"Conversations: Pastor Brian Mandel”

Join Jimmy and his guest, Pastor Brian Mandel, for a conversation about the state of our nation, practical discipleship, and where do we go from here?

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
I'm recording right now, by the way.

(00:01):
Okay.
We're on.
Thought we'd just talk a little bit
before we jump into it.
Yeah, check one, sibilance.
Can we bring the volume in my headphones down just a little?
Yeah.
Perfect.
Okay, yeah, that's better.
Is that good?
Yeah, it was just a little loud.
All right.
Well, how's your morning been so far?

(00:21):
It's been good.
I've gotten the word and got to kind of get my head right
and just think, I got a lot of things I'm thinking about,
I'm thinking about the Sunday out there
and I'm thinking about next Wednesday,
I'm thinking about this memorial service,
I'm thinking about the men's breakfast.
So just trying to keep them all in their buckets
is the challenge.
Preacher stuff, people don't realize,
they see us at our best.

(00:42):
I love what Adam Curry says.
He says, the reason why people think it's effortless
for you is because you make it look effortless.
And so they don't realize you're tired
after doing two services and it's 1.30, one o'clock,
and people still hanging out,
they don't realize you've been there all day already.
And because you make it, that was a compliment.
You make it look easy.

(01:03):
Right.
So. Yeah.
So.
Well, one of the things I think people don't realize
is what preaching does to you physically,
spiritually, emotionally.
Like it's hard to explain even how you feel
after you preach and teach the word of God.
It's different than just giving a speech
or talking to people in a classroom.

(01:23):
There's something spiritual about it
that you feel drained, not in a bad way,
but drained coming out of it.
After Sundays especially, or Wednesday nights,
more Sundays because I've got the rest of the day.
Wednesday nights, you kind of go home and you collapse.
You can go to bed.
But on Wednesdays, I'm usually just, I mean, I'm wiped.

(01:44):
I'm just, I'm like a zombie.
I try not to be.
I noticed this last Sunday, I felt really good all day.
Oh, good.
And then at eight o'clock, I was ready to go to bed.
I was like, I'm done.
Okay, I'm done.
Well, good.
Hey, we wanna welcome our listeners today
to Living Up In A Down World.
And so we'll do that with a little roll in here.
This is Pastor Jimmy and Pastor Brian Mandel.

(02:32):
And we're gonna start today on Living Up In A Down World.
We wanna welcome you.
And we were just riffing a little bit
before we get started.
And you know what, I forgot to pray.
Let's pray.
Let's take a moment.
Why don't you pray?
Just make it brief.
But let's consecrate this over to the Lord.
Yeah, Father, thank you for the opportunity
to sharpen each other, to speak about you,

(02:53):
to speak about truth and to encourage people
around the country listening to this
and around the world listening to this.
God, I pray they'd be blessed by our conversation today
in Jesus' name, amen.
Yeah, amen and amen.
Well, I wanna start off with just talking a little bit
about what's been going on in the country
because man, get some popcorn and a Dr. Pepper

(03:13):
and just read your newsfeed.
It's been wild.
It's like the nonstop highlight reel
that just never quits.
And haven't, didn't they confirm all of us, 22.
Yeah. 22 confirmations.
Wasn't Cash Patel the last one?
Cash Patel.
And there was a couple that, there were some, you know,
that weren't highlighted so much
or they weren't controversial per se,
but pretty amazing that they were able

(03:36):
to confirm all of them.
Yeah. I mean, shocking really.
It's like the NBA All-Star team is what it feels like
going to the Olympics to, you know, dominate.
It does feel like that.
Like America, you know, we're number one.
I mean, powerful.
But I wanna just share something as we get started.
I made a comment on Sunday and it's been,

(03:57):
it's a well-known, you know, kind of a cliched comm quote.
If you don't know your history,
you're bound to repeat it or you're doomed to repeat it.
You know, and so I had everybody say that out loud.
And so since the election and since, you know,
the confirmations and all that,
I'm not going quite as intensely

(04:18):
on some of the political pieces as I usually do.
And part of that is I don't wanna take the sermon time
to do that, but I do, I feel like my role
as an educator, a teacher, a pastor,
is that I still have a responsibility to teach our people
and a responsibility to bring things to the table
and to keep people thinking, keep people prompted.

(04:41):
And so on Sunday, I did this,
I just called it a cultural historical briefing.
And I read a little bit of the charter of Jamestown.
It's from 1606.
What people do not understand and a lot of, you know,
this generation that's here in the last two,
three generations don't understand
because we don't do a good job of teaching history.

(05:02):
We don't do a good job of going back
to our foundational documents.
You know, we live in a time where, you know,
your iPhone is basically out of date
by the time it arrives at your house, right?
You order it, it's three weeks getting there or two weeks.
And by the time it gets there,
they're already talking about the next version, right?
Music's that way.

(05:23):
Music is so digitally oriented now
with downloading capabilities.
You don't go to Billy's Band Aid and buy records anymore.
I mean, you literally have to,
you just download them in a nanosecond.
You think about a song and in 30 seconds,
you can be listening to it.
I miss physical music so much.
I do too.
I miss that.
I missed my Bible.
It's why I got my Bibles back out.

(05:43):
All of them.
This is one of my favorites.
This is the one I've had a long time.
It's got a lot of notes in it.
I always use a physical Bible.
I love it.
There's something different about it.
There's something about tactile, tangible feeling
that puts me more in the moment.
Whereas from the digital world,
and I'm even starting to step out.

(06:04):
Last night I caught myself laying in bed doom scrolling.
Just habit.
What's the news?
I hadn't looked at the news all day
and we went to bed and I was scrolling
and I just caught myself and I stopped myself.
And I clicked over
because I didn't have my Bible sitting on my nightstand.
So I clicked over to scripture
and just spent time reading scripture.
And I was like, what are you doing?

