THE CONFERENCE - Turns Out, You Win By Winning - Steve Deace - Session 3
Episode Stats
Words per minute
152.7031
Harmful content
Misogyny
14
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Toxicity
19
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Hate speech
34
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Summary
In this episode, Pastor Ken gives a keynote address at the 2019 World Future Church Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. God bless! - Welcome to Church ALIVE, where you can always find content that's fresh, real, and powerful for your life!
Transcript
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we are going to discuss we win by winning all right i like winning um you guys may be here
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my oldest daughter anastasia on the show sometimes she she can tell you stories about
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wiffle ball in the backyard i still live in the same house that she grew up in
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we would play wiffle ball in the backyard and i'd hit every single one of her pitches over
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the fence every time. And I'd make her go get every single one of them. And she'd be,
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you know, tearing up. Can we stop? When you stop me, we will stop. When you catch the
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ball, I'm out. Right? I mean, I didn't let our kids win ever at anything. Not once. We're
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about to say goodbye to our final kid. Noah graduates here in about a month, and Amy is
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starting to tell me. He's starting to remind me more and more of you as he gets older.
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I think that is a compliment. I'm going to take that as such, okay? But show me a gracious
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loser, man, and I'll show you a loser every single time, all right? I like winning, and
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And one of my real addictions and vices is competition.
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Shoots and ladders, candy land with the kids, it's a competition.
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We might play board games in our home about once a year, all right?
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Because this is going to end in a family feud, a divorce, estrangement, all right?
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I mean, let's just say I set the mood in our home for a very competitive environment.
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And when I first started out in what God called me to do, I had to learn some lessons about what this means in the kingdom of God compared to what it means in the city of man.
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And over the years, I made some mistakes, some costly ones, in fact.
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One of them I alluded to on the panel earlier today.
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And so, you know, I loved Kenny Rogers when I was a kid.
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So my talk here today is to quote the great prophet Kenny Rogers from his great hymn, Coward of the County.
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Basically, what I'm going to do here for the next 40 minutes or so is urge you to promise me, son, not to do the things that I've done.
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To learn from the mistakes people like I that have gone down roads that many of you in this room are trying now to go down.
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And to learn from the mistakes people like me made.
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When there was never going to be conversations like this, there were never going to be conferences like this.
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Or in Moscow or in Ogden, there were never going to be these sorts of conversations.
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And, you know, I proudly believe that we should support the nation of Israel.
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If for no other reason, then it's a nice cudgel against Islam in the Middle East.
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But there is something wrong with the fact that the last generation of believers were way more aware
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of what was going on with the Israeli Defense Force on a given day than in their own country.
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All right? And so a lot of the redirection that you're trying to do, I'm in favor of it. That's
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why I'm here. That's why I met so many of you already that tune into our show, because you
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can sense the common themes and the common goals. So I want to state that up front. Maybe you sense
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a but coming. And you're right. But I want to make sure that you can learn from my mistakes.
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And then hold what I'm about to tell you up against the word of God.
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If you're a believer, you have the Holy Spirit inside of you.
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But after a lot of prayer and consideration, I'm going to say for the next few minutes
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something that I truly believe God wants me to say to those of you in this room
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and in other rooms like this around the country,
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and I hope you receive it with the heart that it's intended.
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That's why I gave you the disclaimer that I just did.
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And the Lord cares quite a bit about the way things are done.
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And if you look at the American left, they like to be defined by their intentions.
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I completely bankrupted the next generation with a welfare state.
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and all of the societal maladies and markers I claimed I was doing something about
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are now all way worse than they were before I got started.
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But my intentions were good, so don't judge me.
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But then on the right, we like to be judged by results.
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More importantly, for whom are we doing it for?
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the results on the outside for a while may seem like it is working.
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And I come from a business where you get all kinds of instant incentives
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Instant engagement, instant recognition, instant growth in a followership.
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but they don't guarantee necessarily that you are displaying discipleship.
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Remember that show from when I was a little kid?
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I'll just go ahead and nominate myself for the job, all right?
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If we do not attempt to advance the kingdom of God by the rules of his kingdom, we will not be.
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If we do not do this by the methods of God's kingdom and for his glory, he will not bless it.
