March 4, 2025 • 30 mins
How do we learn to train for spiritual things? What does spiritual battle look like? Join Apostle Dr. Lee Ann Marino live at Sanctuary International Fellowship Tabernacle - SIFT (Charlotte, North Carolina) for TRANSform 2024 for a humorous and practical life application as appeals to spiritual warfare in our everyday lives. (Intro and Conclusion Track "Ready to Rock" by Yvgeniy Sorokin, https://pixabay.com/users/eugenemyers-40510887/. Empire Transport Track "The Beauty of Green Legends" by DTXN1,https://pixabay.com/users/dtxn1-42017842/.)
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Welcome to Kingdom Now, the podcast featuring Faith with an Edge.
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Where we celebrate the Kingdom of God within you.
I am your host, Dr. Lee Ann Marino, apostle, author, podcaster, professor and theologian,
and founder of Spitfire Apostolic Ministries and all the works that go along with it.
I am excited to share this program with you as we explore the ends of counterculture
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Christianity present as you live out the Kingdom of God in your everyday life.
To learn more, visit my website at www.kingdonpowernow.org.
And now, our program, which features a variety of formats here, just for you.
Interviews on a variety of relative topics, teaching and preaching proclaim everywhere from my
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North Carolina studio to St. Shory and beyond.
And powerful insights here for now as we turn the world upside down everywhere we go.
[Applause]
Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, happy whatever time of day it is wherever
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you are.
And to our listeners in Nepal, we say, "Namaskar."
We hope that whatever time of day it is when you were listening that you were having a
good one.
And I welcome you to the special edition of the Kingdom Now podcast.
And I am your host, Apostle Dr. Lee Ann Marino here.
as the Spitfire serving as the voice of counterculture Christianity where we feature
the theme of faith with an edge.
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And if you'd like to learn more about the world of counterculture Christianity, feel free
to visit my website at www.kingdompowernow.org.
This edition of Kingdom Now was recorded live the first weekend in November 2024 as part
of Transform 2024 with the theme, "This means War."
The message is titled, "Training for bigger things."
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If you would like to learn more about the world of sanctuary International Fellowship Tabernacle,
feel free to visit our website at welcomeinthisplace.org.
So I had no idea what I was talking about when we started this.
And I ironically enough kind of picked a theme.
I guess we kind of mutually picked it like came up as a conversation months and months
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and months ago.
I had no idea what I was going to be talking about.
I had no clue where I was going to be going with it.
And you would think, "Okay, it's a really obvious thing."
And so then I sat there and I wrote all my notes out that I never used anyway.
And it was all nice and you don't see, it was all neat sort of.
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And see I didn't even cross anything out.
And then we're there yesterday because we had an event yesterday.
And I had a whole other thought for this message than all my nice little notes in the nice
of notebook.
And so now I have to kind of, "I'm not going to lie.
I don't even remember what passage I came from."
I know the other ones.
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I know the stuff I used toward the end, but I don't even remember what I start with.
But anyway, it's not really that important because we'll get where we need to go.
And that's something that I've always found.
We always seem to land where we're supposed to.
I'm into that.
So I was going to talk about the idea of training because the message is training for bigger
things.
Thank you, Julie Harvey for that because Julie Harvey said that and then I went, "That's my
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message."
Thank you, Julie.
But I had absolutely no idea where I was going to go in terms of where I'm actually winding
up.
So what I originally started with and where I was originally going to go with this was
to talk about training and to talk about things like, "If you've ever watched Rocky
and you watch him train in all the Rocky movies, you watch him train."
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And then I was going to use something a little bit closer to home and I was going to talk
about when you're in theater or you're in musical theater or you're in choir and you train
and what happens is they give you the song and you practice and you practice and you
practice and you practice it.
But then it occurred to me that we get those illustrations but that's not something that
everybody goes through, not everybody's in choir, not everybody boxes, not everybody does
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some of these things that we always use as the example for things.
And it occurred to me and somehow we all still know how to fight.
Okay, we might not have any experience with doing stuff over and over and over again in
practicing and that disciplinary aspect but you better all believe that everybody knows
how to fight.
And I started thinking about those examples and how that stuff kind of works in our lives.
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Where do we train to fight?
Where do we learn in the natural, how to do what we're going to do in the spiritual and
where do sometimes that line kind of get lost because it does get lost sometimes.
So where do we start?
And so the first thing I thought of was siblings.
Now I don't really have that experience with my siblings because my siblings are all
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a lot older than me.
And so I kind of explained it as a hierarchy that it was like they were kind of like up higher
than me on the food chain.
And so if we had a fight, parents automatically deferred to them because they were older and
because nobody ever really thought, gee, maybe they're in the wrong.
They're supposed to be the example, yada yada yada.
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And so I really didn't have that experience with my siblings.
I had it with my friends.
And so I started remembering all those years ago and how we used to fight at school.
And that sounds probably really, really weird to some people because some people I guess
they don't fight at school the way that Chuck is looking at me.
But sometimes we did.
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So I remember being in seventh grade and I was standing toe to toe literally like this
with my absolute arch enemy.
And so she was what we used to call a brown noser.
In other words, she was a kiss up.
And all the teachers loved her and her dad was on the radio.
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And so he was responsible for snow days as far as we were concerned.
So we all really liked him.
And she had to be in everything.
She had to be class president.
And I was the editor in chief of the school paper.
And that was my thing.
And she comes up to me one day and she says that she wants to be assistant editor.
And I said, how much power can one person have?
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And you know, we're kids.
And I'm saying this at like 13 years old.
And we got into it one morning before school.
And so much so that people were standing around us watching.
And I don't even remember to this day what we were talking about.
