This is the Truth Network. Coming to you from an entrenched barricade deep in the heart of central North Carolina, Masculine Journey After Hours.
A time to go deeper and be more transparent on the topic covered on this week's broadcast. So sit back and join us on this adventure. The Masculine Journey After Hours starts here now.
Welcome to Masculine Journey After Hours. We are talking about having faith in a fallen world. That's what you think about that for a minute. What is it that you have faith in, right?
Is it of this world? How much can you depend on that? What's not something that can disappear on you in this world? Jobs can evaporate, relationships can end, those types of things. This world is a fallen place. And so what do you have faith in, right? And what keeps you going as life keeps coming at you? And so we're talking about keeping faith or having faith in a fallen world.
How to keep faith in a fallen world. And so if you missed the first show, we had a lot of good conversation. Even Andy had a good thing to say or two. And then he'll have more to say here a little bit later.
But Robby, you have the first clip of this show, and so we'd love to hear from you. Yeah, it's really cool to me that there's this movie that came out. It's called The Ultimate Gift, and it stars James Garner as a dead guy. Dead from a standpoint of he leaves all his grandson these messages from the grave. In other words, he recorded all these things that he hoped to help his grandson with after he passed. And he was a billionaire, and so all of the young grandson's aunts and uncles were spoiled, and he knew that. And so he left him some messages in order to try to help him because he had faith in the boy. And therein lies the issue.
For so many of us, we have an issue of we lose faith with God, but also when we begin to do that we lose faith in others, and we really miss an opportunity. James Garner didn't miss this opportunity, and so he laid out some things like God would to test this young man, and some of the gifts that he gave him from the grave, one of the gifts was work. And he had to put all these fence posts in this Texas ranch, just miles of them. And he had to get them all in line, and when he didn't do it right, the guy would come pull them out.
And it was quite the test for this kid who had never really done it. He was working his life. And he had the gift of friends, and he made friends with this little girl that was actually dying of cancer. And it really touched his heart through the idea of he finally found out the value of a friend because as soon as he didn't have his credit cards and all his money, all his friends left. So it was quite a story of that. So there was a little time lapse in this clip in that you're going to hear the beginning, what the message is he left Jason. And then after that time lapse, and Jason passed these tests, and he actually receives the major part of his inheritance, you'll hear how James Garner's faith pays off.
I've been thinking about this for quite a long time. How can I give you something and not have it ruin you like your uncles and aunts, even some of their kids? So I want to give you a gift, a series of gifts leading up to, well, I won't call it the ultimate gift. You fail in any way, it's over. You get nothing.
And everything you do must be to Mr. Hamilton's satisfaction. Jason. Yeah. You gave away the hundred million, all of it.
Yeah, so what? Well, if you're standing here now, it means that not only have you succeeded in receiving all of my gifts, but have done so beyond the boundaries that I have set, I guess that means that I have succeeded as well. What I could not accomplish in life, I haven't done in death. As long as you are still alive, I will be, too. I love you, son. I love you, too.
Goodbye, Jason. You know, that cliff illustrates something that's amazing, that we know love goes beyond the grave, but I don't know if you've ever thought about or considered how faith goes beyond the grave, right? And, you know, often in a ministry or as a parent or something, you have a task that needs to be done, and a lot of people would doubt whether that person could do it. But when you have faith in that person and you put it in their hands and you mentor them and you cherish them and you believe in them, which is actually to an extent, grace, the first letter in the – or excuse me, the second letter in the word grace has to do with faith, right?
And so as you, you know, had faith in Andy to do a talk or you guys had faith in me, right, to be able to be part of this ministry. And those things last beyond your lifetime. And, you know, it's that faith that you gave that person, they pass it on to the next person, and it goes on and on and on. And those things are gigantic, are gigantic. But unfortunately, especially in our families, think about it. You know where I struggle the most, right, is the people I'm closest with, like, man, they can't do this.
That's an agreement, right? And Satan's trying to get us to take the bait that we lose faith in our relationships, we lose faith in what those people are accomplished, and we know, you know, that God made them so that they would have what it takes. And what an opportunity when we stretch our own faith to have the ultimate gift that James Garner, you know, received after his life, you know, his faith was still playing out. Yeah, I can't recommend this movie enough. It is an amazing – it's a family-friendly movie. It is just incredibly good from start to finish.
It takes a little while to understand what's going on in it, but it is such a good movie. There's actually three of them. Are there? I don't know, yeah, and they're all, by the way, on Amazon Prime. So there's the ultimate gift, then the ultimate life, and then the ultimate legacy.
