SPEAKER_00: You're listening to this vision of the road.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes we need to leave.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes you have to come up to the ledge, and at that moment, you have to act quickly.
SPEAKER_01: It's a sermon of wisdom, but it requires a quick decision.
SPEAKER_01: You've got to just move forward.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, Joseph, Olipher's wife, quick decision.
SPEAKER_01: Moment of truth.
SPEAKER_01: Option two with Olipher's wife.
SPEAKER_01: He in that moment decides to jump, literally, or leave out of his clothes and run through the halls naked because that was the best choice for him, for God's calling, for his integrity, for his character.
SPEAKER_01: And I think we can take encouragement that sometimes life calls us to do that when we know it's right and wrong, right?
SPEAKER_00: At The Road, our vision is to raise up wholehearted disciples of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: For more information on the road, visit theroad.org.
SPEAKER_00: We hope you are encouraged by today's message.
SPEAKER_01: We've been in the study of Revelations the last few weeks.
SPEAKER_01: Pastor Steve's been taking us through the last few months, I apologize.
SPEAKER_01: The last few months.
SPEAKER_01: We're going to take a brief pause from that.
SPEAKER_01: Pastor Steve asked if I would uh speak today, and I said yes, slightly reluctantly.
SPEAKER_01: No, I'm kidding.
SPEAKER_01: Um I was very excited about it because I felt like God had been putting a message on my heart for a larger body.
SPEAKER_01: And um middle school might not have been the most appropriate venue for that.
SPEAKER_01: So he's given me adult years, so thank you.
SPEAKER_01: Um in that.
SPEAKER_01: I would say uh bear with me.
SPEAKER_01: As you guys know, last week I I'm still battling this voice thing.
SPEAKER_01: So um prayed uh for healing and that God will at least allow me to have the vocal capacity to get through.
SPEAKER_01: But I'm gonna take a pause from Revelations this weekend, and we're gonna talk about something that I think, within light of the recent events that we've been going through and looking at these last couple weeks in our city, in our lives, I hope is a practical application.
SPEAKER_01: So let me open in prayer and then we'll go to it.
SPEAKER_01: Heavenly Father, in Jesus' name we pray that we just give you this time, God, that you would use it as uh you see fit, that we would seek you in your heart, God, in your word.
SPEAKER_01: And I pray for a fresh revelation of old truths, Father God.
SPEAKER_01: Because if it's a new truth, it's not truth, but an old truth with fresh eyes, God.
SPEAKER_01: So I just pray for the hearts and minds would be open and that we would be able, that I, Father God, would be able to communicate your message today to these believers in this church.
SPEAKER_01: In your name we pray.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
SPEAKER_01: I used to be cool.
SPEAKER_01: I laughed too.
SPEAKER_01: I was sitting at a stoplight on the way to take my kids to school, and in front of me was this really nice vehicle.
SPEAKER_01: At first I didn't really pay attention to what kind it was, and I just noticed this, it was like a red vehicle.
SPEAKER_01: I don't get to what kind of vehicle because that's important in a minute.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, was this black and white bumper sticker.
SPEAKER_01: And you know you've seen the guys and gals that decorate their cars, they actually paint job their car with bumper stickers.
SPEAKER_01: This thing was clean.
SPEAKER_01: It had one black and white bumper sticker in the front of it, and it was right centered in the back of the tailgate.
SPEAKER_01: It said, I used to be cool.
SPEAKER_01: And uh so I looked at it and my son and I noticed it, and we started laughing.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, pretty hard.
SPEAKER_01: I was like, this was a great bumper sticker.
SPEAKER_01: We kind of have this thing where we um try and read bumper stickers.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes, as I'm learning, bumper stickers aren't created equal, and they're not all PG 13 or even PG 10.
SPEAKER_01: So if I see one before he does, I'm like, oh look, eagle or something, you know, deer, um, squirrel?
SPEAKER_01: No.
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, so we see this one, and it's we see it at the same time, and we just he starts to belly laugh, and it kind of takes me by surprise, and I start to find it hilarious.
SPEAKER_01: I'm going, man, there's a guy comfortable or gal comfortable in their skin, because I don't know at this point.
SPEAKER_01: They're in front of me.
SPEAKER_01: And so I'm getting curious.
SPEAKER_01: I start thinking, and we just we have this moment of just hilarity.
SPEAKER_01: I start to think about what kind of person puts that on their car.
SPEAKER_01: Somebody who's probably was cool at one time and is now at least settled into their skin in the fact that they're no longer cool.
SPEAKER_01: So we get on the freeway, I drive by, and then it dawns on me, I'm like, oh my gosh, it's a Chrysler town and country.
SPEAKER_01: It's a minivan.
SPEAKER_01: Light bulb.
SPEAKER_01: This guy, and it turns out to be a guy who doesn't look unlike myself, is in the car doing his thing, probably on the same path to school that I'm taking with his kids.
SPEAKER_01: And um I look over and I almost want to give him kind of a salute or a thumbs up because I appreciate in that moment some of his shame.
SPEAKER_01: The fact that I knew where Christ or Town and Countries rank on top selling minivans and what they have to offer at this stage in the game for me, and even the thought process and the decision that my wife and I had to come to to join that club.
SPEAKER_01: And we did join the club.
SPEAKER_01: And so it was almost like, I feel you, bro.
SPEAKER_01: I'm in the club.
SPEAKER_01: If I ever was cool, it is past, and I'm no longer there.
SPEAKER_01: So, anyways, um, it was a fun time uh with him, but a sobering reality of um the coolness of my past that is now uh behind me.
SPEAKER_01: But we have a minivan, I'm half proud to say it's a Toyota Siena, number one last year.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, awesome.
SPEAKER_01: It battles kind of neck and neck with the Honda Odyssey.
SPEAKER_01: The fact that I know that makes me uncool.
