Independence Day

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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. We are glad that you're with us this week and I'm glad to be back amongst most of you guys.

So it's really nice to see Ed and see the Ed. Why are you laughing? Oh, because I said most of you guys. It was just for me.

No one else found it funny, but I did. But we are missing a couple of our regulars. We're missing Harold, and what you guys hear Harold on the air, right? We're missing Art, which you've heard Art a few times, but not very often. Yeah, very quiet Art. Not quiet in the meetings, but a little bit, but they're quiet on the air. And we're missing Robby and missing Jim, which has become normal as of the last few months, because it seems like he's usually on a cruise somewhere. Yeah, so hopefully they're all having a good trip or whatever they're doing. I know Harold's not, he's battling against a little bit of stuff health-wise, so we'll be praying for him.

But anyway, welcome to the masculine journey. And we have a great topic considering we're on an eve, eve, eve of what, David? What are we on the third eve of? Independence Day.

Yes, yes. Fourth of July. Yeah, the Fourth of July is what we call it. Yeah, you're exactly right.

Or Independence Day. What would that be in Hebrew? You're in Robby's chair, so I think that we'd need to ask for that. Yeah, I'm not even going to do that. Not going to do that. Sorry, Robby.

I would love to, but I'm not going to leave. Toph, it's the cross of hey. Yeah. Yeah, we got it. We got something in there. Robby, we're missing you. Come back quick.

Yeah, we're missing all the guys. So Andy, this is actually your topic this week. So you want to tell us a little bit about the topic?

I'll claim it. We couldn't come up with anything as a team, but it is the time for Independence Day, and we like to celebrate that. Just wanted to talk about the crossover impacts of the Independence Day, obviously of our nation and the freedom that we get, but the Independence Day of when we found God, when we found Christ, and really the parallels between the two, which I try to think of things whenever I'm delving into history and the things that happen of how they relate to our spirituality. If you think about it, we likely would not be sitting here if there wasn't a successful Independence Day, right? The gospel probably went all over the world. God used this country mightily, and the Independence Day was the foundation for that.

And you think about it, we were talking some reading I did recently. It wasn't everybody was on board for this revolution when it went down. About a third were patriots, about a third were Tories or loyalists to the king, and about a third didn't care.

They just wanted to be left alone and not a lot different from our country these days, it seems like. But really, Independence Day, there was some courage, some vision that went forth. And it's the same way with us and our salvation. God had a vision for our freedom, for our independence, and we just kind of want to walk through that and the parallels.

This is, we're going to touch on both because I both think both are important to us, both our national freedom or independence, as well as our own spiritual freedom and independence. Well, thank you. You actually have the first clip, so you want to tell us a little bit about that clip? Shocker that he had it, yeah. Yeah, I've learned well from Sam. He has.

Yeah. So on this one, we've used a clip from the Patriot. I think we've used this clip in a different context. It was really about Benjamin Martin, who's kind of a composite character for some heroes of the South Carolina portion of the revolution. And he's going to talk to the legislature, their meaning, and they're deciding whether they're going to take part in this revolution and this independence. And you can see the debate as they go back and forth with the different members of the legislature. You had very strong attitudes on both sides, and it just lets you know that just because you decide that you choose independence, you have to have everybody on board to also choose that. Not everybody, you have to have a portion. You have to have a group who's willing to do it.

I think Kenny mentioned just the unity that you have to have. But this clip, really, I'll talk about it when we come back, but it really is just this banter back as part of this legislative meeting and what they come to, and then I'll just speak about the results. Do it now and send a message to King George he will never forget. Our first order of business. And our last, if we vote a levy or order.

Mr. Sims, you will not have the floor. Our first order of business will be an address by Colonel Harry Burwell of the Continental Army. Colonel Burwell. You all know why I'm here, not an orator, and I would not try to convince you of the worthiness of our cause. I'm a soldier and we are at war. From Philadelphia, we expect a declaration of independence. Eight of the 13 colonies have levied money in support of a Continental Army.

I ask that South Carolina be the ninth. Massachusetts and Virginia may be at war, but South Carolina is not. This is not a war for the independence of one or two colonies, but for the independence of one nation. And yes, what nation is that? An American nation. There is no such nation, and to speak of one is treason.

That's it. We are citizens of an American nation, and our rights are being threatened by a tyrant 3,000 miles away. Would you tell me, please, Mr. Howard, why should I trade one tyrant 3,000 miles away for 3,000 tyrants one mile away?

An elected legislature could trample a man's rights as easily as a king can. Captain Martin, I understood you to be patriot. If you mean by patriot, am I angry about taxation without representation? Well, yes, I am. Should the American colonies govern themselves independently? I believe they can, and they should. But if you're asking me, am I willing to go to war with England?

