Engage Your Destiny - Ben Peterson

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to pray dot com. I'm Ben Peterson, the CEO
and founder of Engage Your Destiny. Please follow this profile
from more engaging content that we have crafted specifically for
military veterans and the warriors at heart. Also head to
our website to see how you can support ministry to
our active duty military. Now I charge you to take

(00:21):
today's message and use it to engage your destiny. One
of the greatest generals in world history was a man

(00:43):
by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte. The Napoleon complex, also
known as Napoleon syndrome and short man syndrome, is a
purported condition normally attributed to people of short stature. Michael,
I'm not talking about you. You're a giant, bro. But

(01:03):
they have an overly aggressive and domineering social behavior, and
it implies that such behavior is to compensate for the
subject's physical shortcomings. Y'all tracking Now, Napoleon was extremely insecure,
and yet he was one of the greatest generals of
all time. He was born into a minor family, and

(01:26):
he was extremely intelligent. He was determined to do great things,
but from a young age he wrestled with all these
insecurities around his class around his intelligence, and the inner
play of these, coupled with his persistent sensitivity to criticism,
drove his ambitions. Napoleon ascended through the military, and he

(01:47):
was extremely short, but he fought and led in over
eighty battles in his life as a general, losing only ten.
He was one of the most successful generals in his
way the world. A series of events and offenses and
lies led to open war between France and Russia in

(02:08):
eighteen eleven, and history had shown up until that point
that no army had ever survived the brutal winters of Russia.
Anyone aware of those. Russia is one of the coldest
places in the world, and it has so many open
planes that the wind gets fierce and the windshill is

(02:28):
out of control. And Napoleon disregarded historical evidence to not
go to war and advanced anyway. When he set out
for war, the French outnumbered the Russians two to one,
say two to one, and his plan was to overcompensate
and get back to France before the winter, and his

(02:48):
plan was to defeat the Russians in five weeks. The
Russians were able to hold off the advancing French army
until winter, and it was a disastrous defeat. It was
the greatest retreat in history. Napoleon led six hundred thousand
French troops into Russia and only one hundred thousand returned.

(03:09):
Half a million troops died to combat and two the cold. Insecurity.
Can you guys see how this man was plagued with insecurity?
He then got into war with Russia and that created
a horrible outcome. If we live our lives based on

(03:34):
insecurity and not knowing who we are, we will overcompensate
and put ourselves in situations that are not good. Yell, tracking,
there was one man in history who did not struggle
with insecurity at all. What's his name? This? This is

(03:55):
the easiest question. Jesus, And I thank you Jesus, and
we're going to talk about the temptations of Jesus and
what he dealt with because when Jesus went into a situation,
he knew who he was and he didn't have to
overcompensate for anything. Napoleon battled his life over compensating for

(04:19):
his insecurity, which led to his defeat. So Jesus has
been fasting in the wilderness for forty days and forty nights,
and he's at the end of his time, and the
devil comes to meet with him in the temptation of Jesus.
So we're going to go to Luke chapter four, verses
one to thirteen. Go ahead and write these scriptures down.

(04:43):
And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the
Jordan and was led by the spirit into the wilderness
for forty days, being tempted by the devil, and he
ate nothing during those days, and when they were ended,
he was hungry. The devil said to him, if you
are the of God, command this stone to become bredn

(05:04):
And Jesus answered him, it is written man shall not
live by bread alone. And the devil took him up
and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in
a moment in time, and said to him, to you,
I will give all this authority and their glory, for
it has been delivered to me, and I will give
it to whom I will. Y'all recognize that Satan has

(05:24):
control over this world right he's running the ship, and
that is why we worship, That's why we pray, that's
why we seek him to get his presence around us
so we can overcome the world that Satan is in
control of. And can you guys see by the events
happening around that Satan's kind of doing a good job
of running his ship. That's a roger. And so Satan says,

(05:48):
if you will then worship me, it will all be
yours verse eyan next life. And Jesus answered him, it
is he's You shall worship the Lord, your God, and
him only shall you serve. And he took him to
Jerusalem and set him on the pinnacle of the temple

(06:08):
and said, if you are the son of God, throw
yourself down from here, for it is written he will
command his angels concerning you to guard you. He's basically saying,
throw yourself down, because your angel should save you from
this if you are who you say you are, And
on their heads they will bear you up lest you
strike your foot against the stone, angels holding them up

(06:29):
so he doesn't fall right. And Jesus answered him, it
is said, you shall not put the Lord God to
the test. And when the devil had ended every temptation,
he departed from him until an opportune time. Jesus overcame
three major temptations. But we have to realize how we