Okay. And you actually – what happens is after he gets the gift, you know, Jason goes through some stuff to grow in his life, and they actually take you through Red's life. What James Garner went through in order to be able to have that legacy. And then in the last one, they play it on another rich kid, which is a completely different kind of a situation. And all three movies, like my wife is like, man, I just wish there was one more in the set, because all of them star the attorney. Yeah. And the attorney was Mr. Hamilton, which you didn't hear him in the clip.
I wish we had some clips from him. But just phenomenal wisdom, old guy that just, you know, calls it as he sees it. And, you know, it's really helpful when you're in a test to have somebody speak the truth. Yeah.
Terry, would you like to add something to this particular topic? Definitely. You know, faith is interesting. Faith is good and scary at times.
Okay. You know, I just listened to some of this conversation and thinking about faith. And I am like, I glance back and I think of Job, you know, flat on his back, everything.
I mean, his friends, his family kind of getting him saying, man, why don't you just give this thing up? You know, what they see is a physical man, his struggles right there, all right there in front of them. You know what you used to be able to know, you can't look at you, you know. But the thing and I was sharing with Danny, I said, because of his conditions. I said, you know what, people look at you and they take the CAT scans and whatnot, and they see this and they show you this physical thing here, you know.
But the thing is, in the physical, they see that, they show you. But what are we as men who are Christians, men who are called to do a work for God, what do we show them, even in our struggles? You know, what did Job show them in his struggles? He didn't give up, you know. He kept on to what it was. I'm sure they saw something in his struggles there. It puzzled them.
It made them, you know, think that he was a crazy man. But his struggles, and I know in our struggles is our strength, especially when it comes to faith, especially when it comes to the band of brothers, the men that we are, the men that God called us to be. Our struggles, our struggles is our strength.
The thing we have to do is get beyond our struggles. Good, thank you. Andy, you have the next clip. You want to tell us a little bit about it or all about it or however you were hearing it?
First of all, I want to do a little confession. I took a six-minute clip and put it into two minutes, and it's really a lot of, you'll think you're in, listen to something, I'll fast forward. Yeah, they've had a lot of coffee before they did. Yeah, exactly. There's not a lot of pauses in between. So anyway, this is from secondhand lines.
We've used this before. It's about Walter, who's a broken boy who his mom has lied to him and he can't really trust. So there's a fallenness there. And then he's talking to Hub, not Dub, but Hub, who has had some bad stuff happen in his life, some brokenness, and they're talking, and you'll hear some of the, you'll hear the conversation. Walter's look, Hub hasn't really given Walter a lot of attention up to this point, and Walter approaches him near this pond as Hub's kind of wandering around out there and he kind of walks up on him and scares him, but essentially they get into a speech that Hub gives to young men, and you see the interaction between them, and I'll talk about it when we come back.
I don't know if it missed anything in setting it up, but let's just listen to it and go from there. Here I am. You cold, son? You better hear. You better... Those stories about Africa, about you, they're true, aren't they? It doesn't matter.
It does, too. Around my mom, all I hear is lies. I don't know what to believe in. If you want to believe in something, then believe in it.
Just because something isn't true, that's no reason you can't believe it. The long speech I give to young men sounds like you need to hear a piece of it for peace. Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things that a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good. That honor, courage, and virtue mean everything. That power and money, money and power mean nothing. That good always triumphs over evil. And I want you to remember this, that love, true love, never dies. Remember that, boy. Remember that. It doesn't matter if it's true or not, you see.
A man should believe in those things because those are the things worth believing in. Got that? That was a good speech. You think so?
Thanks. When are you going to give me the rest of the speech? You're almost a man. You promise? Wait one minute here.
Wait. I can't be a good man until you give me the rest of the speech, right? So you need to stick around until I'm old enough to hear the whole thing.
I see what you're trying to pull here. No, you have to stick around until I'm old enough to hear the speech. I'll write it down. No, I want you to give me the speech.
You won't be living here then. You're my uncle. I need you to stick around and be my uncle. What about Uncle Garth? He needs you.
What about the dogs and the pig and the lion? We all need you. I need you. No, you're just being silly. No, it's true. It's true. I know you miss Jasmine an awful, awful lot. But if you go, we'll miss you just as much.
It's true. All right, you win. I'll stick around and be your uncle. Don't expect me to be happy about it. Deal? You're a good boy. You actually went two minutes and one second, Andy. I just looked at it. That's all right.
Actually, it wasn't a full 201 because I knew you would say something. Oh, yeah. But you just see that interaction again.
It was very quick. And it was not exactly like what it would be if you saw it as the movie. But both of them – I mean, Hub is so damaged from – he doesn't want to connect or really take on Walter because of his hurt from – Jasmine that's mentioned there dies in childbirth, so he loses his little wife and his child at the same time. And he doesn't want to make that connection. So he's affected by that fallenness. Then you've got Walter who's being affected by the fallenness of this world, his mom acting crazy and stuff.