I don't remember what it was over.
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It was some issue of the day.
You know, that's probably still a issue today, but I don't remember it back then.
You know, this is like 94 or 95.
I don't remember what it was over.
We were having some wild and weird and stupid debate.
And I don't remember it was over.
And then there was another one who was my best friend, well, I was in junior high.
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And Jennifer, she is still on my Facebook page if she watches this.
And every year before we would break for the summer.
Every year about two weeks before we would have a fight.
And I to this day don't know why.
I don't remember what it was over.
I said, maybe we were prepared to not talk all summer because she would go to New Jersey.
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And I had to, you know, like stay home and pray that my knees didn't stick to the back
of the couch because it was so hot and we had no AC.
And I would be sitting there glaring at her and we're having this fight.
And I don't even know what it was over.
And in a hindsight, a lot of the stuff that we probably all got into fights with people
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over, we're probably stupid.
You took my pen, you took my pencil, you looked at me wrong.
You know, you wore the same shoes as me today.
Now we all show up in the same outfits all the time.
And it's like ironic and it's like a thing, but you know, that you're wearing my clothes,
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you know, kind of thing.
Copycat, yes, right, exactly.
And so we were mad about all these different things and things always went one of four
ways in the 90s.
Yo mama.
That's one of them.
And sometimes that got finished and sometimes it did not.
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Somebody jumped somebody else, which definitely didn't happen all that much.
We didn't have that many fist fights or that much kind of stuff at that time, but it was
possibility.
Then you have the things usually digressed into some really weird arguments of words that
didn't make much sense.
And so then something digresses into that vein.
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And then you've got friends trying to talk you out of the argument that you're in.
And so then you've got that stage of things where they're like, come on, this isn't worth
it.
You're going to get suspended.
You're going to get detention.
You're going to get whatever, you know, we need to do this.
But one of the commonalities that all these things have in common, which we've talked about
before, a lot of kids don't have today, our parents were not overly involved with us.
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And so we were there figuring out our own governance and our own fights and our
own polity by ourselves.
Parents leave your kids alone, let them figure some stuff out because that's very, very important
to a lot of the stuff that happens.
So we learned in fighting our positions.
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We learned our battlegrounds.
We learned what mattered to us.
And it was all right at some point if that changed.
It was all right if maybe we didn't have the same argument.
One of the reasons why I probably don't remember this argument from seventh grade, a girl
that I didn't like was because I probably don't have the same views today.
Whatever argument we were fighting on, and I remember because at the time I grew up, we're
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real conservative and she was real liberal.
And so that was often a conflict between the two of us.
And so I probably don't agree with what I said back then.
And that doesn't make me a hypocrite.
It means I'm a person.
It means I'm growing.
It means I'm learning.
I'm allowed to change my mind.
We all are.
And when it comes to fighting, we learned that in our process.
We learned a lot if we look at the natural aspect of fighting for the spiritual aspect of it.
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And one of the reasons why I've often said, I don't tend to like spiritual battle as a
church topic is because I don't think we teach it well.
We teach it spooky and weird and look.
I get chasing demons and cursing bloodlines and thinking that the reason why you're having
a bad day and you're stuck in traffic in Charlotte is because some ancestor somewhere
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way back called on some demon god is fun.
Okay, it's fun.
It sounds fun.
It sounds ridiculous, but it sounds fun.
It sounds a lot more fun than say, hey, some of the things that happen in our lives happen
because we make bad choices.
It's a lot more fun than saying, gee, maybe this is just a bad day.
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It's a lot more fun to get into all this weird, creepy stuff that doesn't make sense.
It's a lot more fun to run around the room and scream and shout and sweat and speak in
tongues and cuss demons than it is to go pay your electric bill.
But at some point in time, we still have to all do that.
And if we think about that principle that we learn how to fight along time ago and then
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somehow we get in a church and we forget that, that we're missing something in the natural
spiritual gap.
We're missing something in what God really wants us to learn and wants to teach us and we
learned it back then.
Preparation for better things.
God knew we were not going to be still having or hoping that we would not still be having
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the same junior high fight when we're 30 and 40 years old and 50 years old.
And it's ironic how social media has revived all that to a certain extent and
how a lot of people don't act much better than they did 20, 30, 40 years ago.
But we're supposed to be on to better things.
Some of these things that we're battling over are not important.
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And I will never forget the day I was on social media and someone started because they always
do.
And I literally said, I don't know this person.
I'm not ever going to meet this person.
I don't really care to talk with this person, thanks.
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So why am I going to sit on here and write an essay and do free homework for somebody I
don't even know and like when I have all these things to do.
And the point I'm getting at with that is that we have to have training for bigger things.
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God is not training us in the spirit to battle all these little things.
He's not teaching us and training us and bringing us up from those earlier times and from those
young errors where we did battle little things so that we can still be chasing and battling
and worrying about all this same stuff now.
And a lot of it is about that.
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And think about the stuff people argue about on social media.
After we get past politics, there's usually a couple of key things.
So we all know what number one probably is.
Everybody argues about abortion.
Everybody argues about gay people in church and then we start the holiness argument.
So about clothing, someone like someone's outfit, someone doesn't like someone's outfit
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and somehow that turns into a yo mama conversation.
That's about as mature as it is.
This one is lecturing about holiness and about this Bible verse and that Bible verse and
this and that.
When the Bible does not specify how long or short it is.
Just like the specification about men having short hair and women having long hair, doesn't
specify what's long and what's short.
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There's no inches in the Bible.
There's no cubic feet or I'm trying to think of foot like, what was the Roman measurements?
Anyway, I'm trying to think of what they were but there's like a four, something with a
foot, a candle or something like that.