(06:52):
do one thing is how we do everything. When you
do one thing one way with insecurity, it's going to
come out into every area of your life. And that's
why tonight we're going to focus on three areas to
create more self awareness of the temptations that come into
our life that God's love is not enough? And what
did we encounter in worship God's love? And this is

(07:18):
coming down to the lie. I want you to write
this down. I am not good enough. This is the
foundational lie that God is trying that the enemy is
trying to set every single day in your life. I
am not good enough. And here are the three lies

(07:38):
that we're going to overcome tonight. Number one, write this down.
I am what I do. I am what I do. Performance,
I am what I do performance. How many of you
feel like in the military your worth is based on

(08:01):
your performance every day? Right? The military is one of
the most performance driven organizations that exists. And newsflash, when
you are out of the Army, someday you are going
to be expected to perform. You're going to be expected
to sell, You're going to be expected to show up,

(08:21):
You're going to be expected to do what is asked
of you. But what takes place in our lives is
when we have insecurity about who we are and we
get so focused on what we are going to achieve,
we allow those achievements to define our identity instead of
being defined by who we are. In christ Amen, I

(08:45):
remember going back to accomplishments. I remember when my organization
pulled off the festival down in Daytona for veterans with
over thirty five thousand attendance. I had never worked harder
for any one day in my entire life. It was
a six million dollar event to do massive, and I

(09:07):
gave everything that I had, and my entire identity was
wrapped up in the performance of that event, completely wrapped
up in it. And I remember when that event ended.
Many of you have heard the story. We had some
financial trouble that came out of it, and we came
out of that event one point five million dollars in
debt and I had to fire twenty five people on
my team and there were only three left. My identity

(09:30):
out of that, out of that failure, was shattered. It
didn't matter that thirty five thousand people came, It didn't
matter that we had massive country artists, that we had
some of the biggest brands in the country support us.
It didn't matter that thousands of veterans got into programs
that got healing success after success after success. It didn't
matter because there was one level of one area of
failure that came out of it, and that achievement was

(09:54):
what was defining my identity. Are you tracking? And that
is where the bodyttomless pit of achievement will never be enough.
Write that down. Achievement is a bottomless pit and it
will never be enough. You'll never be able to fill it.
It doesn't matter how many schools you go to, it
doesn't matter what you get your PT test up to,

(10:17):
it doesn't matter what level of achievement you get. If
you are allowing those achievements to be who you are,
that I am what I do in my performance, it
will crumble. Y'all tracking, and this is what the enemy
tries to do with us every day, especially because we
have NCOs and we have leaders, and we have people
in front of us that are constantly measuring our performance.

(10:40):
But there's going to come a time in your life
where if you continue to set your foundation on being
what you do, it's going to be taken away from you,
and especially in my story, where my identity was so
built on what I did. I had to lose everything
in order to get to a place where nothing could
distract me except for me and God God. Because I

(11:01):
had nothing I could do. It took after that event
was over, it took over nine months to get this
ministry back up and go and get things going here
for Campbell, I had nine months to figure out what
I was going to do next. Do you have any
idea how horrible that was? I had nine months of
zero achievements. And what God was doing in me is
he was breaking my foundation because he knew he needed

(11:23):
to do more with my life. He has a plan
for my life, and so he was breaking down my
identity to say no, no, Nah, your identity is not in
your performance. It's in a relationship with me, defined by
who I say you are as my son or daughter.
And in each of your lives, God will take away
from you the things that you lift up in your

(11:45):
performance in order to get your attention. So learn from
my mistakes and begin to work on this now and
then and then number two, I am what I have possessions.

(12:05):
I am what I have possessions. Now This can get
a little tricky because possessions can also be seen as accomplishments,

(12:26):
where many of the people who join the military do
not come from a lot of money. We got any
silver spoons in here, I'm not one of them. The
majority of the people who come from the military do
not come from a lot of money, and they are
joining the military to try and make a better life
for themselves. Can we relate to that? I know I

(12:47):
was okay and the military provides that path. What happens
when we grow up and we see other people having
things that we don't have, it creates a form of insecurity,
and that insecurity sits there until there's an opportunity to

(13:08):
fill it with what it wants, which can look like
a brand new car. It can look like a cell phone,
It can look like a new TV and Xbox, it
can look like any one of these material possessions that
are like, Man, I made a decision that I'm not
gonna be broke, I'm not going to be poor. So
if I have these things, that means that my status
is here and I'm not going to be where I