And he doesn't have a family, and he's pursuing that connection. And Hub avoids it, and they come together. But just that speech where Hub is talking about all these virtues, faith, essentially. And he was like, whether they're true or not, you have to believe them.
Well, the things are true. What he's saying is whether you see those in people, you have to believe eventually that they'll get there or whatever. But I just thought it was really a good clip because we've used it for a lot of different things, but I hadn't really thought about it as far as being a faith and a fallen world type of clip.
But anyway, I thought it made the point well. Yeah, another aspect of it is that Hub is believing that his time is coming on. That he has no more value here, but then all of a sudden Walter lets him see there is still value here.
Walter rescues him. Yeah, there's still a place for me here that I've not been put out to pastor. Not pastor, pasture.
You're a pastor. That's a pasture. You've been put out to pasture.
I'm talking about pasture. Very funny. Your future is bright. Your future is bright.
I have to wear shades. You know, what Walter is trying to do is get Hub to break some agreements. And it's fascinating to me to see if you ever just spend some time with that clip clipping it like he has, and I have many times, is see how many times Walter says it's true. I was going to point that out. That's right.
And how important it is because his mother always lied to him. That's right. And it's a great illustration for all of us that we think that people can't handle the truth, right? And so we don't share it with them sometimes. And in order to share the truth requires faith that they can receive it.
That's right. And it's a shame how many times we pass up on that opportunity to have faith in the person to be able to handle the truth. Yeah, he saw that in Hub, and Hub didn't want to enter in, and he was like, I won't be here.
But he was like, no, it's true. I want you to give me that talk. I'll write it down. Yeah, right. Thank you for bringing that up, Robby, because I had forgotten. You don't need to thank me for the point I made. Thanks. I appreciate that. That's fine, man. Let's see how it's going.
Thank you for your contribution, Sam. I was just talking about Robby because I had meant to make that. I'm just messing with you. And it just always, you know, I like to mess with you. I'm an easy target.
I go into defense mode pretty easy. So one other point I want to make real quick is from our reading. We've been reading the Bible together, and I haven't really contributed a lot because I don't like typing and stuff. But just sharing on here, Exodus 3. Sounds like an agreement.
Yeah, it is. When God comes to Moses and he says, who should I tell him I sent me? And he says, I am who I am. And he said, this is what you shall say to the sons of Israel, the Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob has sent me to you.
This is my name forever, and this is a name for all generations. Sorry. Basically, I've missed the part that I was trying to read. But he said, God tells Moses, he said, this will be a sign that I sent you is whenever you'll come back here and worship on the mountain.
Think through that. You've got to go do all these things. You've got to go through these ten plagues and all this stuff that Moses doesn't know about. But whenever you'll know this is a sign that I was with you is when you come back here to worship. Well, he's calling him out. He's saying, I have faith in you to go do this. And I don't know. It was one of those things that just kind of jumped off the page to me as I was reading it yesterday.
And it goes to the point of Rob who's talking about of where having faith in others and seeing what they don't see, and God saw that in Moses. So sorry, I hacked my way through that. I'm done now. No, it was good. It was her reading two days ago.
But still, that's all right. No, it was yesterday. Today was Matthew 21. The day before that was Exodus 4.
The day before that was Exodus 3. Again, future's bright. I'm just giving you a hard time. It's because you started it before the show. That's all. Anyway, Terry.
Can I share just a minute? This faith thing, you know, it's a portion of what I've seen when God exposes us, okay? He exposes us.
In other words, you will be seen either true or false. You know, God's going to use you sometimes to expose others, which is a very uncomfortable position. When he placed you somewhere, like we talked about, being uncomfortable. You know, and God wants you to say or do or move or something that's going to make things. And lots of times, it's not by what you say, but it's by your actions that you expose them, you know?
Just by your actions. In other words, if there's a guy that hates you and you love him, your love for him is going to expose him. You know, God's going to use that very thing you hate to expose the guy that he wants to love. So our positions and what God wants us is, I mean, you don't know the next position, but man, can you just sit and wait on it?
Because God ain't going to fail. He's going to be made perfect, and it's going to be awesome. There are so many things in our world that, like you just say right there, I just think back, what did I just go through today when I was sitting down with my boss at work talking to him? And I just want to, just tell me the truth.
That's all I really want, but he's working around, he's doing things, he's trying to say this or that. I'm like, faith in a fallen world. I'm like, okay, you've got all this fallen world coming right at you right now.