SPEAKER_01: Um talk about decisions today and the idea of the little decisions in our lives that bring us to what I want to call today ledges.
SPEAKER_01: Before I get there, I'm gonna give you um some intel here.
SPEAKER_01: Research done at Cornell University shows we in this time and date and age, with the impinent uh with the tremendous amount of information that we have available to us, we make and approximately in the waking hours cognitive or conscious decisions every day.
SPEAKER_01: We make 35,000 of them.
SPEAKER_01: That's a lot.
SPEAKER_01: That breaks down to approximately 2,333 per hour of waking hours.
SPEAKER_01: And I gave you guys the benefit of the doubt getting your eight hours of sleep every night.
SPEAKER_01: So that means every hour, in the hour that we've been together, you will have processed 2,333 decisions.
SPEAKER_01: Children, by comparison, only make 3,000 decisions a day.
SPEAKER_01: My philosophy and my research shows that half of those decisions are typically based on whether they will or will not obey mom and dad.
SPEAKER_01: It's pretty much just a quick, eh no, no.
SPEAKER_01: Yes, probably should.
SPEAKER_01: Um now, what else I found interesting, Cornell also showed that of those 35,000 decisions we process, 227 of those on a daily basis are based on food.
SPEAKER_01: Now, this resonated with me.
SPEAKER_01: I kind of like food, I'm a foodie, and some of us might bend the averages or skew them.
SPEAKER_01: I probably think about food more than that average.
SPEAKER_01: Um, I don't know what that says about me, other than I appreciate the palate.
SPEAKER_01: Thank God for my ability to appreciate his gifts and food that way.
SPEAKER_01: So, um, a decision, I'm just, I mean, a lot of us know this, but I'm just gonna kind of go with what Webster says as we talk about what this means as we move forward.
SPEAKER_01: A decision is a noun, a conclusion, or resolution reached after consideration, the action or process of deciding something or uh or of resolving a question.
SPEAKER_01: In some cases, a formal judgment if you're in kind of the the courthouse.
SPEAKER_01: Um, that said, we come to decisions.
SPEAKER_01: Many little decisions culminate to bring us to the ledges of life, right?
SPEAKER_01: So these would be things that I don't want to get ahead of myself there.
SPEAKER_01: Let me illustrate something real quick.
SPEAKER_01: So we have this stage, it's cool, it's kind of got some different ledges, but little decisions like this.
SPEAKER_01: I was actually originally gonna jump off the stage at one point here, but then I thought getting older, I'm not as youthful, knees might not take it.
SPEAKER_01: But so, okay, little decisions.
SPEAKER_01: I wake up, I brush my teeth, I comb my hair, I take a shower, I use soap.
SPEAKER_01: Have to be reminded if I'm the boy.
SPEAKER_01: The girls seem to get that.
SPEAKER_01: I'm talking about my kids.
SPEAKER_01: And then you find yourself little decisions, you drive to work, you answer some phone calls, you check some emails, and then before you know it, you're at something that's not gonna be easily navigated or negotiated.
SPEAKER_01: And you have a lot larger drop, but it was a series of smaller decisions, and I'm sorry I should have given you guys a warning.
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna be moving a lot today, and these guys got the camera on me.
SPEAKER_01: So, um, anyways, it's a bit of an aerobic exercise.
SPEAKER_01: The um the deal there is obviously the thesis is that little decisions bring us to the ledges of life that cause us to pause, and that's where in those moments we need to seek God's counsel.
SPEAKER_01: What do we do when we face the ledges of our lives?
SPEAKER_01: Familiar quote from Albert Einstein: In the midst of difficulty lies opportunity.
SPEAKER_01: I like to think of it this way: the opportunities afforded to us in life come by the way of faithfulness to God in our times of difficulty.
SPEAKER_01: Hebrews 4, 14 through 16 says this.
SPEAKER_01: Seeing then that we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession.
SPEAKER_01: For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weakness, but was in all points tempted as we are yet without sin.
SPEAKER_01: Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in the time of our need.
SPEAKER_01: As a boy, I grew up in Illinois, and we didn't have many ledges.
SPEAKER_01: We had to kind of seek them, and we did.
SPEAKER_01: We had a lot of cornfields.
SPEAKER_01: I didn't have the benefit of growing up in Colorado.
SPEAKER_01: We'd visit here as often as possible, but there was plenty of ledges here, as we know.
SPEAKER_01: We have to look out our window and see Pike's Peak, and it's filled with ledges.
SPEAKER_01: But despite the cornfields, uh, there actually were some fairly good ledges.
SPEAKER_01: And in my neighborhood where I grew up, amongst the cornfields, there was one particularly large ledge or cliff, as it were, big to us at the time, especially even being a little critter.
SPEAKER_01: Um it was about 80 feet from top to bottom.
SPEAKER_01: And you would travel, excuse me, you'd travel through the woods, and uh before you knew it, you'd be at the edge.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm there with my buddies, and we're looking over, we're looking at each other, and we're thinking, this looks really cool, man.
SPEAKER_01: There's gotta be a way to get over this thing without killing ourselves.
SPEAKER_01: I don't even know that the second part even came to mind.
SPEAKER_01: I think we just thought, man, this looks really cool.
SPEAKER_01: There's gotta be a way to get over this thing or down it, and who was gonna be the first to try it?
SPEAKER_01: Well, adolescence came and passed, and so did puberty.
SPEAKER_01: None of us during that time really had safe measures to uh cross that obstacle on the ledge.
SPEAKER_01: I went to college up in northern Illinois, outside of Chicago, and um that was completely flat from where I grew up in the Quad Cities.
SPEAKER_01: I grew up on the Mississippi River, but I traveled two hours west, east, sorry, east, to Chicago, and um in DeCalb, Illinois, DeCalb corn, you guys seen that?