There was like, no.
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There's no specifications.
And so we're arguing about all that stuff.
And so we're arguing over specific points on doctrine that a lot of times are really
very technical and not biblical and really don't go anywhere.
We're not being trained for that.
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That's not why we're in warfare.
The ancients using the Romans as the illustration did real things and did real battle and fought
huge vests, armies of space.
And we're sitting here supposed to be like that in the spiritual realm arguing over worrying
about all this petty stuff.
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And once awhile, years ago, I knew someone who thought everything was a demon and those people are fun.
And she had a kid and the kid fell in the bathtub.
Kids do that.
Okay.
Kid fell in a bathtub.
Kids trip, right?
Okay.
You know a bunch of kids.
They fall.
You have kids.
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They fall.
It's the devil and somebody's working which got against me and all my family.
And I don't know how to break it.
Nobody cared about her.
She wasn't that interesting.
No one was after her.
I'm not kidding.
He fell down.
That was it.
But if we don't get to the idea of bigger things and I think that it's important to state
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that the bigger thing is not us because I know that in a lot of church circles, we're
the big thing God wants to do.
No, we're not.
God gives us something to do and he gives us a part of us and we're not ever going to
get to those bigger things if we just keep staying on all of these really small minor things
that really don't matter in war.
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Like you say, you have to work together.
And in war, we can't be victorious in the battle.
If our focus is always on whatever's going on over there.
And Hebrews 12, that's what I'm reading from.
And Hebrews 12, and I'm reading from the amplified, which means this is not my normal Bible.
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And that means that this book, of course, isn't all highlighted and colored.
So I have to go and look for what I'm looking for.
We're going to start in verse 5, Hebrews 12.
And have you completely forgot the divine word of appeal and encouragement in which you
are reason and with and addressed as sons.
I, son, do not think lightly or scorn just submit to the correction and discipline of the
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Lord, nor lose courage and give up and thank when you are approved or corrected by him for
the Lord corrects and disciplines everyone whom he loves and he punishes even scourges
every son whom he accepts and welcomes to his heart and cherishes.
You must submit to and endure correction for discipline.
God is dealing with you as sons for what son is there whom his father does not thus train
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and correct in discipline.
Now nobody really likes getting discipline.
And I don't think it grows on us as we get older.
If anything, I think that we're kind of more resistant to it.
I think that the older we get, we have the attitude that we don't need it.
We get kind of this attitude that we're all right and we're grown and we're this and we're
that.
We don't need to hear anything from anybody else.
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And I'm also going to say that's very American.
That's very much in line with the ideals that we were talking about.
We like the cowboy idea that we are self-sufficient and we don't need anybody and we don't really
need the idea of discipline.
But the body of the kind does establish that discipline is a godly thing just like authorities
of godly thing and there can be bad examples of it and there can be extreme examples of
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it and there can be wrong examples of it and there can be over discipline examples
of it that go beyond what God would want and there can also be good examples of it.
The reason why God wants us to be disciplined is so that we can be self-disciplined.
If you think about what they do in the army or what they do in the military, they train
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people to be soldiers to be self-disciplined like boot camp and if you have ever dated or married
somebody who has been in the military, you know that they all have really interesting
hangups like their shoes.
I dated a guy in the Navy, not current guy, but the guy many, many years ago he was in the
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Navy and he had this thing about his shoes and that's because they inspect the shoes in
the Navy and so they had to look a certain way.
My father was funny about his laundry.
He wanted to have his shirts done a very, very specific way and his boots had to be done
a certain way too and I mean he wanted his shirts done a special way even when he got
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out of the military.
And when he was in other jobs, when he was an engineer and when he was a judge, he would take
his stuff to a special cleaners because he wanted it done according to a certain specification.
And so that was how my dad was and my dad was a good example that he was pretty particular.
He was pretty particular about a lot of different things and who I'm what now, pretty particular
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about a lot of very specific things, pretty detailed about stuff like cleaning and things
of that nature because they learned that in the military, they learned to be very self-dependent
and to be very disciplined and to be very, very orderly.
And when I look around the church, we don't have a lot of self-discipline and we don't
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have a lot of self-discipline because nobody wants to be disciplined.
And I'm not saying this to anybody in particular in this church because nobody here is really
doing anything that is making me have to get on them about anything.
It's not that kind of a thing. It's just the principle that we should have the goal of being
self-discipline and we should have the goal that every time we go through something, whether
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it's through Satan or whether it's through the traffic of Charlotte or whether it's through
another person, that we don't have to go crying defeat.
We have to be able to stand as soldiers with the same concept that we are in the military
of the Lord.
This is the army of the Lord.
I've got a prayer show that says, "I'm a soldier in the army of the Lord on it that I hand
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stitched."
I mean, we have that whole kind of concept that we are in the army of the Lord and we need
to do our part.
We need to do our work in that vein.
And what does it mean by doing that work?
Well, let's continue on.
So verse seven, "You must submit to and endure correction for discipline.
God is dealing with you with sons."
Well, what son is there whom his father does not thus train and correct in discipline?
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And if you are exempt from correction and left without discipline in which all of God's
children shared them, you are illegitimate offspring and not true sons at all.
Now, I think that that's kind of an interesting point there because in other words, we got
all these churches where everybody just kind of runs around and does whatever they want.
And we love the idea that God is father, we love the idea that God is loving and we like
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the idea that God cares about us.
But we don't get to the point of discipline where God might tell you to sit down and
keep your mouth shut.
And if you are not in the place to hear that, you are going to be in trouble at some point
in time in your life because there is an awful lot of times where we might want to say something,
we might want to get our two cents in.
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We might even have the right to, but it's not for us to do.
