take us out before we go to break, or you want me to?

Go ahead. All right, so when we come back, we're going to play another clip that's the other side of this, of what the world often tells us who Jesus is, so we can't wait to get to that. Go to maskonjourney.org to register for the boot camp. What we have at our boot camp is something that makes you stronger and gives you the strength to go on your regular walk with God.

It's something that will make you be bigger than you were when you got there. The first one, I had no clue what I was walking into, and then realizing that other people are in the same boat and, you know, how open everybody was to share their struggle. It was a great group, and a lot of contacting was able to be done. It is a tight bond of men, everybody's the same, and each and every time that I've come to boot camp, I've learned something different. And not one man that's ever been there neglect not to take time out to talk or to share. It's serious business, and you need to come one time to break straight with the men and fellowship. Feel what happens here, hear the people pray and get down to earth about what's going on in life and get real.

Register today at masculinejourney.org. Well, David, that was your bump, and, you know, we call that one of the many clips before you were born bump. Yeah, it was. It was 1982. So I was definitely born after that.

And definitely, you know, you answered the question when I asked that. Why are the 80s clips, why the 80s songs so long? They're so long because we had a longer attention span. Yeah.

And then Andy said there was more than TikTok era. So, you know, but that's just a great, I mean, it's a great song all around. I mean, ultimately, I mean, it's the theme song at Rocky.

So, I mean, it kind of leads you into battle when you listen to it, kind of gets you pumped up and ready to go. Well, thank you. I didn't realize you're going to be done that quick. You stopped it.

I was looking away. Sorry. Andy, you want to tell us a little bit about, no, not yet. Okay.

No, not yet. So anything else from the Brave Heart clip that you want to touch on that we didn't get a touch on on that side of it? Any things about why you think that that could be a potential representation of Jesus? Well, He did call out their identity. But He challenged their small mentality, though, on whether they, they didn't have a vision for freedom. They didn't have a vision for anything beyond long shank scraps and dying in their beds, you know, years later with no freedom. And He cast that vision for them.

And I think that's what a good leader does. And if you think about it, does Jesus not cast that vision? I mean, He gives us, you know, the promise of abundant life. If we go after it, if we go after Him, but, you know, if He doesn't cast that vision, you know, then there's no desire for that.

Well, Wallace is casting that vision. Right. Andy, you want to say something? Yeah.

I was just thinking, as Andy was talking, that very rarely does Jesus ever call you into something that's not bigger than you are or bigger than you can imagine it even happening. Right. And with a lot of risk. Yeah. Lots of risk.

You know, there's always risk. You know, I think that what was cool about we're going to have in the after hours, Charlie, I think his last name was Waite. Is that right? Charlie Waite is going to echo his inner brave heart. Yeah, that's right. He is.

A couple hundred years after that, I think. No, about 500. The other thing about it, there's two other things that jump out at me.

Number one is, I mean, it's literally he will seek to lose his life, will gain it. Yeah. Right.

And in other words, there is the gospel message right there. Yeah. Somebody said that one time, didn't they? Yeah. Yeah. And then the man said it.

Yeah. John Elder said it, but it's. I'm talking about Jesus. The other man. Kevin Hand. Kevin Hand.

The son of man. Oh, oh, oh. I'm glad that you all got a big kick out of this. Oh, that's good. That's good. That's good.

I like that. Yeah, you did. That's who I was talking about. Yeah. That's exactly what I meant. You're exactly right. You're exactly right.

To quote John Eldridge. All right. Right. Right. Right. But if you, you know, as you, as you watch that scene, you know, William Wallace is picking a fight with a lot of different people. Oh yeah.

Yeah. I mean, he's picking a fight with the Lords who are, you know, trying to get him to honor, you know, him when they pull it. So he's picking a fight with them. He's picking a fight with England and he's, he's actually battling everybody to an extent for what's right. And how often is life like that? I mean, it just is, but because of the training that he had, because of all these clips we've seen from Andy, you know, all the fathering that he got and all that led up to this clip, you know, he, he now is fighting for everybody's heart.

Even the English, because, you know, they too, you know, were simply deceived by longshakes. Yep. Absolutely. So we're going to get to another version and I'll throw some stuff out there, Robby.

You can add to it before we play it. This is from a church in Raleigh called a vintage 21 church, I think is what it is, vintage church. And they put this out and it was to poke fun at the world's view of what Jesus is like, right?

The legalism that the church has, the judgmental, the, and it's over the top on purpose. So you know, when the first time I saw it, initially I felt a little offended and then I realized what they were doing, you know, and then it made me laugh that it was just so over the top that, you know, that's what the world, that's what the enemy wants us to think Jesus is really like. And so when you listen to this, don't get offended, just listen to it for what it is. It's to poke fun at the world saying, no, that's not who Jesus really is. Right. Cause one of the critical questions for all of us, right? Is that if we could get a picture of what a true man was like, if we could get a picture of what God's heart is like, then we could get a picture of our own heart. Well, part of the problem is that we got, in order to get to the truth, sometimes you got to break agreement with the lies. And when you think of how Jesus is portrayed by the world as the meek and mild, gentle, you know, person that is almost passive aggressive, you know, pointing out your faults and that kind of thing, then, then you get the idea of, of this, this clip was meant for us to challenge us to is what our image is of Jesus.