SPEAKER_01: You can look and probably see Iowa and other places from DeCalb's uh cornfields.
SPEAKER_01: It's so flat.
SPEAKER_01: But I was in our ROTC and we had some brothers, and um we got to go to some schools while we were there and in our training Northern Warfare School in Alaska that does a lot of orienteering mountaineering and come back with repelling um and and mountaineering concepts and stuff that we wanted to deploy with this recently found knowledge, and we looked around and we had nothing to scale.
SPEAKER_01: And so we would pursue, we'd go off the uh, we'd get permission from the cadre, and we'd actually do clinics off of the uh stadium, the football stadium.
SPEAKER_01: Well, that kind of wore itself out, and you can only do that so many times.
SPEAKER_01: So we took a weekend trip, me and a couple guys, and we went around and we decided to visit where we thought we could find some some serious you know cliffs in Illinois, which brought us back to my hometown.
SPEAKER_01: I said, hey guys, I got a place that has burdened me since childhood that I want to scale this.
SPEAKER_01: At least I can send a note out to my brothers growing up.
SPEAKER_01: I conquered it, man.
SPEAKER_01: And so we did.
SPEAKER_01: We went up, we found some trees, we found some um stable points of access, and we we did.
SPEAKER_01: We negotiated the cliff, we propelled down, it was great.
SPEAKER_01: And um, we actually pulled up, and my buddies that were with me were like, seriously?
SPEAKER_01: Uh it's like 80 feet, dude.
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, hey, listen, it's important to me.
SPEAKER_01: Please at least uh you know satisfy this for me.
SPEAKER_01: I got I gotta send this email, I gotta tell the guys I did this finally.
SPEAKER_01: So, and they said, Okay, cool, man.
SPEAKER_01: So, anyways, we had a good time.
SPEAKER_01: That's kind of the physical ledge that we find ourselves and when we seek out those things.
SPEAKER_01: But what about the ledges that come to us that are unexpected that cause us to pause in life?
SPEAKER_01: And I'm talking about right now who do we marry?
SPEAKER_01: The choice to marry the right person, um, the career that we're gonna pursue, or job path, even changing midway through what you thought your calling was after schooling and being in a job, and you changed industries entirely.
SPEAKER_01: I've got a good brother here I've talked to and prayed with here, who's contemplating and actively pursuing leaving the family business to go pursue law enforcement.
SPEAKER_01: And the big challenge, and just really um the decision that that means for the family and what that's going to look like for their personal life.
SPEAKER_01: Um having children.
SPEAKER_01: Some people get married, decide one spouse wants one, one doesn't.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes you uh think you're both calibrated in that direction and you want a family, and then you decide that maybe that's not the calling, and then you change your mind, and now you have to reconcile with each other and seek each other's hearts about those things.
SPEAKER_01: Um, you get the news of a family member who gets suddenly ill or sick and you have to grapple with that.
SPEAKER_01: Or somebody who, even further than that, passes away suddenly and goes to the next step.
SPEAKER_01: How do you process that?
SPEAKER_01: You get lab results back that aren't favorable, they're negative, they're unexpected, and what do you do with those moments?
SPEAKER_01: Those are ledges, guys, that we're brought to that in the moment that we get that news, we're brought to the very edge and we're looking over, and we don't know sometimes in our own mind, in our own wisdom, how we're gonna process, how we're gonna proceed, how we're gonna navigate that.
SPEAKER_01: We currently face that.
SPEAKER_01: It's not that we can't navigate it because we've navigated it three times, but if you've seen my wife, it should be obvious that we're expecting number four here pretty much any day, and we're excited about that.
SPEAKER_01: Minivan, boom.
SPEAKER_01: Hey, that decision just seems to get better and better every day.
SPEAKER_01: So we're prepared now for number four.
SPEAKER_01: In hindsight, God had to bring me to that ledge to be prepared for number four.
SPEAKER_01: Here we are.
SPEAKER_01: Um so the fears, and my wife and I we've been talking about this, and um, I'm gonna get a little bit more into detail about that later.
SPEAKER_01: But how do we navigate labor, the birth?
SPEAKER_01: Um, she's a warrior, she wants to do it without drugs, she wants a supernatural experience with God, and she's done it with two of the three already, and so she's pursuing that with her heart, and the agreements, the lies, the things that the enemy wants to put on us in those moments to take away our courage and how we go.
SPEAKER_01: James 2, 2 through 4.
SPEAKER_01: At those moments of the ledge, count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness, and let steadfastness have its full effect that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.
SPEAKER_01: I want to share with you the three actions I think that we face at the ledge.
SPEAKER_01: We can linger on it, we can leave it altogether, and we can leap off.
SPEAKER_01: All three of those actions require four things courage, faith, trust in the Lord, and obedience.
SPEAKER_01: Courage to face the challenges and obstacles before us, Deuteronomy 31, 6.
SPEAKER_01: Be strong and of good courage.
SPEAKER_01: Do not fear nor be afraid of them.
SPEAKER_01: For the Lord your God, he is the one who gives.
SPEAKER_01: Sorry, he is the one who goes with you.
SPEAKER_01: He will not leave you nor forsake you.
SPEAKER_01: Faith.
SPEAKER_01: We need faith that God will provide the needed resources for the tools and tasks ahead.
SPEAKER_01: He owns a cattle on a thousand hills, so he certainly has the ability to provide those resources for us.
SPEAKER_01: Trust.
SPEAKER_01: Trust that he will never leave us or forsake us.
SPEAKER_01: We saw that in Deuteronomy.
SPEAKER_01: That he knows our heart's desires and he promises to give them to us if we delight in him.
SPEAKER_01: 37 4.
SPEAKER_01: Psalms 37.4.
SPEAKER_01: The key there is we have to delight in the Lord at the ledge because he knows the desires of our heart and he's going to help us through those times.