(06:25):
It's so simple to fall into that.
So think about it.
Our generation's been trained in 144 characters, right?
Because our 140 characters,
that's what Twitter X was if you don't have the blue,
the premium version of it, which I'm not gonna pay for.
So I get 140 characters.
That's not very much.
So you learn to be brief.

(06:46):
You learn to be quick.
And then what we've done,
we've trained our brains to do life in 140 characters.
We don't say how we're feeling.
We just send an emoji.
Yeah, I'm happy.
I don't wanna say I'm happy.
I just gonna send an emoji.
Well, and it's gone beyond that even to,
everything's about clickbait now, right?
It's about the, what is the little thumbnail on the video

(07:06):
that sucks you in with a deceptive tagline of some kind
just to get you to click.
It's gone even worse.
It's brutal.
And it's brutal on the heart.
I love what John Eldridge talks about
how it's an assault on your heart.
He says the human heart, and I totally agree.
He has some great sources for this and great resources,

(07:26):
but the human heart was never designed to take in
the amount of content and information
that we're driving our hearts to take in.
So our hearts can't handle it.
It's an assault on the heart.
And of course in marketing and media,
it's actually, you could say it's an attack on the heart,
but really it's them trying to get your heart's attention.
If they can get your attention, they can get your money.

(07:48):
And that's what it comes down to,
clicks, likes, comments, and then monetizing, right?
And so when I go back and read things
like my physical Bible, or actually go back
and read the charter of Jamestown,
or I read the Mayflower Compact

(08:09):
and Declaration of Independence,
and I read those words slowly,
I realized that when they wrote those words,
there was intentionality behind every word.
Yeah, focus.
Focus, there's weight, there's gravity.
Each word means something.
Because they knew they were writing something
that would become potentially the rule of law for them,

(08:30):
which means they would need to write it well,
because they're gonna be coming back to this.
It's gonna be their driver,
but it's also gonna create a lane or boundaries,
you know, rails to keep these new colonies on track
and to bring some level of order.
And so let me read this,

(08:51):
and then feel free to comment on this.
We do hereby dedicate this land and ourselves
to reach the people within these shores
with the gospel of Jesus Christ,
and to raise up godly generations after us.
And with these generations,
take the kingdom of God to all the earth.
May this covenant of dedication remain to all generations,

(09:15):
as long as this earth remains,
and may this land, along with England,
be evangelists to the world.
You know, what stands out to me in hearing that
is even just the terminology of like using the word covenant.
You know, they didn't see this as just an idea
that they wrote down,
or just some, you know,

(09:36):
thing that they thought would be good to do.
They recognized they were doing something solemn,
that they were making an agreement with God himself,
you know, and that they were dedicating themselves
to this purpose.
And there's something powerful about understanding,
like this is what everything we know as America today

(09:56):
was established based on, was that idea.
And we get caught up in all of the things
that happened along the way,
some good, some bad, some terrible.
It's not about all of the things
that happened after that individually.
It's about what was the point?
What were we trying to do?
What were the founding fathers aiming at, you know,

(10:17):
and constantly taking ourselves back to that?
I mean, you see that all throughout scripture as well,
with God's people.
God's people made all kinds of mistakes.
They goofed up, they forgot God, they left God,
they sinned against God,
they entered into judgment and captivity,
but it always was God taking them back to,
this is what I started you on.
This was the covenant I made with you

(10:38):
and bringing them back to that.
And as long as they would return
to the promises God made to them,
return to the covenants that they made with God,
they would prosper, they would succeed,
they would find their way again,
because God is faithful to bring people back
when they've made right agreements with him.
That's really good insight, PB,
because if we have nothing to go back to

(10:59):
that is a foundational thing for us.
And in our discipleship series, we talk about foundations.
We spend a whole block, four to five weeks on foundations,
because if you don't have foundations,
you have nothing to build on.
And we've all seen houses that were not built properly,
they were thrown up too quickly,

(11:20):
or they were built on land
that didn't have a good foundation,
didn't have the right kind of bedrock or right kind of soil.
And as the earth moves, the foundation shifts,
and if it's not well built,
everything shifts, the whole house.
You know what it makes me think of is,
those renovation shows we all used to binge watch on HGTV.

(11:40):
A lot of times, you'd see a house that looked really bad
or looked like it was falling apart,
and they would tear it down to the studs,
to the foundations, if you will,
and they'd find out, actually, this is a well-built house.
Everything that looks so bad about it
was cosmetic and easily fixable.
And I think that's where we are in America.
As many bad things as there are,

(12:01):
as many things as need to be corrected
that are truly things we need to think about and address,
we have good foundations.
We have a good framework that we've built this nation on,
and it's the same with our faith, with Christianity.
And we can, the things that seem so insurmountable
are actually fixable.
We can address the problems when the foundation's right.

(12:24):
And that's well said.
We were in a church one time,
and we planted a church in central Texas, in a small town,
and there was a church building available,
and it had an apartment inside of it.
So if we could rent the church,
we would have a place to live.
So it was a two-for-one thing.
I mean, it was crazy, looking back on it,
like, what were we thinking?

(12:44):
But you don't know anything in your 30s.
So not to offend anyone who's 30 years listening to this,
I'm just saying, we didn't.
Maybe you do, but we didn't.
And it was our first church plant,
so we were happy to actually secure a building
that had an apartment in it.
So it actually worked out great.
The problem was, it was so,

(13:04):
the foundation was terribly built,
and it was built in a part of that town
that was known to have bad soil and bad foundation.
So all of the homes in that area had issues,
had foundation issues.
So if you have a foundation issue,
anything you build on that foundation
is gonna have issues.