(13:29):
came from. Y'all tracking again, building our foundation on something
that cannot last for eternity. Do you know what the
two things are that you will take into eternity? Number
one is your relationship with Jesus. Number two, write this

(13:51):
down is the relationships you have with others. Every possession,
the shirt, the clothes, the beats, sorry, liv the apple watch,
I'll call it someone else. Every one of it isn't

(14:11):
gonna last for eternity. And those possessions. There's nothing wrong
with buying things and having nice things, but those things
cannot take your heart. And so that's one area. It's
the possessions and the things that we buy, like giving
us this status and to prove that we are enough,

(14:33):
because that's what the enemy is trying to get us
to constantly do, is say I am not good enough.
But also possessions can come in the form of an achievement,
like getting an award, right because that possession, that thing
signifies your work and your achievement and your worth in
defining who you are. And so that's where I really

(14:55):
want to push you. Guys. Do you have your possessions
or do your possessions have you if they were all
gone tomorrow? Would you still worship him? Would you still
love him? Would you still be grateful for the breath
and your lungs. We just had a tornado that you
guys saw the tornado, You say, right, that was like

(15:16):
three miles from my house. What if that had come through?
What if I'd lost my home? These are the questions
we ask. And how quickly can it be gone? It
could be Ask Sylvester. There's a young man on Sylvester
Street that his kids know that died in that tornado
in Carsville, and that family's house is gone. The things

(15:40):
that you hold on too can be gone like that technology.
One emp and we're back in the stone age. This
world is so volatile and so uncertain. The one certainty
we have is Christ And so what I want to
tie a bow on this on is that I want
you to take a look at your and if you

(16:00):
have come from a family that was less than and
you made a judgment of I am gonna go and
get this and when I have this, then I will
be enough. That's what I want you into. Does that
make sense? And not letting possessions define your life and
who you are? Number three, I am what others think.

(16:27):
Number three, I am what others think. Opinions and this
one is big so often in the military. So if

(16:48):
we go back to what happened with Jesus, Satan is saying,
throw yourself off this building, right, and your angels will
save you, and you will be seen in such a
way where you are indestructible. I want you to write
that down, indestructible. And there's a lot of ways to

(17:10):
interpret this, but I believe that a portion of what
this scripture is getting into with the temptation of Christ
is our indestructibility being humans. And how often in the
military do we want to be seen as indestructible, right,
as being strong, as having all the energy, being able
to run, jump, do everything that the military asks of us,

(17:31):
and more. Right. And I remember in Iraq, dude, I
was I could run through a brick wall. I I
mean we were sixteen hours a day's working, two hours
in the gym, six hours of sleep, get up and
do it again, over and over and over again. I
came home jacked, I mean, I was a beast. And

(17:58):
then I hit a point a few months after coming
home where my shoulder started hurting, and then my next
started hurting, and then my knees started hurting. And I
remember and I wasn't lifting correctly. I was doing pull
ups with like my leg up, so I was like
doing these like full pull ups, and it was like
it was putting my shoulders forward. I screwed my body
up so badly. When I was twenty three years old,

(18:20):
it hurt me to walk. And I remember getting to
a point where I was so depressed because the beast
mode was gone right, and my identity was built on
being the beast mode. And this is where the enemy,
especially with military people, wants to get us. There was

(18:41):
this meme that I saw where it said that the
foundation of depression for every veteran is that I will
never be that great ever again. And so you guys
are in this phase where you're in top shape, You're
in some of the best conditioning you've ever been. Don't
let that be your identity because your body will never

(19:01):
be able to sustain that forever. It's gonna go away. Someday,
life's gonna change, Babies are gonna happen, like it's gonna
get right. How hard do you have to fight to
stay it right? I was with I was with one
of my friends came into town last night and we
were talking about because we went and we climbed Pike's
Peak and this was years ago, and me and me

(19:25):
and my other buddy, we were single at the time,
and so we were in great shape and we're running
up this mountain and our two other buddies had babies
at home, kids, and we were so mad at them
that they couldn't keep up with us on the mountain.
And they were like, do you realize we do not sleep?
You know, we're exhausted. And these were both guys that
were super fit guys at another point in their life,

(19:46):
but man, life hit them hard. And so this is
where at the foundational part of how we're gonna build
healthy relationships if our foundation is built on insecurity and
we are trying to fill ourselves with our performance, with
our possessions and the opinions of others of what they're
going to think of us, because that's all it's coming
down to. We're just trying to be good enough for

(20:07):
other people, right, and what they're gonna say about us?
Someone say something, okay, And so that's why I want
to bring us into a discussion about who we really