SPEAKER_01: Obedience.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, that we would follow the Lord's leading in this process.
SPEAKER_01: His timing and his outcomes are perfect.
SPEAKER_01: He knows our lives and how they're supposed to look better than we do.
SPEAKER_01: And when we take the wheel, we take control over that, we change our course, we change our direct our trajectory.
SPEAKER_01: And I'll show you what that means sometimes when we leave the ledge too soon or we're not supposed to.
SPEAKER_01: At some point, all three of these actions have their appropriate place or use at the ledge of decision.
SPEAKER_01: So how do we discern which action is appropriate for that moment in time?
SPEAKER_01: At some point on this timeline, we will exhaust our own ideas, efforts, and resources trying to navigate the ledge in our own strength.
SPEAKER_01: My nephew has invited me, who is in full fit and vigor in his early 20s, to join him on a super Spartan race this uh May.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm thinking, okay, Johnny, what does that look like, man?
SPEAKER_01: How many hours, what's the duration, what's the endurance I need to get through this thing?
SPEAKER_01: Because um I'm not once what I was was, and if I ever was cool, I'm certainly not now.
SPEAKER_01: So what do I need to know to get through this thing?
SPEAKER_01: And he goes, Well, it's about three hours of obstacles, eight miles, and I'm going, in my mind, I'm going, I can do that.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, all right, ready.
SPEAKER_01: I could probably do that tomorrow, actually.
SPEAKER_01: You gotta climb some ropes and jump some walls, fire mud pits.
SPEAKER_01: Sounds awesome, let's do it.
SPEAKER_01: But in reality, I know all too well because when I jump on the battlefield of Turkey Bowl, the price I pay for the next three or four days, then I am nowhere near the physical condition to face the Spartan super brother mother race.
SPEAKER_01: And so there's gonna be training involved, and so I'm gonna have to come back to that ledge.
SPEAKER_01: I haven't even committed to him yet.
SPEAKER_01: I'm still kind of dodging it.
SPEAKER_01: He's like, the coupon expires for discount this week, bro.
SPEAKER_01: You got eight days.
SPEAKER_01: So in my mind, eight days.
SPEAKER_01: Eight days, and I'm back here.
SPEAKER_01: And then I know my destiny is in May on that gridiron, so we'll see what happens.
SPEAKER_01: Be praying for me.
SPEAKER_01: Um he's flying in from Phoenix, so what I did tell him is I said, fine, show up, dude, but I'll have one thing on you, and that's elevation.
SPEAKER_01: You may be 20, but you're at sea level or below, and so I'm gonna call it the Colorado Equalizer, brother.
SPEAKER_01: Come on.
SPEAKER_01: I hope to look over to it and be like, hey, hey, mount up with wings of eagles, right, bro?
SPEAKER_01: Let's go.
SPEAKER_01: He's a good kid.
SPEAKER_01: Um, we seek God's wisdom through prayer and reading his word.
SPEAKER_01: We seek to gain the mind of Christ through the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_01: And through this, we learn how to move forward, guys.
SPEAKER_01: Our knowledge of life's lessons and experience will only take us so far, and those resources will be easily depleted.
SPEAKER_01: Then we require a different kind of wisdom.
SPEAKER_01: We require a spiritual, godly wisdom.
SPEAKER_01: And wisdom, we had an interesting conversation about this at our staff retreat we had last week.
SPEAKER_01: We sat around, we talked about wisdom versus knowledge, and the insight on some of the little guys around that table was fascinating.
SPEAKER_01: They actually had better answers than all the adults.
SPEAKER_01: Uh the Sanders kids were there.
SPEAKER_01: And and little Samuel was like, What?
SPEAKER_01: Serious?
SPEAKER_01: I was like, you know, he came up with this awesome, and then Sam, too, was defining cornerstone and what that means in our faith.
SPEAKER_01: And I was just impressed with where our young people are.
SPEAKER_01: No, no, no, doing on my own, I'm sure I probably have a counseling jar that I'm gonna send him to see Kent when he's about my age.
SPEAKER_01: Um, but it's good.
SPEAKER_01: Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
SPEAKER_01: It may not be difficult to store up in the mind a vast quantity of facts within a comparatively short time, but the ability to form judgments requires the severe discipline of hard work and the tempering heat of experience and maturity.
SPEAKER_01: This is from Calvin Coolidge.
SPEAKER_01: So, knowledge is having the facts, and wisdom is knowing what to do with them.
SPEAKER_01: Paul gives us the intel we need in 1 Corinthians 2, 6 through 16, and this is kind of where I'm gonna hang the hat of the message as we discern knowledge and spiritual wisdom.
SPEAKER_01: And this would be something that we're not gonna have time to go into in depth that I wanted to today, um, but it would be a verse or some passages that you guys should chew on.
SPEAKER_01: We've talked about Steve, uh Steve's talked about the last couple weeks, how we chew on the words of God and get discernment through the scriptures and meditate there.
SPEAKER_01: And I think if you guys are facing ledges of your life, um, if you're not today, you will be uh very shortly, because they're just seasons of where we come to in them.
SPEAKER_01: And so, 1 Corinthians says this However we speak wisdom among those who are mature, yet not the wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing, but we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom of God ordained before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew, for had they known, they would have not have crucified the Lord of glory.
SPEAKER_01: But it is written, I has not seen nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love him.
SPEAKER_01: But God has revealed to them, has revealed them to us through his spirit.
SPEAKER_01: For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God.
SPEAKER_01: For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man?
SPEAKER_01: Which is in him.
SPEAKER_01: Even so, no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God.
SPEAKER_01: Now we have received not the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God.
SPEAKER_01: These things we also speak, not in words which man's wisdom teaches, but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.
SPEAKER_01: But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.
SPEAKER_01: But he who is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is rightly judged by no one.