(13:24):
And I remember it would change throughout the year,
but the cracks in the walls,
there were certain times of year,
or if there was a drought season,
depending on what the climate was like
in that particular time of year,
where there were times where there would be holes
so big you could see through it outside the house.
Oh my goodness.

(13:44):
I mean, literally, any kind of critters,
mice, squirrels could get in.
And we had to actually put things
like stuff, rags or towels in some of those cracks.
That's how bad it was.
And then we'd get rains and whatnot,
and then we'd go pull the stuff out
because the walls would go back together.
It was the weirdest thing I've ever seen.
I learned a lot about foundations having that building.

(14:07):
We didn't own it, we just leased it.
So we ended up, we were able to get out of that
at some point, but the foundations are so critical.
And that's what I love about this charter.
They were saying that our intent and our purpose
for coming here and our intent now that we're here
is to literally gospelize the world.

(14:28):
We're here to evangelize and share
the gospel of Jesus Christ.
I mean, literally they said to reach the people
within these shores with the gospel of Jesus Christ
and to raise up godly generations after us.
Sounds like they knew the great commission.
Tell me about it.
And I get goosebumps literally when I read,
I almost get emotional over it
because that is what our nation is founded on.

(14:51):
And when you talk about American exceptionalism,
some people get upset about that and think,
oh, you're just being arrogant.
It's not about arrogance, it's all.
It's just that this is the only nation
that has in its original documents,
the express purpose for its founding
was to evangelize the world.
And I believe that's why we've had chance after chance

(15:12):
after almost like Israel just over and over.
We don't replace Israel, not at all.
I never, anyone tells you that they're way out of bounds
and they're in dangerous territory theologically.
Well, the scripture tells us that any nation
is gonna be blessed who's God is the Lord,
whether that's Israel, of course,
but any other nation who gets in on that party
will also be blessed and that's what America did.

(15:34):
That's Psalms 3312 and I absolutely love that
and appreciate that.
I have sitting before me on the table before us
a very miniature version of the national monument
to the forefathers and it's in Plymouth, Massachusetts
and it's literally hidden away.
I remember when we drove, we were driving over to see it

(15:55):
and we were with Adam and Tina Curry, it was me and Annette,
we had gone up to Plymouth and to see this monument,
I felt led to pray over this, pray over our nation
by laying hands on the monument and we did that.
It was amazing.
What I didn't realize, I had looked it up,
I'd read about it so I knew the history of it.
You heard about it from Kurt Cameron, right?
Yeah, Kurt Cameron in his movie Monumental

(16:17):
and then also when we did biblical citizenship
through the Patriot Academy with Rick Green,
they have a whole first lesson is Kurt Cameron again,
explaining and most people have never heard of this.
Just, well, just, I had neither.
Most recently, Adam Curry was on Joe Rogan

(16:38):
and he gave him a Founder's Bible,
which is a fantastic tool for learning your history
and marrying it with the original intent
of the nation and the Word of God.
So if you want a good resource, all the content in that,
you have the Bible, it's a New American Standard Bible,
but with sections all through there

(16:59):
about the founding of our country.
And it helps you see the scriptures out of the word
that the founders used to build the basis
for the foundational documents of the country.
So you understand this is where they took it from.
Yeah, it's an amazing resource and tool for you learning.
And all of the little vignettes in there are short
and easily readable.

(17:20):
You don't have to read like a full book.
These are like a few pages and they have pictures
and they're just a great way to get the highlight reel
of history, so to speak, of our foundations.
So I would encourage you to check it out again,
called the Founder's Bible.
You can get it at the Patriot Academy.
Just Google Patriot Academy
and they have a gift store online there.
So Adam was telling Joe Rogan about the National Monument

(17:45):
and about us going up to Plymouth to see it.
He made a comment back when we went to see it,
there's only one tiny sign in town
that says the National Monument to the forefathers.
They have these huge signs for seeing Plymouth Rock,
which was a real dud.
We saw it when we went.
It's a rock, you know?
And by the way, it's probably not the rock they landed on

(18:07):
because it was even added later
by a deacon or an elder,
a deacon from one of the churches decided it was this one.
So anyway, it's one of those kind of going to Israel
is like, you know, all these different places
you may have been the site of, you know,
not necessarily was, so there's that.
But this is different.

(18:27):
This was built in 1889 or completed in 1889.
It took them 100 years to build this
because it was made out of granite, right?
It's made out of solid granite.
It's the largest solid granite monument in America.
It's also the tallest at 81 feet.
And-
It's pretty big.
It is big.
And you don't know how big it is until you see it in person.
You can go online, look at pictures of it.

(18:49):
But the thing that Adam made a comment about,
he is it's like it's been lost.
And as soon as he said that, I said, no, it's been hidden.
Yeah.
It's not hidden from us, it's hidden for us.
There you go.
I just really felt that and I said that when we were there
as we rolled up, it's actually in a cul-de-sac.
Of a neighborhood.
So it's really almost bizarre.

(19:12):
And then you roll up on this little park
and this thing is so massive in scale.
I was blown away.
I didn't realize how tall 81 feet was.
And unfortunately this thing does not get visitors
like other monuments do.
No, no.
Because people don't know about it.
A little over 200,000 a year might show up
according to the thing I read about it,
which is nothing compared.

(19:32):
And there's no other mention of it anywhere like downtown
in the tourist district of Plymouth.
And it's fun, it's a great trip.
And it's a fun place to hang out for a whole day or two
and enjoy.
We enjoyed our time there, neat shops to walk around
and it's on the bay, overlooks the bay and it's beautiful.