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now over the last generation of third way big eva scam religion that usually meant i i can see some
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of you bristling and i used to sit in seats where you are hearing speakers say this and i would
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bristle too because i knew what was coming out comes the sweater vests out comes the hawaiian
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shirts and out comes the pleated khakis and the unstated 11th commandment on the third tablet
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which is the most important commandment of them all.
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And so maybe someone like me needs to be the one to bring this message.
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I remember the first time I ever spoke for my faith.
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I'm a fairly well-known local sports talk radio host.
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And one of the big mega churches in town has me come and invites me to come speak to the men.
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And so I began a tradition that I just renewed here
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before I came out to speak to you guys here this afternoon.
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I went and found the corner stall in the bathroom
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Another reason I do that is I get plausible deniability.
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If you don't like it and you're offended, don't blame me.
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And I got done, and I went out there and spoke,
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and I've had this happen so many times in my career.
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I go back and read the book A Nefarious Plot sometimes,
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And when I got done, the pastor who invited me,
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the men are cheering me, and the pastor who invited me
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comes up and he puts his arm around me and says, you did a great job. Very impressive. And I,
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you know, got really bowed up. Then he whispered something in my ear I have never forgotten.
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He said, you remind me of one of those Old Testament prophets, he told me, but
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just remember what people like me did to all the prophets.
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I've had that experience a lot. Over the course of my career, I've had friends, enemies,
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enemies become friends. Friends that became enemies, and then friends and enemies again.
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Basically, relationships with me are like the transfer portal in college sports, okay? There's
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one kid, he started at South Carolina, went and played at Ohio State, went back to South Carolina,
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went back to Ohio State, just announced yesterday he's going to South Carolina again. My kids can
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tell you there's all kinds of people that have been in and out of our home. They were friends
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with me for a while, and then when what they wanted out of me didn't line up with what I
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thought God was calling me to do, suddenly we become enemies. Any of this sound familiar to
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any of you guys at all? This has been my life for the last 15, 20 years, trying to take the
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message of a narrow road to a broad audience. And so it comes with its own pitfalls, even if
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you're even better at not stepping on rakes than I have proven to be.
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So we have to check our motivations all of the time
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Getting ready to go do a speaking engagement in Atlanta, Georgia
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It was the first time I'd ever been invited to speak outside of Iowa
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In the history of American Christian media is on the phone
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and if you've ever worked or followed Christian media
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this is the kind of call in my line of work you've been waiting for
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I eventually I just had to hold the phone away from my ear
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That there's a difference between accountability and gatekeeping.
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Jesus is the only one that gets to say follow me.
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I did try listening to this for a good 10 solid minutes
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I did. And I shot back. John the Baptist stood in the street, told King Herod he was a whoremonger
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and called his wife a whore in front of the entire town. And Jesus said, no man born of
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women is more blessed than he. And it got real quiet on the other end of the phone.
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And he said, what did you say? I said, nothing. And I just let him go on.
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Now, here's the thing. Years later, that exact same man, I would not be where I'm at in my career and standing before you with the audience I have now if it were not for him.
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Years later, he sponsored me. Years later, he wrote a letter to his board of directors, personally recommending they create a time slot in their network for me. And they did.
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is the name that I just mentioned, John the Baptist.
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Yet he is actually the first to recognize our Lord.
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He baptizes our Lord, gives his life for our Lord.
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Which just goes to show faithfulness isn't a tone.
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But most of the time in our culture, when we say things like,
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it's not what you said, but how you say it, we don't really mean that.
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What we really mean is there's no way you could say it that would be good.
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For example, the Christian school my son now goes to,
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years ago I came in and addressed the senior class.
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And I decided I was going to make my whole talk about,
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is it true that it's not what you say but how you say it?
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And so I had the boys of the senior class and on one end of the gym
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hey, who agrees with me that it's not what you say but how you say it?
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How many hands in the room went up, do you think?
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And I said, all right, I'm going to test that theorem right now.
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And I walked over to the girls and I said the following.
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I said, hey, 10 years from now, one of you is going to be cooking dinner in a home
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And he's going to say, oh, my goodness, you still fit in the same dress like it was when
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You're still as beautiful as the day we got married.
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And look, the kids, you've got them, I mean, they're minding, they're doing their homework, they're doing their chores.
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Is that my favorite dinner I'm smelling? What a blessed man I am.
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Oh, by the way, you know that new receptionist I told you about at the office?