Right. So it's from the, uh, it's if you watch the video, you can go find it on YouTube. Oh, it's from the greatest story ever told, which may be the boringest story ever.

The story is awesome, but that movie is hard to watch. It's a John Eldridge story. No, it's not. It's Jesus.

He said it too. I'm pretty sure we're going to go ahead and play it, but just listen to it for what it is. All right. Now it's time for me to tell you all what you've done wrong since I last saw you. And don't try and hide because I'm Jesus.

I will find you. Let's start with you, Peter, you lied to your mother the other day, Andrew, you said a naughty word when you hit your finger with the hammer, James, you laughed at him when he hit his finger moving right along, John, you drank too much wine the other night, not way too much, just enough to make me angry, Matthew, we fell asleep in church, didn't we? Yes, we did. And Thomas, you were slow dancing a little too close with that girlfriend of yours. Let's see. And you, I forgot your name, so you're off the hook for now, Philip, I saw you smoking a cigarette behind that bigger rock the other day, Benjamin, you aren't wearing your WWJD bracelet. Jacob, I don't mind you saying my name, but not after you stub your toe, Frank, you know what you did. I just can't repeat it because I'm Jesus. All right, all you sinners come with me. It's time to pay the piper.

It was only one cigarette. I heard that. That's it's funny. I mean, for me, it's funny because that's what the world wants you to believe that Jesus is, and Jesus is people, and we reflect that to the world, and that's really what the enemy wants you to buy into. Darrell Bock Yeah, I mean, that's the things that we conjure up in our mind, but yet we have John 4 and the woman at the well, and how much grace he had for that woman, and how he restored her. He told her to go sin no more, but he restored hers, he had so much grace for us, he spoke into her life and stuff, but you know, those are the contrasts. And I think a lot of times we just get that distorted image of Jesus. Like Robby said, that's a lie, and we need to get that out of the way, that we limit Jesus to that, and you know, he's so much more. Who do I want to follow?

I want to follow William Wallace. He's fighting for freedom, for the freedom of parts of his heart, and for others' hearts, and you know, it's just something that you don't see. A lot of times religion sometimes can get in the way of you really experiencing what God intended for, and he talks all through the Bible, Jesus spoke to the religious more than anybody.

Darrell Bock Right. So yeah, he went after the people in religious power, right, that were leading people astray or leading them into other things. When I look at that, and we go back to the point Robby was making earlier, and what you said earlier, Andy, was that which image do you want to reflect? Which one makes your heart come alive? If I believe that Jesus is really like the vintage 21 greatest story ever told thing, boy, there's just not a lot of life there, there's not a lot of joy, there's nothing redeeming in that, right? And so, you know, William Wallace, obviously, that's a movie, and that's not exactly who Jesus was, but man, which one makes you come alive?

Which one wants you to go out and go fight for the hearts of others? That's a question that I end up with, and so when I look at that, I'm like, wow, I want to be more like that guy. Darrell Bock Right, and it literally is, it sets up this treasure hunt, you know, from my standpoint of, you know, we're going to chase after the heart of God here for four days, but it will be a battle of mostly truth versus lies, of what does – because if we could get a really good look at God, then we could get a whole lot better look at ourselves, right? And I heard this actually over the weekend, it's so beautiful that the idea of the blessing, right, of that – is the idea of a father putting his hand on his son's head, and the son then conforming to the father, you see? And so if we could truly, you know, get that hand on our head, you know, to know what that looked like, what does the father really look like, you know, then we get a vision of our own heart because his heart wants to fight for us.

His heart, you know, certainly longs for adventure, just how many adventures do you love to go on with dad? But his heart is also to fight for the beauty, and to conform to that is really an exciting thing that brings life unbelievable. And so for me, the Core Desires talk is just like the open invitation to the, you know, center of a lifetime. Yeah, I remember on the Core Desires of my very first boot camp, I had no idea what to expect. You know, there wasn't a radio show that I could listen to that told you what to expect, and I went in and the trailers just blew me away, and I'm like, wow, this is different.

This is not – didn't see that typically coming. You know, and then when John talked about this part that we've covered so far, I really had to look at my own perceptions of who Jesus was. You know, I remember writing in my journal, who do I really see Jesus as, and what needs to change in how I see Him? Right, because I grew up with flannel graph Jesus, you know, meek and mild, loving the little kids, and that's all true, but it wasn't the totality of who He was. And that's a problem with it, is a lot of times we're only taught part of Jesus's character. You know, when you look back at the whole history of the Bible, it's littered with war and all these things that say that there is a time for fighting. Right, there's a time to rise up. Well, you know, those partial truths are what gets us in trouble a lot of times, too, that you were talking about.

That's what Satan used, the partial truth with Jesus in the wilderness. Absolutely, and so if this is wet your whistle a little bit to know more, two things you need to do, go register for the boot camp that's coming up November 17th through the 20th. It's right around the corner. Go register for that at masculinejourney.org.

If finances are an issue, please just email one of us, Sam, Andy, Danny, any of us at masculinejourney.org, and we'll help you with the financial situation. And then also, if this intrigued you a little bit, go download or listen to the streaming version of the after hours that we're going to have on the battle to fight. We'll talk with you next week, and we'll cover our beauty to rescue and an adventure to live. Talk to you next week. This is the Truth Network.