(19:53):
And yet there's no mention of the monument to the net.
And it's massive and it completely towers
over any other monuments that we have, but it's hidden away.
But I think it's hidden so that we'll find it
for those who want it.
So what it is, I like the way Rick Green
and Kirk Cameron both use this language.

(20:14):
I've totally stole it.
It's mine now.
I've said it enough, I shouldn't give them credit anymore.
But it really is the secret sauce
to how our nation was founded, what it's founded on.
And I wanna read these to you.
And I'll put a picture of this on our newsletter as well,
but I would encourage you to go look at it.
The top figure on it at 81 feet in the air

(20:37):
is a woman with her hand pointed to heaven
and her name is, and it's engraved on in solid granite faith.
And she's actually holding a Bible.
And this would have been the Geneva Bible.
This was the Bible that they brought over.
I've actually read excerpts from the Geneva Bible.
You think King James Version is hard to read.
This is another level of Elizabethan English

(20:59):
I didn't know existed.
So all the alternate spellings,
S's or F's and all that.
I mean, it's hard to read.
I was like, cause you can order one.
I was like, no thanks.
I don't think I would ever read it
other than just be kind of nice to have a piece of history.
But she's holding a Bible, a copy of the scriptures.
She's pointing to heaven and directly below her.

(21:21):
It starts off with four other figures
that circle the base or the foundation of the monument.
And the first one is called morality.
Morality is actually a woman sitting on a,
just like a throne or a chair kind of thing.
And she's holding, what do you think that is?
What does that look like?

(21:41):
The 10 commandments.
That's the 10 commandments.
So she's holding the 10 commandments in her hand.
And she's holding the scroll of the scriptures
in her other hand.
And her name is morality.
And on each side of morality,
there are other names ingrained
in that same foundation piece.
One of them is evangelist.
Again, alluding to this charter that said,

(22:04):
we're gonna be evangelists to the world.
On the other side, interesting enough, is prophet.
And what do prophets do?
They foretell and they forth tell.
They declare.
They declare the word of the Lord.
The word of the Lord.
And so that's all on there.
Now you go on around the monument.
The next one, the next figure is Law.
Law's very imposing looking.

(22:26):
He's a very stately gentleman.
And he has in his hands the books of the Law.
And I don't know, there is an explanation for that,
but I'm not sure what it is.
And on each side of Law, you've got mercy.
Isn't that interesting?
And you've got justice.
So you've got justice, the sword of the Lord,

(22:46):
and you've got mercy, the grace of God,
on each side of the Law.
So the Law sits between these,
which is really interesting.
Going on around, the next one, that leads to education.
And so education is a mom.
It's a mother.
And she's sitting and guess what she's got in her hand?
The Bible.

(23:07):
The Bible.
She's pointing to an open Bible
as though she's giving instruction and direction.
And under here, you can't see it,
but it's a mother and a child
where the mother is the teacher
and she's the leader of the home in terms of education.
Sounds like there's a message here
about what leads to good education.
Faith leading to morality,
leading to justice and mercy and Law,

(23:30):
creating a basis for how we teach and train our young people.
This is the secret sauce.
This is the recipe for how they did it
and how we need to return to doing it,
which we're beginning to see some things
come up on the scene that are like that.
On either side of education,
on that you have wisdom on one side,
and on the other you have youth.
So we're trying to impart wisdom to youth through education.

(23:53):
And then the final figure,
which is like stinking Arnold Schwarzenegger
back in his prime.
This dude is a beast.
He is a warrior.
He's a soldier.
And he's actually got his,
he's got a broken chain in one hand,
which is broken under his foot in his hand.
He's got a sword in another hand and he's looking out.

(24:14):
And on either side of this, you've got tyranny.
And on the other side, you have peace.
What's the name of this one?
This one is Liberty.
Liberty.
Yeah, sorry.
Thanks for bringing that up.
So that's Liberty.
So this dude is like, I mean,
what's amazing is the anatomical correctness.
I mean, I doubt there were many people

(24:35):
that looked like that in their day,
but these looked like the Greek gods
that were carved.
The Adonis, right?
And I mean, this dude looks like he could throw down
and handle something.
Underneath, he's got a lion over here on this side,
but under here, he's got his foot on the head of a crown.
And it's the king being defeated.

(24:56):
Wow.
Yeah, through Liberty.
And so those are the four figures,
morality, law, education, and liberty.
And on top, you have faith with her pointing to the sky.
So that was such an amazing trip to go see that
and see what this country is built on.
Adam and I have been having a lot of conversations

(25:18):
about this.
We believe that the Lord has,
it's been hidden not from us, but for us,
and people are finding it and beginning to realize
this is it.
This is what we need to return to.
And so that's something that's on our heart.
We're praying about what to do about it.
You know what I love is,
this wasn't, again, this wasn't just a cool sounding recipe.

(25:39):
This produced so much fruit that was unheard of
in the world before or since.
I mean, if you take a look,
America's effect on evangelism worldwide,
the number of places the gospel found its way to
because of missionaries, prophets, and evangelists

(26:01):
that were birthed out of this type of thinking,
out of this foundation,
is unlike anything the world's ever seen.
There was an explosion of the gospel,
not just in the nation, but everywhere,
as a result of what these guys built
as the foundation for the nation.
Same with charity.
So you are so spot on.
So think about what you just said.
I mean, you really just sparked something in me.

(26:23):
The very first thing that happens
when faith is introduced as the primer,
I mean, it's on top of everything.
It's over everything,
but morality is the first thing that's produced.
Morality with evangelists and prophets,
I mean, and the word of God.
And that is how you found a work.
So you gave a sermon a while back, it was so good.