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As quiet as you all are right now is as quiet as it was in that gym.
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And I said, now let me ask you, the senior class here at Iowa's largest Christian school,
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Are we sure it's not what you say, but how you say it?
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Gave you all the requisite third way Christianity Seldom magazine compliments and disclaimers.
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Complimented your beauty, your grace, your domestic proclivities.
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He got that all out of the way and then dropped the hammer on you.
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And then he even did it in like this really polite, uplifting, and hope-filled K-Love tone.
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Because it can be not what you say but how you say it.
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the only people on earth that really don't get what they want
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are the Christians saved against their own will
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Front row, aisle seat in the eternal smoking section.
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And as the believers, we're the ones that don't get our way.
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But here's the thing, that extends beyond our salvation, guys.
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And it extends to our sanctification and our justification as well.
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Without accountability, you will become everything you hate.
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Without accountability, you'll become everything you hate.
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You'll become the distant father, too demanding,
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that finds the one B or C on your son's report card
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and fixates on that and ignores and bypasses all the A's.
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You'll become the boss, widgets for widgets' sake,
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We have no higher mission here other than the business must make a profit.
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We're coming up on homeschool graduation season,
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completely out of context, 10 million times every year season.
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I mean, listen, I'm a big believer in homeschooling.
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We homeschooled both of our daughters all the way through.
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The only reason our son didn't get homeschooled all the way
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through is because it was very clear when he got to seventh grade,
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he needed a level of male competition that I just was not
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able to provide in the home unless he competed with me, and that was going to be bad. That's why
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he put him in a Christian school, so he would have to compete with other boys and learn what
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that is like. We are big advocates for it. Longtime friend of mine, Michael Ferris, Patrick Henry
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College, HSLDA, big believers in it. So it absolutely has its place.
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But the thing we have to remember too, though, is what are we equipping them for?
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Do we want them to just live a lifestyle that looks like holiness? Or do we want them to be
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able to be equipped to impact and advance the kingdom of God? Are we going to set up our own
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standard of conformity? Or are we going to use his standards? Because again, his ways are not our
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ways. His thoughts are not our thoughts. And yet even in the homeschool community, it's like the
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only verse the book of Jeremiah has is verse 11. And so the homeschool community will have
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Plans not to harm you, but to give you a hope in the future.
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In fact, have you read the entire rest of the book of Jeremiah?
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It starts off with the Jews went down in the valley of Topit.
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And they cast their babies into the fire to a demon.
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For this, God sent Nebuchadnezzar to conquer the people
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Basically, Nebuchadnezzar was the buckle of dad's belt
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And he spanked them harshly for the evil that they did
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And then he dispersed them for the next 70 years
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plans not to harm you but to give you a hope in the future
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we can't take the word of God out of context in either direction
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the great error of the last generation of the church in my opinion
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is that we took the second greatest commandment
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And therefore, what ended up happening is we were perfectly fine offending God.
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We just had to make sure we didn't offend people.
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Well, God is love, although, by the way, the amount of times in the Bible it says God is love
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as opposed to talking about his holiness is something like 20 to 1, but I digress.
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and so if we make it that the highest thing is,
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and the definition of loving our neighbor as ourselves is,
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whatever might offend and not accommodate our neighbor,
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There's a word for people who think they can edit the word of God.
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everyone in hell has something in common you know what it is they all had an opinion
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and they went to hell with those opinions people are in heaven for truth people are in hell for
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their opinions and so therefore we had to play to a crowd what would draw a crowd now listen
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pentecost three thousand men we don't even count the women and children three thousand men get
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say that would be by any definition today a megachurch. The amount of people in this room
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today would be called a megachurch. Calvin preached to churches of thousands, maybe the greatest
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English-speaking minister of all time, Charles Spurgeon, preached to churches that had thousands
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of people. Megachurch isn't a population, it's a mindset. It's where elders are replaced by boards
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of directors and creeds are replaced by mission statements. And we corporatize the church. We're
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What did Jesus preach? The Word of God, the whole thing. And back then, it was just the Old
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Testament. He was the New Testament coming to life before us. We had none of Paul's letters yet.