And I've said that I've been in an awful lot of churches over the years and did I have
authority?
Did God give me authority?
Yeah.
Was it wise for me to jump up in the middle of a Southern Baptist meeting and announce
to everybody that everything that they were doing is out of order?
No.
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And I'm going to admit that very, very early in my ministry time because I really didn't have
the understanding now.
I had people asking me about what I thought of their church.
And I'd send them an 18 page letter, everything I thought that they were doing was wrong.
And that was out of order.
That was wrong of me to do because that wasn't my church.
And I did not have the authority to do that there.
And that was not proper.
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And that was lack of knowledge that was lack of proper understanding.
But somewhere out of that we grow and we learn that at certain points of time it's not always
wise to do things like that.
And that God keeps us a lot of times from ourselves.
Moreover, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we yielded to them and respected
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them for training us.
Shall we not much more cheerfully submit to the Father of Spirits so and truly live?
For our earthly fathers discipline this for only a short period of time and chastised
us as seemed proper
And good to them but he disciplines us for our certain good that we may become sharers
in his own holiness, in his own uniqueness and his own separateness.
Not so that we can cosplay holiness as Nik gave me an idea for a message today where
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in other words we all look the part but we don't really understand what separateness means.
Verse 11 for the time being no discipline brings joy but seems grievous and painful but
afterwards it yields a peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained
by yet a harvest of fruit which consists in righteousness and conformity to God's will
in purpose thought and action resulting in right living and right standing with God.
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So then brace up and reinvigorate and set your slacken and weaken and drooping hands and
strengthen your feeble and paul seat and tottering knees and cut through and make firm and plain
and smooth straight paths for your feet.
Yes, make them safe and upright and happy paths that go in the right direction so that
the layman helping them may not be put out of joint but rather may be turned.
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When we're being disciplined, when we're going through these different seasons with God
which sometimes isn't a season in the sense of a really long time but it could be Tuesday
and we're at work and we've had enough of this thing and we want to tell them to take
this job and shove it which I actually had that feeling myself last week and we have
to stand there and we have to be strengthened and disciplined and not lacking and man
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up as they used to say and do what we need to do and say I'm not going to lay this battle
down until it's complete and when God tells us no we accept that no because we're poised
for bigger things.
Now I'm not going to read all these Bible verses here but I put them up on the string
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and I'm going to use the examples of them.
He was out tending in the sheep, writing a song, passing in the time, doing his own thing
and they're looking for the future king and they went through all the kids.
Now Samuel was told don't go by how they look and they keep bringing out older, good looking
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kids by and he keeps saying no, letting it.
And then they go well who's left and they go well there's only David left.
Well go get him.
Why didn't she bring him in?
We said go get everybody.
Why didn't she go bring him in?
And then they get to David and they go eat the one.
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But you want to know what?
He still had to go back out and tend sheep and he still had to then spend an awful lot
of years in the army for Saul, for the guy who was going to become his enemy.
He didn't just become king the next day.
He had to get prepared for something better.
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So just kind of like we all sit around arguing over socks with siblings or arguing over
stuff at school or having fights with different people and learning something about ourselves
and about our battle.
And he was out there learning how to do the same thing while he was preparing in his battle.
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And then we had Amos who we talked about recently in minor prophets because Amos was a shepherd
and he was a fig farmer I think and he was a herder.
And he's just kind of minding his own business but things got so corrupt they couldn't rely
on the profits who were there that day.
And so God had to raise somebody up.
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He had to learn how to hear from God while he's out there ten in the trees and heard in the
sheep.
And it is all right to be from a little bit of a different place.
And then we talk about Jonah who I just kind of threw in there because I wanted to because
Jonah had to have his divine moment in the belly of a fish because he did do so, with
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God.
And so he got a spanking in literally.
He got thrown over a boat and he got to sit in the belly of a big fish for a couple days
and think about things.
He had time out.
So time out is big.
We go.
So he had to have time out.
But if we understand the idea that we are being prepared for something better, maybe
our better doesn't look like everybody else's.
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Maybe our better doesn't mean that we go all over the world literally and we do a million
missions in crusades and that we are on TV everywhere and that everybody follows us.
Maybe that's not what our better thing is.
Maybe our better thing is different.
Maybe somebody else's better thing is different from that.
Maybe that is somebody's better thing who knows.
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Maybe the better thing is not to have a mega church because as we talked about yesterday,
it's not for everybody.
Maybe everybody's better thing looks a little bit different.
Your better thing is you and your cat and moving up and eventually being able to take
your job and shove it and do ministry full time.
You embrace something similar just without the cat because you like breathing because you
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are allergic to cats because you like breathing and having a partner or having other people
in your lives.
All of us have a vision that embraces community that grows and that gets bigger and we don't
know from there what God is going to do with it or where God is going to go with it.
We all have it.
But we recognize we are being trained for these better things when God tells us not to
get into it with somebody.
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And God tells us to stick to the plan and to stick to what he told us to do even though
we don't feel like doing it.
And not quit our jobs every five minutes because it's just another thing again.
You know, sorry.
Look, that's for me too.
Okay.
Maybe you know, it's when God tells us let something go.
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It's training for bigger things.
Just like eventually we learn to let go of those arguments that we had and keep track of
a bigger picture.
Thank you for joining us on the Kingdom Now podcast today.
I pray it is proven to be a blessing in your life.
To learn more about this work, ask a question, submit feedback, advertise with us, be a guest
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or donate to support this work as our podcast is sponsored by listeners like you.
Visit my website which contains essential information, projects and works for other
points of contact around the web at kingdompowernow.org.