(26:44):
And you're talking about inputs, inputs and outcomes.
And the thing about a recipe
that I learned the hard way as a young person was
if I followed the recipe like it was written
and how it was directed and the exact measurements,
the outcome was always good and it was always the same.
But if I got creative or lazy or short what a shortcut.

(27:09):
So we don't need this ingredient.
Yeah, we don't need to melt the butter.
Why would you need to melt it?
I mean, there's silly little things
that seems so nuanced,
but they actually impacted the outcome.
What's happening right now, and I wanna just share this.
I got a slide here that I'll put on the newsletter,
but it's from CBN News.

(27:31):
And it says this, it's a headline that says
they want God in quotes.
8,000 students seek Jesus and huge Kentucky revival.
2,000 give their lives to Christ.
Amazing.
And it was 30 degrees out there.
And when they baptized them,
baptized them in the back of U-Haul trucks.
Now I don't know, I don't have a picture of that.

(27:51):
So I'm not sure if they had tubs they put in there
or like maybe they put those water troughs probably
in there, but I don't care.
30 degrees is 30 degrees.
That's how you know it was for real.
And there's no heaters in the back of those trucks.
So these kids, hundreds of them got baptized,
not 2,000, 2,000 gave their lives to Christ.
Many of those were baptized that night.
This tells me that faith is happening again.

(28:13):
We have a window right now where faith is being expressed.
People are hungry.
We talked about the Wall Street Journal
last time we were together,
up 22% in Bible sales from young men.
I was gonna say, it's not just that that's happening,
but who it's happening with.
I mean, we're seeing young men wake up.
I mean, it's right there on the recipe, right?

(28:34):
It's right there on the monument.
I'm seeing all this begin to happen.
And if we will follow the recipe
and begin to get back to these things,
these foundational principles,
I'm telling you the outcome will be our glorious days,
the most glorious days America's ever seen.
And we will become a force for the gospel
again on this planet.

(28:56):
I mean, I'm thankful what's going on in Iraq
as it's growing, man, Christianity is exploding there.
We've seen it happen in the underground church in China,
but America is poised to become
that missionary-sending nation again.
It's almost like the heart of the nation is being softened

(29:16):
and people are opening up to truth again
in ways that they haven't in a long time.
And it's the moment that the church has been waiting for
and we better step up and be bold
and speak truth because of love
and not be afraid because people are ready for it.
And we gotta deliver.
So how do we, Pastor Brian, Pastor Brian,

(29:36):
how do we bring this down to where people live?
Because you and I, we're talking at 30,000 feet here, right?
I mean, we're fired up about it because we see it
and it's exciting for us.
These are the things that are happening right now
in our nation and things being discovered,
rediscovered like this,
are things we've prayed about for decades.
And here we are on the precipice

(29:57):
of maybe one of the greatest revivals in history
already beginning to happen.
Now, that's great.
And we can talk about that in big glowing terms
and people get excited and they cheer,
but how does that translate down to a mom?
How does that translate down to a student?
How does it translate down to a dad,
or a boss or supervisor,

(30:17):
or a worker being a massive corporation?
How does this translate down to where we live?
Well, one of our recent discipleship classes that you taught
really drilled down to how a nation has changed
and it all starts in the hearts of the people.
If on an individual level and on a family level,
we don't prioritize allowing God to have his way

(30:43):
in our own personal hearts and lives,
there's no way to see societal change.
So it really, it's the old phrase,
if it is to be, it starts with me.
The more I submit my heart to the Lord,
get in his word, let myself be transformed
by being with him and being washed in truth

(31:07):
over and over and over again,
the more I'm gonna leak out what I'm full of.
And the good news is, is God has opened a window in time
where as we leak out truth,
people are gonna receive it and it's gonna bear fruit,
starting at home around the dinner table.

(31:28):
You thought maybe your kids weren't listening before,
or maybe your parents were too far gone
and they didn't wanna hear any of this stuff.
It's time to try again.
It's time to speak up again.
Maybe you've gone quiet for a while
and you stopped sharing what you believed in
because you thought it was falling on deaf ears.
Then the Lord can open a person's ears
and a nation's ears in a moment by his grace

(31:51):
and by his power and we're seeing that happen.
And so, I think it's time for faith to rise again
in our hearts to believe that man, God wants to move
and he's just waiting for somebody who he can partner with.
Wow, well said brother.
Round the kitchen table, I love that.
Right where we live, right where we work,
right where we play,

(32:12):
that's the traffic pattern of our lives.
And so in the dailies, the daily traffic pattern,
what do you do on a normal day?
Well, how would you do it different
if you knew the secret recipe,
if you knew the secret sauce,
you knew you had the recipe in front of you.
You had the idea that starts with faith,
but then it also has got to impact morality.
It's got the way we live.

(32:35):
Then that's gonna lead to law that becomes guide rails
for instead of having anarchy and chaos,
there's now guide rails,
which leads obviously to education.
Which should inform how we interpret the events
that are happening even politically in our nation.
Knowing how to vote and what to prioritize

(32:57):
and what to not get caught up in
and how to even understand things that are happening
with the kind of the revolution
of the federal government right now.
Cause there's, you could get caught up in storylines
with that, hearing personal stories of this person
and that person and maybe go,
maybe we shouldn't make all this change.
Maybe we shouldn't try to uproot things.

(33:18):
But if you understand the bigger picture,
then you understand like,
it's gonna, there's gonna be a cost to writing a ship.
You know? Absolutely.
And you'll understand why that needs to happen.
And it's worth even some of the pain
that we have to go through to make right things
that have been wrong for a long time.
Wow, so true.