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So that means he's preaching in precatory prayers, judgments, warfare, the kind of stuff that just
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isn't polite to preach today. And the church growth consultants from Willow Creek and Saddleback
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told us. Won't bring in those soccer moms, see that as Karen, that are the key to unlocking the
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suburbs. That is, by the way, church growth consultants speak for you getting the level
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of funding you want to build the pottery barn church you desire. And it all came from this one
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lie that the greatest commandment now is to love the Lord, is to love your neighbor as you love
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yourself. And somewhere down the line is number two. Love the Lord your God while your heart,
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soul, strength, and mind. The summary of the first tablet. Love your neighbors, love yourself.
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The summary of the second. My concern, because I'm a student of history, and pendulums tend to
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swing violently in one direction or the other. Because as a species, the one thing we're, well,
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two things. The two things we're really good at as a species, we are all master idol makers.
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who I promise is cuter than all of your grandkids,
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We went over to watch her a couple of weeks ago,
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and she's like this redhead with blue eyes.
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The very picture of loveliness, Autumn Elizabeth,
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As we get older, here's the other thing we become great at too.
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Somebody breaks into your home, threatens your family.
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your instant reaction is to get up and harm them
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So there's nothing wrong, inherently wrong with reactionism
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It might even be the opposite reaction of what is bad
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but in the kingdom of God that does not make it good.
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God's standards are not subjective. He doesn't compare righteousness to what we understand as
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bad and therefore say, well, the opposite of what you think is bad is therefore good. No.
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Why do bad things happen to good people? Wrong. There aren't any good people.
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Why does God use problematic people? There's only problematic people.
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The standard and ethics of the kingdom of God are not the same as ours. He does not live a binary
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existence. He is both imminent and transcendent. And the challenge for us
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is to emulate that as best we can by the power of his Holy Spirit, the hope of glory Christ at
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work in us. So the reaction I fear I am starting to see, and I am worried about this, and I say
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this as someone that has made this mistake myself, the reaction to the old heresy of
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we can offend God but never offend our neighbor
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and just, let's just take the second commandment out altogether.
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Jesus said it's the second greatest commandment, folks.
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I still think it's kind of important to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.
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Some of you may have heard my interview recently
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who is very sympathetic to much of what's being said at this conference.
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But I had seen some things on his ex-account I was very troubled by.
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And I gave him a chance to tell me what he thought.
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If you listen to my reaction, over and over again, I kept saying to him,
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we have to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.
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I'm sorry that a generation of church growth consultants hijacked that to mean
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stand for nothing, believe in nothing, do nothing,
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and mega malls in the suburbs that sit open and do nothing but gather weeds to be mowed at two
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o'clock on a Tuesday while all literal hell is reeking and waving and breaking loose in the
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culture. I'm sorry that that phrase got hijacked. However, that doesn't mean God canceled it.
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It is still here. The goal of the believer is to not hear the jerkster called and they're all out
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you. That is not the goal. Now, it may happen no matter what we do, because look what they did to
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the green tree, and he healed his enemies. On the cross, he said, Father, forgive them. They know not
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what they do. While we were his enemies, Christ died for us. He healed his enemies. He saved his
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enemies, did more for his enemies than we could ever possibly dream or hope to do. They hung him
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nevertheless. But if that happens to you, dear brother and sister, let it be because your
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righteousness, holiness, convicts them of their lack of their own.
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not because you fulfilled the stereotype of ourselves for them.
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I get hired by companies and candidates to help them communicate.
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I have no way to come up with a non-offensive way to say,
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And hell is where you will go unless you believe in this one singular truth in all the cosmos
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And if you do not, and you deny that atonement and do not accept that grace and mercy,
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the hell you desire is where you will go no matter what else you do with the rest of your life.
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There is no non-offensive way for that message to be preached.
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but don't try to automatically be as offensive as you can either
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I want to speak specifically to pastors in this room
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and so they catered their messages to the crowd
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when your kids would rather have family movie night
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come back again and then we'll actually do our jobs
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but Sunday services are for the unbelievers and the seekers
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You are not to come, there's no twilight doubleheaders in the church.
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You don't come back later for the second game and then get the really good pitching.
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However, I think the challenge for the new generation that we're trying to raise up,
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and some of them are in this room, is that this thing right here,
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the amount of notes I've gotten over the course of my career
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I never intended to teach as much theology on my show
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Now it's the most asked for content that we do.
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The standing up here and preaching is the easy part.