Also if you are in our area and would like to visit sanctuary interational Fellowship
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Tabernacle, visit
welcomeinthisplace.org
Until next time, this is Apostle Dr. Lee Ann Marino reminding you that the kingdom
of God is within you.
And that means the kingdom is now.
[MUSIC]
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Welcome to Kingdom Now, the podcast featuring Faith with an Edge.
(00:54):
Where we celebrate the Kingdom of God within you.
I am your host, Dr. Lee Ann Marino, apostle, author, podcaster, professor and theologian,
and founder of Spitfire Apostolic Ministries and all the works that go along with it.
I am excited to share this program with you as we explore the ends of counterculture
(01:16):
Christianity present as you live out the Kingdom of God in your everyday life.
To learn more, visit my website at www.kingdonpowernow.org.
And now, our program, which features a variety of formats here, just for you.
Interviews on a variety of relative topics, teaching and preaching proclaim everywhere from my
(01:39):
North Carolina studio to St. Shory and beyond.
And powerful insights here for now as we turn the world upside down everywhere we go.
[Applause]
Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, happy whatever time of day it is wherever
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you are.
And to our listeners in Nepal, we say, "Namaskar."
We hope that whatever time of day it is when you were listening that you were having a
good one.
And I welcome you to the special edition of the Kingdom Now podcast.
And I am your host, Apostle Dr. Lee Ann Marino here.
as the Spitfire serving as the voice of counterculture Christianity where we feature
the theme of faith with an edge.
(02:22):
And if you'd like to learn more about the world of counterculture Christianity, feel free
to visit my website at www.kingdompowernow.org.
This edition of Kingdom Now was recorded live the first weekend in November 2024 as part
of Transform 2024 with the theme, "This means War."
The message is titled, "Training for bigger things."
(02:46):
If you would like to learn more about the world of sanctuary International Fellowship Tabernacle,
feel free to visit our website at welcomeinthisplace.org.
So I had no idea what I was talking about when we started this.
And I ironically enough kind of picked a theme.
I guess we kind of mutually picked it like came up as a conversation months and months
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and months ago.
I had no idea what I was going to be talking about.
I had no clue where I was going to be going with it.
And you would think, "Okay, it's a really obvious thing."
And so then I sat there and I wrote all my notes out that I never used anyway.
And it was all nice and you don't see, it was all neat sort of.
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And see I didn't even cross anything out.
And then we're there yesterday because we had an event yesterday.
And I had a whole other thought for this message than all my nice little notes in the nice
of notebook.
And so now I have to kind of, "I'm not going to lie.
I don't even remember what passage I came from."
I know the other ones.
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I know the stuff I used toward the end, but I don't even remember what I start with.
But anyway, it's not really that important because we'll get where we need to go.
And that's something that I've always found.
We always seem to land where we're supposed to.
I'm into that.
So I was going to talk about the idea of training because the message is training for bigger
things.
Thank you, Julie Harvey for that because Julie Harvey said that and then I went, "That's my
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message."
Thank you, Julie.
But I had absolutely no idea where I was going to go in terms of where I'm actually winding
up.
So what I originally started with and where I was originally going to go with this was
to talk about training and to talk about things like, "If you've ever watched Rocky
and you watch him train in all the Rocky movies, you watch him train."
(04:37):
And then I was going to use something a little bit closer to home and I was going to talk
about when you're in theater or you're in musical theater or you're in choir and you train
and what happens is they give you the song and you practice and you practice and you
practice and you practice it.
But then it occurred to me that we get those illustrations but that's not something that
everybody goes through, not everybody's in choir, not everybody boxes, not everybody does
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some of these things that we always use as the example for things.
And it occurred to me and somehow we all still know how to fight.
Okay, we might not have any experience with doing stuff over and over and over again in
practicing and that disciplinary aspect but you better all believe that everybody knows
how to fight.
And I started thinking about those examples and how that stuff kind of works in our lives.
(05:22):
Where do we train to fight?
Where do we learn in the natural, how to do what we're going to do in the spiritual and
where do sometimes that line kind of get lost because it does get lost sometimes.
So where do we start?
And so the first thing I thought of was siblings.
Now I don't really have that experience with my siblings because my siblings are all
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a lot older than me.
And so I kind of explained it as a hierarchy that it was like they were kind of like up higher
than me on the food chain.
And so if we had a fight, parents automatically deferred to them because they were older and
because nobody ever really thought, gee, maybe they're in the wrong.
They're supposed to be the example, yada yada yada.
(06:06):
And so I really didn't have that experience with my siblings.
I had it with my friends.
And so I started remembering all those years ago and how we used to fight at school.
And that sounds probably really, really weird to some people because some people I guess
they don't fight at school the way that Chuck is looking at me.
But sometimes we did.
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So I remember being in seventh grade and I was standing toe to toe literally like this
with my absolute arch enemy.
And so she was what we used to call a brown noser.
In other words, she was a kiss up.
And all the teachers loved her and her dad was on the radio.
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And so he was responsible for snow days as far as we were concerned.
So we all really liked him.
And she had to be in everything.
She had to be class president.
And I was the editor in chief of the school paper.
And that was my thing.
And she comes up to me one day and she says that she wants to be assistant editor.
And I said, how much power can one person have?
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And you know, we're kids.
And I'm saying this at like 13 years old.
And we got into it one morning before school.
And so much so that people were standing around us watching.
And I don't even remember to this day what we were talking about.
I don't remember what it was over.
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It was some issue of the day.
You know, that's probably still a issue today, but I don't remember it back then.
You know, this is like 94 or 95.
I don't remember what it was over.
We were having some wild and weird and stupid debate.
And I don't remember it was over.
And then there was another one who was my best friend, well, I was in junior high.