(33:40):
Man, that's so well said.
The pain of change has to outweigh
the pain of staying the same.
That's what my boss, Dave Ramsey used to say.
And in Jeremiah chapter one,
we hear about the call of Jeremiah to the ministry.
And you know, we always think somebody gets called
to ministry, everybody claps.
Oh, that's wonderful.

(34:00):
Now you're gonna go to seminary
and get your ministry degree.
And you know, we just have this soft idea about it.
But when God called Jeremiah to ministry, says this,
then the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth.
This is Jeremiah saying, this is what he did.
He literally touched my mouth and said to me,
behold, I put my words in your mouth.

(34:22):
See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms.
And then to do what?
I said, what am I gonna do?
I'm gonna go minister people.
He says, to pluck up and to tear down.
To destroy and to overthrow.
And then it ends with to build and to plant.
So there has to be disruption.

(34:43):
You said revolution.
I think I would say reformation.
Our government's experiencing a reforming.
They're reforming and going back to foundational truths
and basic granny's common sense.
Right?
I mean, people are losing their mind over the DOGE
because there are people who are losing their jobs.
People we know and love, friends of mine here in church,

(35:06):
got their note.
And so we know that that's gonna impact good people,
but reformation is hard.
If we think that revival and reformation
comes without a cost, then we're naive.
I mean, we're talking about a reformation
of how we have been operating for decades,
being flipped up on its ear in a month.

(35:29):
It's a lot of change.
Whether our comfort is more important or our future.
Exactly.
If you think about it, I mean,
everything we see in scripture
and everything we see in the founding fathers,
they kept talking about their posterity.
Their posterity.
That's their kids, their grandkids.
It's their family tree.
They cared more.
And you hear these amazing stories

(35:50):
where they were literally willing to die
and be cast down in the mud
so the next generation could walk over them
and get to the next place.
I mean, these very vivid descriptions
of what it meant to lay your life down.
And that's what they laid down in the mud
so the next generation could walk over them
to get to the next place.
And that's gotta be a part of,

(36:13):
we gotta get over our comfort
and all of our convenience things and say,
wait, there may be a price to be paid
to be truly free people, a free and just society.
And if our forefathers were willing to pay that price,
somewhere along the way we got comfortable,
we let go of the reins,
we stepped out of the public square.

(36:33):
Now it's time to get uncomfortable for a while.
And being comfortable is highly overrated.
Feels good in the moment, but you don't get anything done.
You don't get anywhere.
And we need to be okay with being challenged
to be uncomfortable, to be inconvenienced
and to even have our lifestyle upended
if it's for the greater good of reforming this nation

(36:55):
back to faith, morality, liberty, law, education.
And it'll only work if we become a people
who is thinking about future generations.
If we're only thinking about right now, we won't do it.
That's it.
That's exactly right.
If it's all about me, if it begins with me,
but it doesn't end with me.
I'm only the catalyst for the next generation.

(37:15):
It's really generational transfer.
It's a thinking of, I'm gonna think more about my kids.
And I'm not talking about just leaving them
physical inheritance, though that's a great thing.
I'm talking about leaving them a heritage
that's bigger than just some money at the end of this thing.
Well, I think legacy and heritage thinking
is really the type of thinking
that actually flows from the heart of God.

(37:38):
That doesn't come from anywhere else other than him.
He's the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
That's right.
I mean, he's even described transgenerationally.
If you leave God out of the equation,
there's no real basis for generational thinking.
The eternal mindset comes from knowing God.

(37:58):
And that's why that's gotta come from the church.
It's gotta be driven by a nation who's got as the Lord,
who understands right foundations and morality and faith
and all these principles that you talked about.
If we leave that out, we will never come to the conclusion
that it's about future generations.
Therefore, I'm gonna segue here.
Therefore it comes down to the family.
Re-evaluating and revaluing our families.

(38:23):
My goodness, it's so easy during those years
when you get caught up in soccer
and school functions and sports
and you're doing it for them,
but you catch yourself going through the motions
and driving to the different events and doing it
and then looking for your space in the middle of it
and handing them a screen just to get a little peace.

(38:45):
And we do that forgetting that, wait a minute,
we're raising up the next generation of presidents,
attorneys, attorney generals, lieutenant governors,
wait, we're raising up the next generation of leaders
or not and pastors or not.
The next generation of educators.
So when we lose sight of that

(39:06):
because we get caught up in the now,
so much that it's all about, oh gosh, I just need a nap.
So I'm gonna go put my kid to sleep
or I'm gonna go give him some,
yeah, man, we're constantly trying to push back
from the very thing we need to be engaging in
and that's the hard work of raising kids.
I look back over it and if I,

(39:26):
right now I wish I knew what I know now.
I would have done things so different.
I so, in a way I envy you
because you're at a place right now
where you've got those kids still in those formative years
and you're able to form them.
I'm in the middle of it.
Oh my gosh, you're so in the middle of it.
And I mean, I've come face to face

(39:47):
with my own selfishness so many times.
Having kids will do that.
Yeah, and I'm watching them reflect me
in good ways and in bad ways
and when it hits you like, oh my gosh,
I'm forming them.
They're becoming what I'm putting into them.
It's sobering, it's heavy and it's a responsibility

(40:10):
and I wanna do it well.
I want God to have his way in me so that they can become.
So how do we help people pivot?
Okay, so they're getting this information.
They're going, wow, you know, I have fallen prey to that
where I'm just kinda going through the motions with my kids
and just looking forward to them graduating
and moving off and going to school or whatever,

(40:31):
getting out on their own.
What can I do right now to begin to reform them?
We know they're being formed
and I might need to reform.
So how do we start?
I've got an idea, but I wanna hear what you got to say.
Well, you know, Jesus summed everything up
into two commandments, right?
He said, love the Lord your God

(40:52):
with all your heart, mind, soul and strength.
And he said, the second commandment is like it.
He said, love your neighbor as yourself.
And the key in that commandment
is understanding what it means to love yourself.
And if you don't prioritize your relationship with God,
you don't love yourself.
And I will not be able to love my neighbor
or my family or my kids any better

(41:15):
than I'm first loving myself.
Which means if I don't start with me,
if I don't go deep with the Lord,
if I'm not a man who every day repents
and realigns with truth and with God
and let my kids see me do that,
then it doesn't matter what I want for them.
It doesn't matter what I try to pass on to them.