Well, then the answer is most definitely no. So his reasons for not wanting to do that was he had lost his wife and he was raising his kids, and he didn't want to really commit to that because there was risk there. But he found out later that he was going to be pulled in regardless whether he liked it or not, and that's a whole different story. But the point is that that independence that we want, he explained what he wanted from independence.

He just wasn't really to give up anything to receive it. And I think that's where a lot of us are. You know, if you look at it from a spiritual standpoint, I'm all in for going to heaven, but I'm not necessarily all in for being sanctified whenever I first signed up for this deal, you know? And that's what God calls us to do is to go beyond, I think, what we feel like salvation is about. And really, what we are really saying when we do that is we don't really want to be independent from our tyrannical lords over us. We like those false comforters.

We like that stuff that's in our life that brings us satisfaction. It's very similar to the children of Israel when they're getting called out of Egypt. You know, Moses gets them into the wilderness, and they want to go back to Egypt, and we want to go back to Egypt.

And those Tories or loyalists during the day of the revolution, they wanted to go back and they didn't want to break that connection with the king. So just let's see where we're headed. Thank you, Andy. Sorry. That was very interesting. That was very good. Appreciate that, Andy. Anyway, Chuck, you are next with the next clip.

Yeah, the clip I chose comes from the movie 300. And I just love the message behind this. Basically, it's a guy from the Spartans. It's with Greece. He's given kind of a pep talk to the guys. He knows what they're about to face. They've suffered loss, but it's basically the Persians are invading Greece.

It's small at that time. They haven't risen to the power that they were, you know, grew to. But basically, they're coming in. King Xerxes has amassed an army of about 20,000 to 30,000 men, and he's coming in. And basically, the Spartans who are of Greece, they've got men. But what you got to know about these men, from the day they were born, they were bred to fight, to battle, to know what war is all about. So the only entrance into the area where they're going to invade is what's known as Thermopylae, and basically, Thermopylae, I'm sorry.

But that's what the battle centers around. I think I had that with rice one day. Oh, yeah, it's very good.

Yeah, almost like teriyaki chicken. But basically, I thought he was talking about Monopoly. Like, you know, the board game, Monopoly? But anyway, they come through this kind of funnel point in order to get to the Spartans. And of course, they're familiar with the area. So they're able to fight this battle for, you know, a period of about three days, you know, and put up a really good fight, you know.

But if you want to play the clip, I'll talk about a little bit more after. Which you will give up all that you will ever have. You need only to look at the man who fights at your side. This is the why of battle.

This is the brotherhood of men at arms. An unbreakable bond made stronger by the crucible of combat. You will never be closer than with those who you shed your blood with. For there is no nobler cause than to fight for those who will lay down their life for you. For you fight strong today. You fight for your brothers. Fight for your families. Last of all, you fight for Greece.

See, that's the thing. These guys, they had something to lose. I mean, they were fighting for their home, for their families.

They were about to be wiped out, annihilated, and be no more. And that's the battle we face. Whether we want to admit it or not, we're all born into a battle. We're all born into a war. Either we're going to be on God's side or we're going to be on the enemy's side. And that's the thing. We've got people dying every day around us.

What are we doing to bring them into the kingdom of God? Are we fighting that battle the way God has called us to through the Great Commission? And that's what this reminds me of.

And the crazy thing about this, I found so many similarities when I started looking at this. This battle was fought over a period of three days. And basically, the Spartans were betrayed by one individual that helped them end up flanking them and actually led to their annihilation, the 300.

So when you look at the gospel of Christ, that's a three-day period that Christ set us free through his death, burial, and resurrection. That's something we've got to get excited about. And it's just an amazing thing. And with the enemy, we're going to always have an enemy. There's always an enemy in the story. It never leaves us. And we've got to learn how to fight him, how to battle him, how to bond around one another and fight that battle. So if I heard you right, you're saying there's no conscientious objectors in spiritual warfare.

Right? I mean, you can't say, I'm out. I'm not going to do it. No, it's going to come at you. Yeah, you're going to get beat up either way. And so you might as well fight. I love that clip from the standpoint where it talks about, remember what you're fighting for, right? Because for me, that's the hardest thing sometimes is to remember what I'm fighting for. So go to masculinejourney.org to register for the upcoming bootcamp. We'll talk with you after the break. How did God remind you who you were at boot camp?

Oh, in so many different ways from beginning to end. You better expect God to show up because he's going to show up. If you give him the time, he's going to show up big at this boot camp. It's so important to me that I'm going to drive 550 miles to get there. You can spend three days laughing with your brothers and fishing, shooting.