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And Jennifer, she is still on my Facebook page if she watches this.
And every year before we would break for the summer.
Every year about two weeks before we would have a fight.
And I to this day don't know why.
I don't remember what it was over.
I said, maybe we were prepared to not talk all summer because she would go to New Jersey.
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And I had to, you know, like stay home and pray that my knees didn't stick to the back
of the couch because it was so hot and we had no AC.
And I would be sitting there glaring at her and we're having this fight.
And I don't even know what it was over.
And in a hindsight, a lot of the stuff that we probably all got into fights with people
(08:33):
over, we're probably stupid.
You took my pen, you took my pencil, you looked at me wrong.
You know, you wore the same shoes as me today.
Now we all show up in the same outfits all the time.
And it's like ironic and it's like a thing, but you know, that you're wearing my clothes,
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you know, kind of thing.
Copycat, yes, right, exactly.
And so we were mad about all these different things and things always went one of four
ways in the 90s.
Yo mama.
That's one of them.
And sometimes that got finished and sometimes it did not.
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Somebody jumped somebody else, which definitely didn't happen all that much.
We didn't have that many fist fights or that much kind of stuff at that time, but it was
possibility.
Then you have the things usually digressed into some really weird arguments of words that
didn't make much sense.
And so then something digresses into that vein.
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And then you've got friends trying to talk you out of the argument that you're in.
And so then you've got that stage of things where they're like, come on, this isn't worth
it.
You're going to get suspended.
You're going to get detention.
You're going to get whatever, you know, we need to do this.
But one of the commonalities that all these things have in common, which we've talked about
before, a lot of kids don't have today, our parents were not overly involved with us.
(10:02):
And so we were there figuring out our own governance and our own fights and our
own polity by ourselves.
Parents leave your kids alone, let them figure some stuff out because that's very, very important
to a lot of the stuff that happens.
So we learned in fighting our positions.
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We learned our battlegrounds.
We learned what mattered to us.
And it was all right at some point if that changed.
It was all right if maybe we didn't have the same argument.
One of the reasons why I probably don't remember this argument from seventh grade, a girl
that I didn't like was because I probably don't have the same views today.
Whatever argument we were fighting on, and I remember because at the time I grew up, we're
(10:46):
real conservative and she was real liberal.
And so that was often a conflict between the two of us.
And so I probably don't agree with what I said back then.
And that doesn't make me a hypocrite.
It means I'm a person.
It means I'm growing.
It means I'm learning.
I'm allowed to change my mind.
We all are.
And when it comes to fighting, we learned that in our process.
We learned a lot if we look at the natural aspect of fighting for the spiritual aspect of it.
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And one of the reasons why I've often said, I don't tend to like spiritual battle as a
church topic is because I don't think we teach it well.
We teach it spooky and weird and look.
I get chasing demons and cursing bloodlines and thinking that the reason why you're having
a bad day and you're stuck in traffic in Charlotte is because some ancestor somewhere
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way back called on some demon god is fun.
Okay, it's fun.
It sounds fun.
It sounds ridiculous, but it sounds fun.
It sounds a lot more fun than say, hey, some of the things that happen in our lives happen
because we make bad choices.
It's a lot more fun than saying, gee, maybe this is just a bad day.
(11:56):
It's a lot more fun to get into all this weird, creepy stuff that doesn't make sense.
It's a lot more fun to run around the room and scream and shout and sweat and speak in
tongues and cuss demons than it is to go pay your electric bill.
But at some point in time, we still have to all do that.
And if we think about that principle that we learn how to fight along time ago and then
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somehow we get in a church and we forget that, that we're missing something in the natural
spiritual gap.
We're missing something in what God really wants us to learn and wants to teach us and we
learned it back then.
Preparation for better things.
God knew we were not going to be still having or hoping that we would not still be having
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the same junior high fight when we're 30 and 40 years old and 50 years old.
And it's ironic how social media has revived all that to a certain extent and
how a lot of people don't act much better than they did 20, 30, 40 years ago.
But we're supposed to be on to better things.
Some of these things that we're battling over are not important.
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And I will never forget the day I was on social media and someone started because they always
do.
And I literally said, I don't know this person.
I'm not ever going to meet this person.
I don't really care to talk with this person, thanks.
(13:21):
So why am I going to sit on here and write an essay and do free homework for somebody I
don't even know and like when I have all these things to do.
And the point I'm getting at with that is that we have to have training for bigger things.
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God is not training us in the spirit to battle all these little things.
He's not teaching us and training us and bringing us up from those earlier times and from those
young errors where we did battle little things so that we can still be chasing and battling
and worrying about all this same stuff now.
And a lot of it is about that.
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And think about the stuff people argue about on social media.
After we get past politics, there's usually a couple of key things.
So we all know what number one probably is.
Everybody argues about abortion.
Everybody argues about gay people in church and then we start the holiness argument.
So about clothing, someone like someone's outfit, someone doesn't like someone's outfit
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and somehow that turns into a yo mama conversation.
That's about as mature as it is.
This one is lecturing about holiness and about this Bible verse and that Bible verse and
this and that.
When the Bible does not specify how long or short it is.
Just like the specification about men having short hair and women having long hair, doesn't
specify what's long and what's short.
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There's no inches in the Bible.
There's no cubic feet or I'm trying to think of foot like, what was the Roman measurements?
Anyway, I'm trying to think of what they were but there's like a four, something with a
foot, a candle or something like that.
There was like, no.
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There's no specifications.
And so we're arguing about all that stuff.
And so we're arguing over specific points on doctrine that a lot of times are really
very technical and not biblical and really don't go anywhere.
We're not being trained for that.
(15:28):
That's not why we're in warfare.