(41:35):
It matters who I am.
Because they'll become who I am, not what I teach them.
Man, you nailed that.
I mean, you teed it up and crushed it
300 yards down the fairway.
That is true.
It comes back to a heart.
It comes back to our own hearts.
Being completely realigned with God.

(41:56):
And that means realigning with his word
and realigning in relationship with him.
It's not just enough to know the Bible.
Content's not gonna change anything.
It'll help.
It definitely sets up the potential for transformation
and change and revelation, we say.
But information is not revelation.
There's a difference.
I know a lot of Christians or people who say they are

(42:18):
who can quote the Bible backwards and forwards,
but they're mean-spirited.
They treat waiters and waitresses with disrespect.
They're dishonorable to their spouses or whatever
and go down the list.
They cheat on their income taxes.
But when you let...
That actually becomes more destructive.
That combination.
It's like a vaccine.

(42:39):
Not like the ones we've been talking about lately.
I'm talking about a real vaccine
that actually inoculates you.
You get just enough of something
that you actually become dangerous.
You can repel it.
You develop antibodies to it.
So getting back and having our hearts transformed
on an ongoing basis.
The greatest thing I could ever give my kids

(43:00):
is for them to see me praying.
To see me, to walk in the door
and they see me bent over my Bible
and praying for them, for my family, for my wife,
or kneeling down at my bedside
or whatever.
They walk into my office and I'm praying
or I'm listening to something that's putting life into me.

(43:20):
Those are the things that you want your kids
to catch you doing.
Yeah, I think that.
And the other thing I think is really powerful
is when your kids see you owning your mistakes
and repenting.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
You don't have to not make mistakes.
Show them how to handle it.
That's it.
You will make mistakes,
but when we hide them or gloss them over

(43:40):
because we don't wanna look bad in front of our kids,
our kids need to see us being human.
We're human beings, but they need to see us being human.
And that means repenting, saying you're sorry.
I made a mistake.
Oh gosh.
Even you bringing it up.
I remember times when I sat down with my kids
and said, I messed up.
I'm so sorry.
You know, I missed it.

(44:03):
And that grew us closer together.
Instead of them disrespecting me,
they actually respected me more.
Well, you're giving them the empowerment
to be able to do that themselves without shame.
So these are some practical things
that we can do on an ongoing basis.
And I would say, start with you and your heart
being realigned to God.

(44:25):
So, you know, we can talk about reforming our children
and reforming education law and all these different things.
Those are high level things,
but let's start at the kitchen table.
Maybe start in your bedroom.
Maybe when you wake up, you say,
good morning, Holy Spirit.
Good morning, Lord Jesus.
Good morning, Abba Father.
What do you want to do today?
Maybe start with the Lord's prayer.
I do that.

(44:45):
I start with the Lord's model.
I pray two versions.
The original King James version.
I always start with that.
And then I do my own, in my words, version of it.
And I always do that.
And I'll do that several times throughout the day.
It just keeps me anchored.
It keeps me focused on your kingdom come,
your will be done on earth as it is heaven.
That prayer covers a lot of ground.
Oh, it does.

(45:06):
Jesus knew how to make it succinct.
Huge for me.
It's been a game changer for me.
But that's just one, you know,
just one thing that you can do that will help you out.
And then learn some daily rhythms.
I kind of do a morning, noon and night thing.
It's become so natural.
I don't even think about it anymore.

(45:27):
I'll just catch myself in the afternoon going,
I need some, I need some word time.
I'll just do it autopilot.
I don't even like sit down and formally plan to do it.
It may even be if all I have is my phone in my hand
and I'm sitting waiting on my battery
to get changed at Walmart, you know, or whatever.
I've got a few minutes there.
I can either scroll Instagram
and read all the latest news junk,

(45:49):
or I can open it and just look at a few scriptures
and let those seep down into my soul.
Yeah, it's funny.
The Bible is such an interesting book.
The more you read it,
the more you hunger for it and want to read it.
The less you read it, the less you hunger for it.
You know, you have to stir it up, you know.
So you get that ball rolling,
you'll find yourself morning, noon and night saying,
man, I need something.
I need a shot of the word in my soul right now.

(46:12):
So it's like gasoline in your car, you know.
I mean, you get on empty and you're running on fumes.
You'll know it.
Your car will tell you that.
It has an indicator that says you're low.
Mine has a light that comes on and it beeps.
And then it comes up on the screen
and I have to manually get it off of there
to get rid of it.
Because it's telling me, hey, you're about to stop.
Your engine's about to die.

(46:33):
You know, you've got to get to a gas station.
And there's something built into us,
not just something, but someone, the Holy Spirit,
who sort of tries to throw up flags and say,
hey, man, you're running on fumes here.
And if you don't get some fuel, you're going to crash.
And I was watching or listening to John Eldridge

(46:55):
talk about how during the holidays,
he got a little off of his rhythm.
He has a morning, noon, and night thing.
And he said, my sacred rhythm got messed up
because of the holidays and travel and all that
and got out of my rhythm.
He said, I really had to focus to get my rhythm back.
And he said, but it's a sacred rhythm.
It's important to me.