It don't get no better than that. And then you're given time to spend time with God and he will talk to you, with the brothers, friends, the things that you're taught and the things that you think about. Just amazing experience all the way around. 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. I think sometimes as men, we feel like we're on our own and we've got to do everything ourselves and the way of the world is on our shoulders. And it's our job to fix everything and make everything right and have all the answers. And I think when you come here, you just get really honed back in and reminded that God really is for us, that a good father helps you and a good father makes sure you have all the tools you need and a good father comes through for you when you need him and you just feel less alone.

Register today at masculinejourney.org Welcome back to The Masculine Journey. Andy, now that was your bump. You want to tell us a little bit about that? Obviously, it's from the 80s. Yeah. No, not that far back. 90s. 1991, I think. White Hart. Yeah. 90 and a half.

Rocking it. Yeah. Independence Day.

And that's that parallel. I mean, it's, you know, where he's just kind of explaining, you know, whether he didn't want to be ruled by a thousand kings or whatever. And it's kind of goes to the point of, we don't want to be, we as a people have a rebellious streak in us. We can rebel either against God or the enemy. And it's really, I think, where we find true independence is when we rebel against the enemy and say, no, I'm not going to be dependent on you.

And that song is just pretty cool in the fact that just some of the lyrics in it go listen to it, but it's called Independence Day by White Hart. That's good. Thank you. I just, you know, like giving you a hard time, which is normal. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Rodney, we haven't really heard from you on this topic. You want to talk a little bit about it? Well, just swing it my way. Okay.

The biggest thing that I had here was I think even Harold had some comments about it. For me, it's more about dependency than it is independence. And it's, well, where are we going to be dependent? Is it, you know, we're a slave to sin?

Are we a slave to Christ and we want to be a slave to Christ? But it's just hard to walk that out every day. Like we were talking about before the show where anything that we're doing, the further we get from Christ, it's just so easy to find out, wow, I can do this. I'm proud.

I'm independent. I can do it on my own until you can't. And then you take that step that you finally realize, ooh, I've been doing this on my own. And having to turn around and re-face things and say, okay, Lord, whatever I do, I do for you.

And that's just hard to do when we're in the middle of just the everyday life. And that's what I love about, you know, being able to think about, you know, Independence Day because they're like, we talked about salvation is a form of independence from something we want to be away from, but it's repentance. It's a turning away and a turning towards. And when we turn towards, it's a turning towards Christ. And that's the real focus point. Just like when you talk about, you know, heaven and hell and all these things, it's like, yeah, it's nice to not go to hell, but that's not why you go to Christ. You go to Christ because you want to go to Christ, not just because you want to get away from something else. And, you know, fortunately, he knows our heart in those things and how we're trying to actually work through those each and every day.

And that sanctification process that Andy was referencing earlier, I think it's just, it's good for us to kind of always think about, yes, it's good for our country to be independent from tyranny. But we're talking about something much more of the principalities, the rulers, the authorities that we are basically subject to, but we don't understand that they're there. We don't see them. Therefore, it's so easy for us just to become oblivious and just say, there is no God. There is no devil.

There is none of this stuff. The Bible's, you know, malarkey. It's easy for people just to go off and say that because that's exactly what the devil wants them to do. But that's where it's so nice for us to be able to say, nope, we're not going to trust you. We're going to trust God's word and just kind of soak into that. Well, thank you.

Danny, you actually have the next clip. So you can tell us a little bit about it. John Adams. Oh, is it John Adams?

Yeah, this is the show we're doing. I was asleep. I'm sorry.

The clip is from the series John Adams. And I had to think about it. I know you did. I could see the wheels turning in your head.

Looked like you were slipping a cog every now and then. There's reasons for that. But anyway, and he's talking before a group there about what independence is going to cost them. And so, you know, the clip is, you know, a very powerful speech.

But the parallels that you'll see as we listen to it, we talk about it on the backside is like Andy has brought up the physical and the spiritual contrast is what caught me with this. So thank you, John Adams. Right. Just kidding.

John, John, John, John Jones, Adam. We got it. Yeah. Maybe except the most stupendous magnitude measures which will affect the lives of millions born and unborn are now before us. We must expect a great expense of blood to obtain them. But we must always remember that a free constitution of civil government cannot be purchased at too dear a rate as there is nothing on this side of Jerusalem of greater importance to men. My worthy colleague from Pennsylvania has spoken with great ingenuity and eloquence. He has given you a grim prognostication of our national future. But where he foresees apocalypse, I see hope. I see a new nation ready to take its place in the world, not an empire, but a republic and a republic of laws, not men. Gentlemen, we are in the very midst of revolution, the most complete, unexpected and remarkable of any in the history of the world.

How few of the human race have ever had an opportunity of choosing a system of government for themselves and their children? I am not without apprehensions, but the end we have in sight is more than worth all the means. I believe, sirs, that the hour has come. My judgment approves this measure and my whole heart is in it. All that I have, all that I am, and all that I hope in this life I am now ready to stake upon it.