The ancients using the Romans as the illustration did real things and did real battle and fought
huge vests, armies of space.
And we're sitting here supposed to be like that in the spiritual realm arguing over worrying
about all this petty stuff.
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And once awhile, years ago, I knew someone who thought everything was a demon and those people are fun.
And she had a kid and the kid fell in the bathtub.
Kids do that.
Okay.
Kid fell in a bathtub.
Kids trip, right?
Okay.
You know a bunch of kids.
They fall.
You have kids.
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They fall.
It's the devil and somebody's working which got against me and all my family.
And I don't know how to break it.
Nobody cared about her.
She wasn't that interesting.
No one was after her.
I'm not kidding.
He fell down.
That was it.
But if we don't get to the idea of bigger things and I think that it's important to state
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that the bigger thing is not us because I know that in a lot of church circles, we're
the big thing God wants to do.
No, we're not.
God gives us something to do and he gives us a part of us and we're not ever going to
get to those bigger things if we just keep staying on all of these really small minor things
that really don't matter in war.
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Like you say, you have to work together.
And in war, we can't be victorious in the battle.
If our focus is always on whatever's going on over there.
And Hebrews 12, that's what I'm reading from.
And Hebrews 12, and I'm reading from the amplified, which means this is not my normal Bible.
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And that means that this book, of course, isn't all highlighted and colored.
So I have to go and look for what I'm looking for.
We're going to start in verse 5, Hebrews 12.
And have you completely forgot the divine word of appeal and encouragement in which you
are reason and with and addressed as sons.
I, son, do not think lightly or scorn just submit to the correction and discipline of the
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Lord, nor lose courage and give up and thank when you are approved or corrected by him for
the Lord corrects and disciplines everyone whom he loves and he punishes even scourges
every son whom he accepts and welcomes to his heart and cherishes.
You must submit to and endure correction for discipline.
God is dealing with you as sons for what son is there whom his father does not thus train
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and correct in discipline.
Now nobody really likes getting discipline.
And I don't think it grows on us as we get older.
If anything, I think that we're kind of more resistant to it.
I think that the older we get, we have the attitude that we don't need it.
We get kind of this attitude that we're all right and we're grown and we're this and we're
that.
We don't need to hear anything from anybody else.
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And I'm also going to say that's very American.
That's very much in line with the ideals that we were talking about.
We like the cowboy idea that we are self-sufficient and we don't need anybody and we don't really
need the idea of discipline.
But the body of the kind does establish that discipline is a godly thing just like authorities
of godly thing and there can be bad examples of it and there can be extreme examples of
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it and there can be wrong examples of it and there can be over discipline examples
of it that go beyond what God would want and there can also be good examples of it.
The reason why God wants us to be disciplined is so that we can be self-disciplined.
If you think about what they do in the army or what they do in the military, they train
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people to be soldiers to be self-disciplined like boot camp and if you have ever dated or married
somebody who has been in the military, you know that they all have really interesting
hangups like their shoes.
I dated a guy in the Navy, not current guy, but the guy many, many years ago he was in the
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Navy and he had this thing about his shoes and that's because they inspect the shoes in
the Navy and so they had to look a certain way.
My father was funny about his laundry.
He wanted to have his shirts done a very, very specific way and his boots had to be done
a certain way too and I mean he wanted his shirts done a special way even when he got
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out of the military.
And when he was in other jobs, when he was an engineer and when he was a judge, he would take
his stuff to a special cleaners because he wanted it done according to a certain specification.
And so that was how my dad was and my dad was a good example that he was pretty particular.
He was pretty particular about a lot of different things and who I'm what now, pretty particular
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about a lot of very specific things, pretty detailed about stuff like cleaning and things
of that nature because they learned that in the military, they learned to be very self-dependent
and to be very disciplined and to be very, very orderly.
And when I look around the church, we don't have a lot of self-discipline and we don't
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have a lot of self-discipline because nobody wants to be disciplined.
And I'm not saying this to anybody in particular in this church because nobody here is really
doing anything that is making me have to get on them about anything.
It's not that kind of a thing. It's just the principle that we should have the goal of being
self-discipline and we should have the goal that every time we go through something, whether
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it's through Satan or whether it's through the traffic of Charlotte or whether it's through
another person, that we don't have to go crying defeat.
We have to be able to stand as soldiers with the same concept that we are in the military
of the Lord.
This is the army of the Lord.
I've got a prayer show that says, "I'm a soldier in the army of the Lord on it that I hand
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stitched."
I mean, we have that whole kind of concept that we are in the army of the Lord and we need
to do our part.
We need to do our work in that vein.
And what does it mean by doing that work?
Well, let's continue on.
So verse seven, "You must submit to and endure correction for discipline.
God is dealing with you with sons."
Well, what son is there whom his father does not thus train and correct in discipline?
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And if you are exempt from correction and left without discipline in which all of God's
children shared them, you are illegitimate offspring and not true sons at all.
Now, I think that that's kind of an interesting point there because in other words, we got
all these churches where everybody just kind of runs around and does whatever they want.
And we love the idea that God is father, we love the idea that God is loving and we like
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the idea that God cares about us.
But we don't get to the point of discipline where God might tell you to sit down and
keep your mouth shut.
And if you are not in the place to hear that, you are going to be in trouble at some point
in time in your life because there is an awful lot of times where we might want to say something,
we might want to get our two cents in.
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We might even have the right to, but it's not for us to do.
And I've said that I've been in an awful lot of churches over the years and did I have
authority?
Did God give me authority?
Yeah.
Was it wise for me to jump up in the middle of a Southern Baptist meeting and announce
to everybody that everything that they were doing is out of order?
No.