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And I've had to accept in the last couple of years
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that I am in this role whether I want it or not.
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like a siren song, and the ability to reach way more people than I'd ever be able to get into
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one of my services. So now I'm going to do maybe the opposite, where the previous era of pastors
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watered down the messages for the crowd they could get that otherwise would not have come.
00:36:20.660
Because, of course, it was not the Holy Spirit bringing people to them, but their unique,
00:36:25.260
clever methods. God could only bake the cake himself. He needed humans to give him the
00:36:31.420
frosting. Your slam and praise team is what actually did it. God was like, oh, snap. I wasn't
00:36:38.740
sure how I was going to reach zip code 78115. And then Seeker Friendly Church ABXYZ came up
00:36:47.860
with this really cool solo. And look at the people there. Thank you, God. Thank you, humans.
00:36:52.520
That is literally the attitude many of our churches took the last quarter century or so
00:36:58.000
But here's the thing, the temptation of this thing now is though
00:37:07.920
With my ministry than I could ever hope to get into a room like this
00:37:12.620
And here's the thing, just like the previous generation changed the message
00:37:20.540
This thing encourages a different kind of communication
00:37:25.860
And often it's not the kinds of things you'd ever say from a pulpit.
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when they're sick, when their kid didn't come home last night
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When their mom is dying and you don't know that she knows Christ.
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If we went to incentivizing nicer than God heresy in the last generation,
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will incentivize your anger and frustration and venting
00:38:14.440
more than anything, any societal construct in human history.
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between not falling into one fallacy or another
00:38:41.680
the very men that gave them money for me to start my show
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that is the same John the Baptist who said
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if you want to know how you can tell if you are prophetically provoking people
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and this is a culture raise your hand if you don't think this culture needs prophetically
00:39:53.780
provoked because you're in the wrong room all right this culture needs prophetically provoked
00:39:59.700
every day 15 times on sunday and again back to what i said at the top i'm as competitive as they
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come. And I don't know about the rest of y'all, but I like culture wars better when my side wins.
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Can I get an amen on that? That being said, what is the test with whether we're building our own
00:40:19.860
brand, whether we have fallen into the trap of answering what this device wants and incentivizes?
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Because let me tell you what this device does not want, the word of God to go out.
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The question is, are we able to redeem something
00:40:58.080
In fact, John the Baptist shows up as a key player in someone else's story.
00:41:16.720
Even early on, when the Sanhedrin comes to him and says,
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When Christ confronts Saul on the road to Damascus,
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he does not say, why are you persecuting my followers?
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You can tell if you're prophetically provoking a culture
00:43:13.640
my wife and I went through a very difficult time
00:43:42.680
Todd and Aaron don't even know. I'm telling nobody. They found out when I admitted this to the
00:43:47.820
audience. Kids didn't know. They found out when I admitted this to the audience. I'm at the point
00:43:54.900
that I am doing maybe the most important work I think I'll ever do the rest of my career. I've
00:43:58.360
run into a handful of you that have said, you may have saved my life or someone I care about's life
00:44:03.460
for the work that you did during COVID. I got up one morning early on. I had questions. Something
00:44:09.260
seems suspicious to me. I just woke up one morning with a conviction, a deep, unabiding conviction
00:44:15.080
that the reason why a 14-year-old girl at Des Moines Lincoln High School had sex with her high
00:44:21.240
school senior boyfriend in the fall of 1972 and conceived me and everything I have gone through,
00:44:27.980
the abuse I went through, everything else I went through, was so that I would be in this moment
00:44:32.700
right here. And I was to take all the credibility and everything that I've worked so hard for and
00:44:38.400
built on and risk it all and go all in for this moment. My reason for being the platform God gave
00:44:44.660
me was this moment, go all in. I just knew. And I'm doing the most important work maybe I will ever do.
00:44:53.960
But I've neglected really what's supposed to be the most important work I will ever do.
00:44:58.640
And things are falling apart at home while I'm getting more accolades than ever at work.
00:45:32.280
Amy would not share a bed with me, and I'm sleeping alone.
00:45:37.220
I didn't act like God was not aware of what was going on.
00:45:40.420
I mean, God, I mean, I had out loud, long conversations deep into the night,
00:45:45.020
one-on-one, literal wrestling with God kind of stuff at night.