What are you going to do with it? I'm like, I could go attack, there's all kinds of things I could do. But I'm like, I don't think that's where I'm supposed to go. I'm supposed to just, I need to get them to realize that the reason I'm doing that is because you're not assigning anything to me. If you assign anything, he's like, oh, all these things that we've done.
I'm like, you've done nothing. I don't know where these improvements and all these things are at because everybody I talk to on the floor and everybody I talk to everywhere, you're just doing things. We're just getting stuff done that we'd always do the day before. Some people are actually doing a little more, some are doing a little less.
It just kind of depends where everything's at. But I think of a fallen world, I can't look anywhere without seeing a fallen world, even in this room. We're not perfect. We're trying to be as good as we can be. But again, it's whatever we try to do and we try to succeed in something, but we'd always still fall short. And having faith that one of these days, I don't understand it. We're going to die, but then we're going to be perfect or something. I just don't, I don't know how I'm going to be that.
I have no idea. But it's great to know that on the other side, he's going to have so much more control over us. We're going to be able to somehow have control over ourselves.
I don't know why not have the same thoughts and things that I do now. I just don't understand. It's great to know that he's going to take that good care of us.
It's just amazing. So guys, we've got a couple more minutes here. What are the things that you do to hold on to the faith? What are some things that you do to say, I'm in a bad place? Obviously, you have prayer.
That's one we can lean to. What things do you do that help bring you back to that place of faith when the enemy is trying to get you to focus on the fallen part of the world? The challenge sometimes, I think it is, not dodging the question, is that especially as men, we don't like the fact that we expose ourselves and be vulnerable. It's kind of something that God is bringing to light in my own life now, is that there are things you have no control over, and the more you look at it and the more you realize, I don't have control over anything.
There's nothing. So when you lay that out, people get uncomfortable around vulnerability because all of a sudden it exposes the anxiety in us that we talked about earlier that, okay, so I really don't have control over this. The report could come back this, or the job could be, they could walk out tomorrow and say, hey, guys, we're closing the doors.
It happens every day. But the vulnerability of that is, God, will you take care of me? His promise is, yes, I will. His promise is you won't see His children begging bread. His promises are yes and amen. If we don't hold on to that, then what are we doing? I think Andy asked, do we have what it takes? The answer is no, but Jesus does. So that's kind of the whole reality of it, is that hold on to what is noble, what is true, what is just, because those are the only things, the love and the faith that Robby talked about, that are going to live beyond us because God's going to live long beyond us.
Thank you. There's so many things that you try to think through and try to go through in your head sometimes when you're trying to think through these things, but when you have your faith and you can put that first, which isn't the easiest thing in the world to do. There's so many times I just put my feelings and thoughts way ahead of my faith and I just screw things up, and the more you do that, the more you just want to hang your head and just walk away from things, but you just can't let that be what overwhelms you enough to take you away from the Father. And you have to look into it. You have to speak into it. You have to go back to it. So if you're sitting there at my desk, I'm just thinking, okay, Lord, I didn't handle that very well.
I admit it. This is what went on. You just have to keep coming back. You can't just let things go. You have to fight, and it's not the easiest fight sometimes, and sometimes it's really easy to do the right thing, but it's not always, and you just have to keep battling and battling and battling. I think that what we hope to illustrate here at The Masculine Journey is that being grounded in God's Word and hopefully going to it on a daily basis for some length of time, there's no better way to get faith. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. I mean, that's a basic principle that we clearly live by, but the other part is that you walk with a band of brothers or a band of sisters or your church family, whatever that may look like, but you literally have people that will speak truth into your life, and you're walking with people that have faith in you, that believe in you and that you know you're their favorite, even if they give you a hard time about what you're wearing today or whatever the situation may be.
I'm wearing orange again next week. However that looks, but it's critical to have real friends. That's right. It's critical to have a real friend in Jesus, and to me it's absolutely critical to my life to spend, and I'm not talking about reading the Bible to learn stuff.
I'm talking about entering into a conversational intimacy with the Word of God on a regular basis, and that brings faith in my book. It just is awesome. We've got a couple things.
Yes, I agree with everything you're saying. Sometimes for me it's listening to the right music and getting my head in the right spot. Sometimes it's, especially right now, springtime. I was having really not a great day the other day, and I went outside. I could hear the birds singing. I could hear an owl. You know, I heard a woodpecker off in the distance. It's like, oh, you know, that just gives me faith again because the world's so much bigger than what I'm dealing with, right, than getting the right perspective.
And there's so much more. We've got a boot camp coming up November 20th through 23rd. You can go register now. Go do that, please. If you have any questions, please reach out to us. You can reach out to our first name at masculinejourney.org. masculinejourney.org, that's where you would go. Let yourself be loved this week, and love on others as well. We'll talk to you next week. This is the Truth Network.