(47:16):
And he was sharing that in a newsletter
and that's what I've got laying over there,
a newsletter with his followers or listeners.
He was saying, guys, if I did it, you did it too, probably.
You got caught up in travel
and going to see these grandparents and visit these people
and you're out of your work schedule,
you're out of your normal flow
because you had some days off.
It's easy.

(47:37):
He said, I can function for a few days like that
and I'm fine, but then I find my tanks running low.
And he said, it's like warning, warning.
We need those right rhythms.
We're built for it.
We really are.
And we want to help you with that.
We want to encourage you in that.
We gave you a couple of things to do.
First of all, get back to the Bible.
I would encourage you just as something that's easy

(48:00):
and in front of everybody
is get the YouVersion Bible app, download it.
It's free.
It has unbelievable amount of translations
of the Bible on it,
but it also has many devotionals
that can help you on a daily basis.
It has Bible reading plans, many of them.
It's a good way, I would say a good start,

(48:22):
but to me, it's not the finish.
I don't use it much anymore
because I've kind of got my own rhythms
and my own things that I do,
but there are so many helps out there
and we want in that plethora of helps,
you can get lost because there can be so much
you don't know what to do.
It's like eating at Cheesecake Factory.
And one of the constant battles I face is distraction.

(48:46):
And I find that the only way
I can successfully maintain those rhythms for me
is I got to make sure that my computer and my phone
and all those distractions are out of the way.
Because if they're even sitting there,
something will buzz, something will ding,
something will catch my eye,
and I will quickly lose focus.

(49:08):
And we've been trained as a culture
to have loss of focus, short attention spans,
want everything in soundbites.
So when you sit and you try to absorb something,
there's a lot competing against it
unless you are intentional to remove those distractions.
And those distractions aren't necessarily bad things.
This morning at 5.50, I'm up,
I get my first cup of coffee, first of several,

(49:29):
get my first cup of coffee, I sit down at my desk
and immediately my phone goes off.
Two people at 6.05 are reaching out to me to talk.
And I'm like, this is when I write a day.
Instead of doing devotionals, I write one every day.
That's just been a habit of mine for 20 something years now.

(49:51):
That's how I do it.
I just learned to write and it's helped me so much,
keeps me very focused.
And so at 6.05, I got two people live in real time,
reaching out to me and I'm like, really?
6.05, now both of these were good people
that are dear people to me.

(50:12):
It was all I could do to not answer them back.
It was all I could do to push that aside,
push my phone away so I couldn't see it
or hear it vibrate and get focused on what I was supposed
to do.
I don't always succeed at that.
I don't either.
It's so easy.
Man, while I appreciate it, sometimes I want to throw it
out the window at 75 miles an hour, you know,

(50:33):
and just go, really?
This has gotten crazy.
Well, folks, we hope we're helping you.
We could go on all the riff all day long on this
because these are things that are so near and dear
in our heart.
And the reason they're near and dear to us is
because we want to help you.
We don't want this podcast to be just another podcast
and a sea of podcasts.
We want it to be something practical for you

(50:54):
and something that will help you on your journey of faith,
help you, maybe you're coming back to faith
from being away, maybe there's been some time passed
and you're trying to get back to the Lord.
We want to be able to give you things
that will help you with that.
And then on the other hand, we want to give you
the high level things that we talked about
that are sort of the big, broad, encompassing principles

(51:14):
that talk about life.
I do want to say also thank you to our supporters.
Those of you who send us Bitcoin,
thank you so much for blessing us that way.
Also for those who are signed up for our newsletter
and who donate on a continual basis, thank you so much.
It just, it means so much to Annette and I.
And if you want to get our newsletter,

(51:35):
we always put it out about the time
that I publish one of our podcasts,
which are typically on a weekly basis,
but we've missed some because Annette's
out of the picture for a moment.
Our kitchen's almost done.
Maybe next week we'll be back in the flow.
Actually we'll be in Nashville next week, so maybe not.
The week after that we'll be back in the flow
and it'll be Jimmy and Annette again.

(51:56):
But go to livingupandadownworld.com
and you can subscribe to our newsletter
and that way you'll get a heads up
whenever we're putting out a podcast
and try to put some personal things in there
to just let you know a little bit more about us.
And then the other thing I would encourage you to do
is check out the Godcaster.
It's 24 seven live streaming worship
and just little short daily grind,

(52:18):
one minute encouragements for you during the day.
We sprinkle those out through the whole thing.
That's a thing that Adam Curry and I
have worked on together and continuing to do.
And so go to bridgefbg.com and click on Hello Fred.
Well, what is Fred?
Fred is Fredericksburg.
So it's Hello Fredericksburg, Texas,
but it's some local stuff,

(52:39):
but it's broad enough that everybody can be encouraged.
The music's always good.
I keep it going 24 seven in my house.
So check it out.
Another way you can get to that
is you can go to hellofred.fm.
Then there's all kinds of resources,
other podcasts that you can click on there as well.
And so again, we just wanna be a blessing to you.
Pastor Brian, thank you so much, man.

(53:02):
You are so fun to do this with.
This is always fun.
I love it.
Thanks for inviting me.
It's about a 20 something year friendship.
Well, age gap too, but friendship is what I was referring to,
a relationship that we can sit down and riff on things
because we've done life for a long time together.
So thank you so much, brother.

(53:24):
Good to be here.
All right, our friends,
you guys have an amazing week on purpose
and we'll see you next time here
on Living Up in a Down World.
That is our heart for you,
is to live up in this crazy world that we're in.
Good times are ahead, my friends.
Keep living up, keep leaking out.
God bless you.
We love you.
inseparable.