SPEAKER_01: For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?
SPEAKER_01: But we have the mind of Christ, church.
SPEAKER_01: Okay?
SPEAKER_01: That's what we get from God through salvation, through entering in with him, for accepting and having Jesus as a relationship in our lives.
SPEAKER_01: We can obtain the mind of Christ at these ledges in our lives.
SPEAKER_01: Two things, and I would encourage you to go back and look at that passage.
SPEAKER_01: Again, it was 1 Corinthians.
SPEAKER_01: And I apologize, there's no notes on the app today, so I'll give this to you if you didn't get it.
SPEAKER_01: 1 Corinthians 2, 6 through 16.
SPEAKER_01: Go back through those passages and highlight or mark how many times Paul's talking about the Spirit.
SPEAKER_01: And there's the key right there.
SPEAKER_01: That's what we have available to us is the Spirit of the Lord, the Holy Spirit that can give us discernment, that gives us the mind of Christ at these moments.
SPEAKER_01: I think the other thing we get is that God is a fatherly figure to us.
SPEAKER_01: And Jesus instructs his disciples in how to pray when they ask him in Luke 11, and he says, our Father.
SPEAKER_01: And so a lot of us talk like that.
SPEAKER_01: That's when we pray, we do, we use Jesus' instruction about praying.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, we go to him, our Father.
SPEAKER_01: And God has a way of fathering us with brothers, our blood-stained allies, and people that are sages that have gone before and discerned wisdom.
SPEAKER_01: I had the privilege this week to spend time with a gentleman who is a sage.
SPEAKER_01: And what I mean by sage is he's experienced life in full effect.
SPEAKER_01: He's a sage in every way and every aspect of the word.
SPEAKER_01: He's a best-selling author.
SPEAKER_01: And this week he was able to share with a group of us guys the cliff notes of what an 80-year life looked like for him.
SPEAKER_01: And it was awesome.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I just was kind of, he orated and just talked from his experience, his life.
SPEAKER_01: And I was just sitting on the edge of my seat.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I wasn't, I was, it was fantastic, and I loved it.
SPEAKER_01: He talked about what it looked like to face the cliffs and ledges of his life and the lessons learned.
SPEAKER_01: It was encouraging to glean insight on this life.
SPEAKER_01: And he was joyful about it.
SPEAKER_01: He was thankful.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, at the end, it's like there was no bitterness about what hadn't happened yet or what hadn't, uh, what he hadn't accomplished.
SPEAKER_01: He was generally overcome by emotion about the joy and thankfulness to God for not only the struggles, but for the victories and the things that he's walked through and come through on the other side.
SPEAKER_01: And it was just a pleasure to be with him.
SPEAKER_01: It's such a rich experience when God fathers us that way for me, and I know others of us too.
SPEAKER_01: I have brothers that are um that I've spoken to here at the church where dad is either unavailable or no longer on the earth, and we talk about even how we get fathered by each other, and God uses those moments in our hearts to bring us along, this masculine journey.
SPEAKER_01: And I know that's true of the women too, because my wife's had similar experiences as mentors in her life here at this church.
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, Phil Stanley's been a very dear mentor to my wife, and what a joy that's been to see my wife's heart come alive with the times that she shared with her, and just the motherhood and the femininity that they've uh experienced in that union.
SPEAKER_01: And I've and I've been able to see, you know, with George, been a faithful counselor to us at times, and certainly Kent, brother, I appreciate our times together too.
SPEAKER_01: So um gleaning from wisdom from these guys while we have it is a resource that should be exhausted whenever possible.
SPEAKER_01: So I encourage you guys, if you don't have a mentor in your lives, get one, because it makes all the difference when you're at the ledge, because God will speak through them at that time into your lives and show you how you're gonna navigate.
SPEAKER_01: First action we face, I'm gonna move through these quickly, guys, because I know we're getting long here.
SPEAKER_01: I apologize.
SPEAKER_01: Um we can leave the ledge.
SPEAKER_01: Not every ledge is meant to be crossed.
SPEAKER_01: Satan will bring us to plenty of ledges for his own purposes in our lives that requires us to know and have a sober mind, as Paul writes, a vigilance in God's word and seeking wise counsel.
SPEAKER_01: This goes back to bloodstained allies and in his word and seeking his wisdom.
SPEAKER_01: I had a time in my life where I was at a ledge in my banking career before I came to work full-time in the ministry, and be a professional Christian, I think, as Steve has said before.
SPEAKER_01: Um I appreciate that um term.
SPEAKER_01: I was at a at a meeting real quick, and some of you guys have heard this.
SPEAKER_01: I gave a longer version of this testimony at the Wholeheart Advance two years ago.
SPEAKER_01: But I was working in the bank, uh, trust officer, VP over uh wealth management at a bank here in town, and we were up in Denver at an event where there was a center of influences we're coming in.
SPEAKER_01: We had our attorneys that we worked with for estate planning, and our CPAs who helped us uh with our tax work.
SPEAKER_01: And so we brought them in, and during that time, one of my colleagues comes up to me and says, Hey, what are you doing after this?
SPEAKER_01: Do you got time to go out?
SPEAKER_01: I've got a um I've got one of the most prominent litigating attorneys in town for um accident and injury.
SPEAKER_01: So PI attorney, personal injury attorneys, and I'm and I'm one more trip to uh the gentleman's, you know, club to being his primary referral source.
SPEAKER_01: You want to go with me, get some drinks, treat him right, all this.
SPEAKER_01: Um and I looked at him and I said, you know, that's it's not how I do business, man.
SPEAKER_01: Um it's not how I get my business.
SPEAKER_01: And it was it was a moment of truth because something happened there that I wouldn't even be aware of for six months later.