(20:28):
are in Christ. And in order to do that, we
got to confront these things of what we're building our
identity on, because we can never have strong and healthy relationships.
If we're coming in and we're insecure about our performance,
about what we do and don't have, and about what
other people say about us, we won't be able to

(20:49):
come into a relationship with someone to go on the
journey towards getting married and sharing a life together if
we are founded on insecurity. If we look at Jesus,
we need to begin to understand that this man stayed
true to his self and who he was, and he
didn't allow others to dictate his life. Jesus left his family,

(21:13):
and he disappointed them in doing so. They did not
want him to go into ministry and go do his thing.
He was judged by his community saying, aren't you the
carpenter's son. You're not qualified to be the Messiah. Those
are all the opinions of others. He also had Judas
betray him, He had Peter deny him the ways that

(21:37):
his true self was assaulted, but he stayed on mission,
and it got to the point where he was in
the gardens sweating blood, saying, Father, if there's any other
way that I can go through this without having to
suffer please let me out of this. But Jesus did
not allow any level of insecurity of what would happen
to him, what would happen to his body and his performance,

(21:59):
what he would lose in his possessions, and what anyone
was going to think of him to deter him from
going and being murdered on that cross so we could
all be set free from sin. He was steadfast in
the purpose that God had for his life because he
didn't deal with insecurity. He was so set in who
he was as a son of God. And so that's

(22:21):
where the fruit of this and what comes out of insecurity,
and that Jesus did not. I mean, we got two
things that happens insecurity will create two results. Write these down.
Number one e ft and run. I can't live up

(22:44):
to the performance, I can't live up to the possessions.
I can't live up to the opinions of others. So
effet and run, f everything and run. That's what fear
stands for. Faar f everything and run. Can't handle it,
I'm out. And number two is we try to control

(23:09):
everything around us. I'm gonna take control into my hands
and I'm going to perform. I'm gonna take control into
my hands, and I'm gonna get the things that I
want and I desire, so that I can prove that
I'm enough. I'm gonna take control into my hands of
what people are saying about me, are gossiping about me,
and I'm gonna get involved, and I'm gonna change this
and I'm gonna change that. And that's exactly what Napoleon did,
and it ended with half a million deaths. He took

(23:32):
control of everything and tried to control all the scenarios
and did it within his own strength, and it led
to complete destruction. Why is this so important bringing it
back to Napoleon Because there's leaders in this room. And
you may see yourself in some ways as insignificant, but

(23:53):
so was I in my early twenties until I started
running after Jesus with all I had and he began
to do things with my life. And there are men
and women in here who are going to make greater
impacts than you could ever dream. And that is why
your foundation has to be set in who you are,
in Jesus, not in these lies, so that you can

(24:18):
build and you can get stronger, and you can lead,
You can lead businesses, you can lead families, you can
raise children, you can lead companies, you can lead divisions,
you can lead nations. It all comes through security and
knowing who we are in him. Amen. Amen. So I

(24:40):
want to go into a time of discussion and get
deeper into this for you guys to have some time
and discussion with each other. But go to that next slide.
I want you guys to pair up and talk about
which of these three lives do you struggle with and
to focus on why. That's the whole discussion tonight. I
want you guys to have with each other, which lies

(25:02):
do you struggle with? And why? Where did they come from?
And when let's say I'm sitting here and I'm talking
to Gavin and he's telling me what he's he's insecure about.
What's my job? Listen and ask why and let him

(25:22):
get curious about that, and let's talk about that. Why
is that there? Where did that come from? History is
who we are and why we are the way we are.
And so by asking why, we're getting to the core
of why these things are here, because they're there for
a reason. I was out of shape as a teenager

(25:43):
and bullied by jocks. So I made a decision that
I'm going to become everything that cannot be bullied and
be strong and be a machine. Right. That's where my
identity came from. It came out of that broken that
brokenness that I found myself in, and I made a judgment.
I am never going to be that person ever again.
It's not a secure foundation. It's built on insecurity. So

(26:07):
I want you guys to pair up, find a pal,
a little one on one, ask these questions and then
partners ask why and have a discussion around that. And
that's where we're going to focus our time for the
rest of the night. Father, I pray you bless this discussion.
I thank you that you're with us, you're for us,
and you're not against us. God, I thank you that
you love us, that you have good plans for us,

(26:29):
And I thank you God for using this message and
the mistakes of my past, the mistakes of people and
all throughout history God for us to learn so that
we can become the leaders and the warriors that you
have called us to be, with a secure identity in
Jesus name. Amen. Yeah,