While I live, let me have a country, a free country. Yeah, the foresight that he's talking about, seeing freedom come through struggle and obviously a bloody fight, it's so parallel to Andy, just like you were talking about, to our spiritual. I love the scripture in Hebrews where it says, therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight in the sin which clings so closely and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame and seated at the right hand of the throne of God. You know, Jesus knew what was coming. You know, kind of paralleling that with what John Adams is saying in that clip is he's seeing what's coming, but he's looking beyond the trials, beyond the fight, beyond the thing, to something glorious that's never happened before.

You know, Jesus was looking beyond something that had never happened before. And, you know, I love the word of sitting here, a kind of a play on word to word independence. We're independent, independence on things all of our life. You know, when we're born, we're dependent, we're independent of our parents, keeping us alive. And, you know, so somewhere in the midst when you think you're being independent, you're really dependent on something.

And Christ is the only way to go there. So that's just kind of where I was at now that I'm awake. Thank you, Sam. Well, thank you. You're sure it was keeping me awake.

Danny has a very bright shirt, very cool shirt, but a very bright shirt on today. Yeah, it's my Father's Day present from my wife and my dog, and it has a picture of my dog all over it, sir. Yeah, but you're not the father of the dog. I'm not the father of the dog. Okay, I just want to clear that up. Yeah, no, I'm not the father of the dog.

Okay, yeah, it was Father's Day for your kids. That would have been a hairless dog. Yeah, chihuahuas. Yeah. So David, I noticed there, David, I noticed that he got Hebrew in there when you couldn't. He got some Hebrews. Yeah, he got the book of Hebrews. Well, not the whole book. It was a passage.

Not the same as actual Hebrew language. So what thoughts do you have on this topic? You know, with Independence Day, it's like everybody's been saying, but Rodney pointed out earlier, it's more of a, for me, it's more of a dependence day. So the more throughout, like, I'm not new necessarily in my walk with Christ at this point in my life, but the season I'm in right now is working through my word of the year still, which is patience.

I know that was last week's show, was the revisit on that. But the more I lean into the patience on that, the more I ultimately become independent from my flesh and become more dependent on God. So that's really what this means to me. I mean, it's a great time in American history, but, you know, like Chuck said earlier, we're in a bloody fight. We were born in a war. And just as, you know, our forefathers were in a big war for their independence, I mean, we're daily fighting that. And the enemy ultimately wants us to, you know, fall back to being dependent on our flesh. So that way, you can come in and just basically take us right on along like we were in the beginning stages of our walk. So you didn't get to talk last week about the word of the year.

Anything else you want to talk about on it since we didn't get a chance to talk about it last week? What a word patience is. Yeah.

When you got that one, I'm like, ooh, that's going to kick his backside. Yeah. Yeah.

This might be a twofer. I mean, so far it might carry on to next year. We'll see. But maybe word of the decade.

Word of the lifetime. I don't know. Every year we might come out of the show and I'm like, it's still patient. I must be missing something. Be patient. I'm still working on this.

Yeah. I mean, obviously patience isn't one of my strong suits still even to this day. And, you know, it's kind of funny how I'm looking at different things, whether it's, you know, at my home life or my work life or, you know, in church life or whatever the case may be. But it always comes back to, dude, you're impatient. Like, just sit back and relax and like, you know, ultimately be dependent on God. So that way you can be patient with these other things. So it's still, still a big work in progress.

I'm kind of like the new 74 out here. It's still, you know, maybe next year we'll have it figured out. But yeah, that's what I've got for patience.

Go ahead, Kenny. I love the way you put a season. Realize you're in a season and you're developing. God's always developing us.

Oh yeah. And that's where we really find our freedom when he's developing us. Because he's getting the fruit of the Spirit cause when Jesus left, he said, I'm going to prepare a place so you can be with me. That's heaven because he brings all the glory and the holiness of heaven. And, but he's also preparing us for the place that he's prepared so that we can be with him. Cause you know, there's, he said, I want y'all to learn to love each other like I loved you.

And that was patience cause them, them dudes were fighting over who was the greatest, who was going to sit on the right and the left. And it was getting into posing and the mask, what the masculine journey we, we try to deal with. Let's take these off and get real with God in ourself and each other so we can really come to that point. And that's ultimately gaining independence.

Yes, yes, yes. From them things that try to dominate us instead of love dominating our lives, our hearts. Every time I think I'm growing in my patience, I have to drive somewhere.

That really shows me how I've not grown a whole lot. No, not at all. So the question we have for you this week is you head off from, from the show and we head into the after hours.

And if you haven't listened to the after hours, go to any podcast outlet, masculine journey after hours. But the question is what's your independence mean to you? Your spiritual independence mean to you on this independence day. We ask that you do that to lean into God and enjoy your week. We'll talk with you next week. This is the Truth Network.