SPEAKER_01: But I think because of how I was able to handle that situation with God's wisdom, my own personal convictions and my life with my family and with where I want to live, um, the payout would be to get a ton of sales, you know, meet the annual goal, solidify a referral relationship that who knows.
SPEAKER_01: Um that would have been the payout, potentially.
SPEAKER_01: But I'm thinking to myself, if that's how business is won in this guy, then it's probably just the next invite by another bank to another gentleman's club in the future, and then his allegiances are quickly won and lost.
SPEAKER_01: Um, the trade or the cost, guys, would have been my personal integrity, my character, and it was weighed in the balance of that decision.
SPEAKER_01: But I declined, and I told him why I didn't do it and why I didn't believe in it, and that's not how I was going to get business.
SPEAKER_01: I had a chance to meet with Paul Stanley, uh, one of the road overseers, in this season of my life, as I was being, I was coming to a ledge in my life about a decision about my own uh personal career, being having 13 years in the banking and finance world and what God was starting to do.
SPEAKER_01: And what I'd realized was that during that time leading up to that, I started to pray a very simple prayer on the way to work.
SPEAKER_01: My wife had noticed that you have skill sets, you have talents that your heart doesn't seem to be alive.
SPEAKER_01: And I was seeking God in this.
SPEAKER_01: And so on the way to work, every every day, I'd say, God, father me today.
SPEAKER_01: I need you to father me in this aspect.
SPEAKER_01: My earthly father had passed away when I was 21, and so I was seeking counsel where I could find it with godly men and Christian mentors, but I was seeking God the Father in this moment to give me wisdom and discernment and how to face this ledge in my life.
SPEAKER_01: And meanwhile, things continue to go awry at the bank job, and things start to not make sense.
SPEAKER_01: And two plus two equals seven and two-quarters or something.
SPEAKER_01: And you're going, how are we getting here, guys?
SPEAKER_01: And a lot of things start adding up.
SPEAKER_01: And so my prayer, God, father me today and reveal your purpose for my life.
SPEAKER_01: I want to serve you.
SPEAKER_01: There's work to be done with my hands.
SPEAKER_01: Please reveal that to me.
SPEAKER_01: I want to know what that is.
SPEAKER_01: I want you to use the days of my life, the energy of my life I want to give to your kingdom.
SPEAKER_01: And a version of that, I prayed every day on the way to work, um, listening to Christian worship music and entering into that prayer.
SPEAKER_01: And the council and the times that we were able to meet too.
SPEAKER_01: I just appreciated um Paul Stanley's uh encouragement, words of uh experience and wisdom in those moments.
SPEAKER_01: Long story short, had to play out, uh, came to a decision point where the bank job was ceasing, and by every effort of my own, I had a couple referral sources that would have probably met my sales goal for the next three years, but management was stalled at signing some paperwork that would have made that relationship possible.
SPEAKER_01: And I kept asking why, why, why?
SPEAKER_01: Because the guy who invited me to the gentleman's club, my colleague, had a similar experience, and it took two weeks for the management to sign that paperwork and move forward with that with his referral source.
SPEAKER_01: But it was, I was approaching uh four months at this point, and it was the same kind of deal.
SPEAKER_01: It shouldn't have had to be reworked, but I kept getting stalled and redirected, and things weren't adding up.
SPEAKER_01: I'm going, okay, God's moving here, God's doing some things here.
SPEAKER_01: I've been praying, and so brace myself for impact, right?
SPEAKER_01: I'm stepping up, bracing for impact.
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna have to jump or leap at some point.
SPEAKER_01: And what happened next was God gave me an opportunity.
SPEAKER_01: Um, Steve came beside me.
SPEAKER_01: We had a conversation about what full-time ministry here at the church would look like with him, the needs in front of us, and how I could support the road.
SPEAKER_01: At the same time, I had a headhunter call me and give me an opportunity.
SPEAKER_01: Kind of a everything in my corporate life that I was working towards and for was about to be handed to me.
SPEAKER_01: It was a beach job in Florida, company car, clubhouse, or country club membership, you know, handsome, handsome six-figure salary, instant stock options in the company, and it would have been financially a game changer for our family, and it was something that I was working towards in my corporate career.
SPEAKER_01: I was 36 at the time, and thinking, what an opportunity to be a trust man or a manager of a trust shop down in Florida living by my sister.
SPEAKER_01: So there's this, the corporate golden ring, and then there's the answer to my heart's desires of seeking adventure with God and his kingdom and going after with everything that I had.
SPEAKER_01: And financially, if you looked at him, it wouldn't even make sense to you.
SPEAKER_01: You'd be like, well, of course, you know, if you're seeking that, then that's where you're gonna go.
SPEAKER_01: But um, my wife and I we prayed and fasted, and it didn't take us long, and it was clear the direction that I had to go because I could see myself already down the road where I would be in a couple years at that job.
SPEAKER_01: Financially ahead, sturdy bank account, you know, feeling good, goal accomplished, another check mark in the box, uh moving up the ladder.
SPEAKER_01: But my heart would be dead, I would not be alive, I wouldn't be feeling excited about life.
SPEAKER_01: And so we we chose the road less traveled, as it were.
SPEAKER_01: Fitting.
SPEAKER_01: So, amen.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
SPEAKER_01: Appreciate that.
SPEAKER_01: And praise God.
SPEAKER_01: Praise God, because in that moment I needed courage and faith and trust and obedience because he knew me better than I knew myself, guys.
SPEAKER_01: And that's that's what I want to leave uh with you today as we talk through here.
SPEAKER_01: Again, sometimes we leave the ledge that we're supposed to cross with God's will, and he brings us back to it.
SPEAKER_01: And um, you're familiar with the story of Jonah, and he uh decides not to go to Nineveh initially and finds himself in the belly of a fish for three days in darkness.
SPEAKER_01: I can't even imagine what my prayers would be like in that moment.