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And I'm going to admit that very, very early in my ministry time because I really didn't have
the understanding now.
I had people asking me about what I thought of their church.
And I'd send them an 18 page letter, everything I thought that they were doing was wrong.
And that was out of order.
That was wrong of me to do because that wasn't my church.
And I did not have the authority to do that there.
And that was not proper.
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And that was lack of knowledge that was lack of proper understanding.
But somewhere out of that we grow and we learn that at certain points of time it's not always
wise to do things like that.
And that God keeps us a lot of times from ourselves.
Moreover, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we yielded to them and respected
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them for training us.
Shall we not much more cheerfully submit to the Father of Spirits so and truly live?
For our earthly fathers discipline this for only a short period of time and chastised
us as seemed proper
And good to them but he disciplines us for our certain good that we may become sharers
in his own holiness, in his own uniqueness and his own separateness.
Not so that we can cosplay holiness as Nik gave me an idea for a message today where
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in other words we all look the part but we don't really understand what separateness means.
Verse 11 for the time being no discipline brings joy but seems grievous and painful but
afterwards it yields a peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained
by yet a harvest of fruit which consists in righteousness and conformity to God's will
in purpose thought and action resulting in right living and right standing with God.
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So then brace up and reinvigorate and set your slacken and weaken and drooping hands and
strengthen your feeble and paul seat and tottering knees and cut through and make firm and plain
and smooth straight paths for your feet.
Yes, make them safe and upright and happy paths that go in the right direction so that
the layman helping them may not be put out of joint but rather may be turned.
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When we're being disciplined, when we're going through these different seasons with God
which sometimes isn't a season in the sense of a really long time but it could be Tuesday
and we're at work and we've had enough of this thing and we want to tell them to take
this job and shove it which I actually had that feeling myself last week and we have
to stand there and we have to be strengthened and disciplined and not lacking and man
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up as they used to say and do what we need to do and say I'm not going to lay this battle
down until it's complete and when God tells us no we accept that no because we're poised
for bigger things.
Now I'm not going to read all these Bible verses here but I put them up on the string
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and I'm going to use the examples of them.
He was out tending in the sheep, writing a song, passing in the time, doing his own thing
and they're looking for the future king and they went through all the kids.
Now Samuel was told don't go by how they look and they keep bringing out older, good looking
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kids by and he keeps saying no, letting it.
And then they go well who's left and they go well there's only David left.
Well go get him.
Why didn't she bring him in?
We said go get everybody.
Why didn't she go bring him in?
And then they get to David and they go eat the one.
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But you want to know what?
He still had to go back out and tend sheep and he still had to then spend an awful lot
of years in the army for Saul, for the guy who was going to become his enemy.
He didn't just become king the next day.
He had to get prepared for something better.
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So just kind of like we all sit around arguing over socks with siblings or arguing over
stuff at school or having fights with different people and learning something about ourselves
and about our battle.
And he was out there learning how to do the same thing while he was preparing in his battle.
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And then we had Amos who we talked about recently in minor prophets because Amos was a shepherd
and he was a fig farmer I think and he was a herder.
And he's just kind of minding his own business but things got so corrupt they couldn't rely
on the profits who were there that day.
And so God had to raise somebody up.
(27:11):
He had to learn how to hear from God while he's out there ten in the trees and heard in the
sheep.
And it is all right to be from a little bit of a different place.
And then we talk about Jonah who I just kind of threw in there because I wanted to because
Jonah had to have his divine moment in the belly of a fish because he did do so, with
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God.
And so he got a spanking in literally.
He got thrown over a boat and he got to sit in the belly of a big fish for a couple days
and think about things.
He had time out.
So time out is big.
We go.
So he had to have time out.
But if we understand the idea that we are being prepared for something better, maybe
our better doesn't look like everybody else's.
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Maybe our better doesn't mean that we go all over the world literally and we do a million
missions in crusades and that we are on TV everywhere and that everybody follows us.
Maybe that's not what our better thing is.
Maybe our better thing is different.
Maybe somebody else's better thing is different from that.
Maybe that is somebody's better thing who knows.
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Maybe the better thing is not to have a mega church because as we talked about yesterday,
it's not for everybody.
Maybe everybody's better thing looks a little bit different.
Your better thing is you and your cat and moving up and eventually being able to take
your job and shove it and do ministry full time.
You embrace something similar just without the cat because you like breathing because you
(28:44):
are allergic to cats because you like breathing and having a partner or having other people
in your lives.
All of us have a vision that embraces community that grows and that gets bigger and we don't
know from there what God is going to do with it or where God is going to go with it.
We all have it.
But we recognize we are being trained for these better things when God tells us not to
get into it with somebody.
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And God tells us to stick to the plan and to stick to what he told us to do even though
we don't feel like doing it.
And not quit our jobs every five minutes because it's just another thing again.
You know, sorry.
Look, that's for me too.
Okay.
Maybe you know, it's when God tells us let something go.
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It's training for bigger things.
Just like eventually we learn to let go of those arguments that we had and keep track of
a bigger picture.
Thank you for joining us on the Kingdom Now podcast today.
I pray it is proven to be a blessing in your life.
To learn more about this work, ask a question, submit feedback, advertise with us, be a guest
(29:59):
or donate to support this work as our podcast is sponsored by listeners like you.
Visit my website which contains essential information, projects and works for other
points of contact around the web at kingdompowernow.org.
Also if you are in our area and would like to visit sanctuary interational Fellowship
(30:21):
Tabernacle, visit
welcomeinthisplace.org
Until next time, this is Apostle Dr. Lee Ann Marino reminding you that the kingdom
of God is within you.
And that means the kingdom is now.
[MUSIC]
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Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.