00:45:53.060
And I think that's maybe what it means when God says David is a man after his own heart.
00:45:57.120
Even though he's an accomplished to murder, he's a serial adulterer, he's a terrible father,
00:46:01.320
one of his sons rapes his daughter, he has nothing to say, causes a revolution in his own kingdom.
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But if you notice throughout the course of David's life, he falls a lot.
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But he always recognizes that God is God and I am not.
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And that humility is why God never runs out of grace for him.
00:46:25.460
And the line of the Messiah runs through him to this day.
00:46:48.740
please tell me that the jeans don't make my butt look big
00:47:04.480
A man, a God became man and gave his own life for me.
00:47:10.260
I've been redeemed at a high, bought back, saved at a high cost.
00:47:17.700
I am to be a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.
00:47:24.720
do I truly know God's perfect and pleasing will for my life
00:47:33.480
and I don't care how much of a following you have
00:47:37.760
you will not fulfill your mission in the kingdom of God
00:47:49.520
None of us are fit to tie the sandals that he wears.
00:47:57.960
And the drapes here can speak at this conference next year.
00:48:08.080
The opposite of the mistakes of the last era is not taking one reaction to the other extreme.
00:48:20.400
and the understanding that God is God and we are not.
00:48:27.960
So my final accountability or my final suggestion for you
00:48:56.920
and he sends one of his final disciples back to Christ
00:49:42.080
the words of his very first earthly sermon when he quotes from Isaiah 61
00:49:46.000
as he comes out of the wilderness and the 40 days of battle
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not fulfill our mission in the kingdom of God. Gatekeeping
00:50:04.120
and accountability are not the same thing. Just because
00:50:08.160
something was done one way in another era does not mean it has to be done this way
00:50:12.060
in this era. Just because something is done in one part of the country a certain way doesn't
00:50:16.380
mean it has to be done in another part of the country a certain way. Gatekeeping is not
00:50:21.460
accountability. But you know, sometimes your gatekeepers become your good accountability
00:50:27.900
partners. Like that older man who was trying to gatekeep me early in my career.
00:50:35.240
But I didn't turn my back on him. I didn't rebuke him. I listened.
00:51:02.080
I have to do this the way God wants me to do it
00:51:07.240
without accountability, you will not be able to say what Paul says to his spiritual son Timothy
00:51:15.120
at the end of his ministry. And if there's nothing more, I want nothing more in life.
00:51:21.400
As God is my witness, I want nothing more in life than my children to stand up at my funeral
00:51:27.120
and say these words about me one day. The old man was not perfect. We could tell you things you
00:51:35.020
don't even know. But over the long course of his life, here's
00:51:40.240
what we can say with confidence. He fought the good fight, he
00:51:43.640
kept the faith, and he finished the race. You will not finish
00:51:48.820
the race without accountability. You won't. And you
00:51:53.960
will just become a new generation's version of the
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previous generation you're trying to correct. Give God the
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glory he deserves. He needs apostles and not assassins. In fact, I think I'm going to close
00:52:12.720
there. I was in an emergency room in upstate New York almost exactly two years ago.
00:52:22.060
The making of our movie Nefarious darn near killed me once.
00:52:41.140
They're telling me that maybe they didn't actually
00:52:46.180
They might have to call the Centers for Disease Control.
00:53:00.620
but she can't stay with me because it's too crowded
00:53:04.660
I could just sense it, I tweeted out that night
00:53:14.220
and I wake up in the middle of the night and I can't sleep anymore
00:53:34.540
They said, hey, we're about to wake you up anyway.
00:53:36.300
We're concerned if you're laying down too long,
00:53:48.460
I have walked this sea corridor in this hospital room for three hours.
00:53:56.860
And it was like nothing else was happening in this world for me.
00:54:08.740
And in my spirit, I heard something I will never forget, and it broke me.
00:54:18.460
Because it's the kind of thing a loving father says to a son who needs correction.
00:54:26.640
And I heard, Stephen, I need apostles, not assassins.
00:54:48.460
You know, it doesn't have enough of priests, papas.
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We worry about, is this honoring and glorifying him?
00:55:15.480
or am I have to shuffle my feet because I'm embarrassed?
00:55:40.640
And that's what I want for all of you in this room
00:56:14.520
that important. None of us are. And that should free you up all the more to finish the race for