SPEAKER_01: But I would definitely be pleading, Nineveh doesn't look so bad, God.
SPEAKER_01: Yes, I'll go.
SPEAKER_01: I'll go.
SPEAKER_01: I don't want to die in a whale's belly, and nobody ever knows what happens to me.
SPEAKER_01: And so God answers his prayer and he doesn't spit him up at home, he spits him on the beach to go do the mission.
SPEAKER_01: Awesome, I love it.
SPEAKER_01: It's like, you're okay, fine, man, here you go.
SPEAKER_01: And then he's on Nineveh's beach shores, and he's got to go do the work and give the message.
SPEAKER_01: And God blesses that, and it's great.
SPEAKER_01: Um in the story of Daniel, we see him leave the ledge of Nebuchadnezzar for his own righteousness.
SPEAKER_01: Um, not for his own righteousness, but for the Lord's glory and for the righteousness there.
SPEAKER_01: And he gets tested, and Daniel would be Daniel and his friends would later be found ten times better than other any other man in the land because of his faithfulness to God.
SPEAKER_01: Nebuchadnezzar would find this in him.
SPEAKER_01: Um and so I think we see encouragement that way.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes we need to leap.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes you have to come up to the ledge, and at that moment, you have to act quickly with the sermon of wisdom, but it requires a quick decision, and you've got to just move forward.
SPEAKER_01: Because you can hang there at the ledge, and some things are gonna happen to you.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, Joseph, Potiphar's wife, quick decision.
SPEAKER_01: Moment of truth, option to be with Potiphar's wife.
SPEAKER_01: He, in that moment, he decides to jump, literally, or leap out of his clothes and run through the halls naked, because that was the best choice for him, for God's calling, for his integrity and for his character.
SPEAKER_01: He would rather have run through the halls completely in the birthday suit than to sit there with Potiphar's wife and reap the actions of that decision.
SPEAKER_01: So he drops the mic and he leaves and he's running out without robes.
SPEAKER_01: And I think we can take encouragement that sometimes life calls us to do that when we know it's right and wrong, guys.
SPEAKER_01: Church.
SPEAKER_01: I like Peter's blind faith.
SPEAKER_01: We talked about Peter this week in um in in middle school, and and uh Mike brought a good message for our kids.
SPEAKER_01: But I was also in Peter's uh thought process and thinking about him in the early days.
SPEAKER_01: Peter before Pentecost, right?
SPEAKER_01: We we love this guy because we can all kind of relate to him.
SPEAKER_01: He's uh he goes with his heart first oftentimes, and um, and that's and that's also good in moments, but he has the courage to leap onto the water and and walk on water and experience that with Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: And he gets he gets condemned a little bit about, you know, ye have little faith.
SPEAKER_01: But I like to think about that moment.
SPEAKER_01: I'm going, let's give him a little cred because he does actually leap out of the boat, and none of the other guys do.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm thinking, well, let's give him a little love here for that, at least.
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I mean, Jesus makes a good point, and that Peter wasn't ready yet for the faith that it would need, that he would need to do the work that God had for him until after Pentecost.
SPEAKER_01: You guys, we got uh the book club author all in, and Mark Batterson in one of those chapters talks about, for those of you who been reading, he identifies a moment in his life, a cliff or alleged his life, where he has to leap and he has to take the faith step, and he leaves a full ride scholarship after his freshman year at University of Chicago, top school in the nation, and he leaps into the ministry, decides to go down to a Bible college in Springfield, Missouri, and he walks you through that.
SPEAKER_01: But there's a moment in his life that he's identified as a leap of faith into where's God's calling him and with his direction, his purpose.
SPEAKER_01: My last point here and what we do at the Ledge Church is um we linger.
SPEAKER_01: And what does it mean to linger at the tough decisions we face?
SPEAKER_01: To linger feels the most natural to us.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it doesn't feel natural to just leap.
SPEAKER_01: And certainly there's a time where we have to linger.
SPEAKER_01: So we have to discern God's will.
SPEAKER_01: We can over we can be overcome if we linger too long, and I'm thought about.
SPEAKER_01: We used to take trips down to the Grand Canyon, we'd take a hiking trip, and there'd be seven waterfalls, or there was a lot of waterfalls down there.
SPEAKER_01: It's a beautiful place.
SPEAKER_01: Have a soup high falls.
SPEAKER_01: I've talked about it, I think, at at other moments when I've had a chance to speak.
SPEAKER_01: But we went down there, I think, probably six summers in a row.
SPEAKER_01: Man and I would do a backpacking trip, and it was about a uh marathon round trip, 13 miles up, 13 miles down, and we'd spend three or four days in the canyons in the belly there.
SPEAKER_01: And once you got down there, it's like you went from stark death desert, people die in this place because there's no life, and you see the buzzards.
SPEAKER_01: But then when you get down to the bottom, um, it's fertile.
SPEAKER_01: Water's flowing, it turns green, the smell changes, the trees are green, and it's awesome.
SPEAKER_01: It's just a whole different environment down there.
SPEAKER_01: It's actually rated on National Geographics one of the seven wonders or of the world must-see modern day.
SPEAKER_01: And it's just it's fantastic, it's beautiful down there.
SPEAKER_01: But when you're down there, you have a chance to hike up in different places and you see these pools that the waterfalls flow into, and you can go to different ledges and jump into the pool.
SPEAKER_01: And oftentimes the challenge is getting up and it's a difficult path, and then you find yourself at the moment of truth on a 50 or 40-foot ledge looking over at the water below, and there's a line behind you, so you know you're not going back, and everybody's waiting for you to get your courage up and you know do the jump.
SPEAKER_01: And you get there for a minute, and you can really, and you guys, if you've ever been in those moments, you can certainly see uh where your turret your courage and your faith can start to get robbed from you.
SPEAKER_01: And if you stay there too long, if you linger too long, you lose the ability to go forward unless somebody comes up and pushes you off.
SPEAKER_01: Which may or may not have happened with a guy in front of me, because I'm watching him and he's losing heart, and I'm starting to lose heart watching him lose heart, and I'm going, go, dude, it's time to go.
SPEAKER_01: I gotta get up and do this thing.
SPEAKER_01: Um so sometimes we do.
SPEAKER_01: Uh I think to gain a deeper understanding to what to do in the moments, I want to give an example of where Jesus goes and how he gets his own mind and how we're to get the mind of Christ.
SPEAKER_01: And it's a moment of truth for him.
SPEAKER_01: He does it at the Mount of Olives, where we find him praying in the Garden of Gethsemane.
SPEAKER_01: He's 24 hours away from the biggest ledge of his ministry and life, the cross of Calvary.
SPEAKER_01: He knows what's ahead and what he faces, immense pain, suffering, ultimately his death on the cross.
SPEAKER_01: We see a very human reaction that we can all relate to in his disposition here, given the situation.
SPEAKER_01: We can all understand the sorrow and agony as we pull on moments of our own lives where we've been there and we said, I can't go forward.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe I can.
SPEAKER_01: I don't want to.
SPEAKER_01: If there's another way, help me find it.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus is preparing his mind and his heart at this moment to face what's in front of him.
SPEAKER_01: We go to Luke 22, 39 through 46.
SPEAKER_01: Coming out, he went to the Mount of Olives as he was accustomed, and his disciples followed him.
SPEAKER_01: When he came to the place, he said to them, I pray that you may not enter into temptation.
SPEAKER_01: And that, and he was withdrawn from them about a stone's throw.
SPEAKER_01: And he went and he knelt down and praying, saying, Father, if it is your will, take this cup away from me.
SPEAKER_01: Nevertheless, not my will but yours be done.
SPEAKER_01: Then an angel came and appeared to him from heaven, and it had to strengthen him.
SPEAKER_01: And being in agony, he prayed more earnestly.
SPEAKER_01: Then sweat became like drops of blood falling to the ground.
SPEAKER_01: Then he rose up from the prayer and come to his disciples, and he found them sleeping from sorrow.
SPEAKER_01: And he said to them, Why do you sleep?
SPEAKER_01: Rise and pray, lest ye enter into temptation.
SPEAKER_01: In the same story accounted in the Gospel of Matthew 26, 37 through 38, we read this, and I like how Matthew describes a little bit more detail where Jesus' mind is at this point.
SPEAKER_01: He began to be sorrowful and deeply distressed, and then he said to them, My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death.
SPEAKER_01: Stay here, watch with me.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus in this moment's needing bloodstained allies.
SPEAKER_01: He's needing his brothers to pray with him.
SPEAKER_01: He's not finding them.
SPEAKER_01: He has to see God, and sometimes we do.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes this is something, a journey we'll have to take on our own church, and we'll have to seek God, and he'll be faithful to us as we see he sends the angel to strengthen Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Though God the Father would not let Jesus bypass the upcoming suffering, he did send an angel to him.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus is praying, Take the cup from me.
SPEAKER_01: If I don't have to do this, is there another way to ransom the sins of the world without my sacrificial death?
SPEAKER_01: And being in agony, he prayed more earnestly.
SPEAKER_01: Then his sweat became like blood falling to the ground.
SPEAKER_01: As he prayed, Jesus sweat poured off his body as if he was bleeding.
SPEAKER_01: And some believers, or some believe Luke is describing a condition here called hemodrosis, in which sweat and blood mingle in extreme cases of anxiety.
SPEAKER_01: The closest I've ever come to seeing this in my own life was in the birth of our second daughter with my wife, who was going through it all natural in the hospital.
SPEAKER_01: And at the moment of birth, the actual moment where little Sophia was going to come out, she was pushing, she was so focused that her face started to get these red spots, and she was popping micro blood cells in her face.
SPEAKER_01: And so afterwards she was speckled.
SPEAKER_01: And I thought, had she gone on any longer, the sweat and the blood would have come through, and I would have maybe seen that.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I've never seen that happen before, and it was wild.
SPEAKER_01: Um and I've never had that kind of focus or that kind of pain in my life, and so my hat's off to her.
SPEAKER_01: She is a warrior in what she faces and uh the strongest person I've known.
SPEAKER_01: I couldn't do what she does.
SPEAKER_01: I know I I come in with a band-aid and she's, you know, she's helping me fix my boo-boos.
SPEAKER_01: But um she's like giving birth without Vicodin.
SPEAKER_01: It's awesome.
SPEAKER_01: I don't even think they give you Vicodin, but that's what I would be asking for.
SPEAKER_01: Um anyway, she's an inspiration in a moment there that I've seen the closest thing in those moments.
SPEAKER_01: What we glean from Jesus in his prayer is that two things.
SPEAKER_01: He prays it three times, and we don't know the duration of those three sessions, but we know in Matthew he has to come back and he prays it three times in preparation for Sorry.
SPEAKER_01: If the Son of God has to do that, why do we think that it's gonna be as easier, easier for us that we come up to the ledge and we're going, okay, I don't know how to cross this, I'll say a quick prayer.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'm gonna take the stairs.
SPEAKER_01: No, that's not what God has for us.
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna face the ledge, and we might have to come back three, four, five times to seek his will.
SPEAKER_01: We have to be obedient.
SPEAKER_01: That's what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_01: We have to take courage here, church, because if Jesus had to do it, then we certainly shouldn't think that we don't.
SPEAKER_01: To linger on the massive ledge like this requires us to cry out to the Father and pray for his wisdom and courage, to have the faith, to trust in it, and then to be obedient to move forward, to learn the will of God, not our own.
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SPEAKER_00: today and be sure to listen to the next edition of The Road.