Bobby: Welcome to the Thee Generation Podcast. I’m Bobby Bosler, and I’m speaking to you today from Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. That’s right; I made it home! I’ve got a lot to share with you young people, and there are things that God is doing; there are things that I’m believing God to do coming up here in the next little bit. But first off, before I get into any of that, I just need to give this announcement.

I think many of you are aware, the Thee Generation Youth Summit is coming up very quickly. In fact, if you go to theegeneration.org and look at the very top, you will be able to see a live update of how many days it is until the Youth Summit begins. Currently, at the time of my recording, it says there are 18 days left. And I’m really excited about seeing some of you in Menomonee Falls for an exciting two and a half days of competition and inspiring preaching.

We’ve got an awesome lineup in store for you all here this year. If you’ve looked at the Youth Summit page, you’ve seen some of the things there, and we’ve had some developments even since then. Of course, Dr. Jim and I will be preaching and Pastor Gillmore, but this year we’re privileged to have Caleb Reed be one of our main speakers here at the event. Many of you, I’m sure, have heard Caleb Reed’s preaching. He’s a young man who traveled with me years ago in 2013 as a team captain. He’s been out in evangelism for, I believe, three years now, going on four. And he is just a great example of what we’re going for when it comes to Thee Generation. He’s one of our recommended evangelists. And I’m very excited about having him preach as well.

Joe Mueller will also be one of our speakers at the Youth Summit. And again, he’s spoken at the Youth Summit before. But we’re also gonna be having Ryan Swanson come and speak twice at the Youth Summit. He’ll have one main session and then also a special workshop session. For those of you that may or may not be aware, I do wanna mention he will be unveiling and really launching the Cord app at the Youth Summit this year. And I’m super excited about that for those of you that have been following his Satisfied program and following the progress, for those of you that have benefited from the daily accountability model and even just the challenges that he’s given on the podcast –  will know that Ryan is someone that well, really, God uses to touch the hearts of people and to give them hope.

One other thing that I want to mention about the Youth Summit –  and that is this, there’s still opportunity! We’re ahead of the game as far as registrations for where we’ve been in the past. We’ve got a great crew planning to come. So get in those registrations as soon as you can and plan on joining us in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, this coming October 11th, 12th, and the 13th. So that’s going to be really exciting!

Another thing I want to mention is if you use WhatsApp, which some of you may use it. Some of you may not. You may notice there’s a new feature rolled out over the last couple of weeks called Channels. And I want to give an admonition, and I want to give you a good outlet.

My admonition is this. Please don’t just go exploring channels. One of the things that I’ve appreciated over WhatsApp over the years is it’s an opportunity to get prayer requests and news and so on from your friends without the openness of social media where you can get into anything. You know what I’m saying? And so when the channel’s feature just was released, I honestly was not too happy because now there’s just an opportunity to view things that you shouldn’t view. And I just want to encourage you, do not go exploring.

However, we are going to be opening, we actually have already opened, the Thee Generation WhatsApp channel. If you want to get to that, (for some reason, I can’t find it when I search the channels,) but if you’ll go to theegeneration.org/whatsapp, that will redirect you to the WhatsApp app and to our channel. I haven’t done a ton with it. But on there, you’ll see I’ve got a couple of announcements and some features we’ve rolled out on the website, one of them being the new series module that I just developed. I still have some things I hope to do on it, but that series module is something that’ll let you not only see similar podcast episodes grouped together…. So for instance… Ryan went through his Search for God series on the Satisfied podcast Dr. Jim finished up his my journey series. You can see all of those items in a particular series in one place. It’s a little bit different than categories, but it’s something I think will be an encouragement. I’ve got the latest two series, three series on the home page just below the podcast section. So check that out.

Well, young people, I wanted to get you up to date with where we’re at and what the Lord is doing regarding the whole trial that we’ve been going through. Where I last left you, I believe I was in Kansas and stranded there because our truck had major issues. I don’t remember all of what I said last time. I tried to catch up a little bit, but the long and the short of it was the truck that God had provided in a miraculous answer to prayer went bad. And not bad that you could fix it with a few thousand dollars, bad like it needed a new engine to the point where it wasn’t really worth pouring the money into it anymore.

I had an offer from the dealer that we bought it from to put a pre-owned engine into it at no cost to me. However, in the process of working through the details and praying and seeking God for what the next steps would be, we stumbled upon a little bit of a curveball as far as the logistics of this whole thing. And I’ll say a little bit more about that in a minute, but let me just give you a little bit more of my journey and what the Lord has been doing in my heart.

I’m going to tie that into the topic of what I’m burdened to challenge you with here today. When I last recorded, I recorded the sources and solutions for anxiety. And I know I’ve heard from a couple of folks that it was exactly what they needed. And I want you to know that’s what I needed at the time too! And to be honest with you, at that time, I wasn’t feeling a whole lot of peace. It’s one of those things where I’d go to the Word of God, and I would look at what God says and God would minister to my heart and God would bring me to tears as I saw His unchanging loving kindness towards me, his unfailing love. And God would… minister to my soul, but I felt as if as soon as I got away from the Word of God in the sense of looked away from my Bible and the text and kind of got on to other things in life, I would still get weighed down in my soul again.

Well, we knew we needed to get home. School had started, and my kids needed to get back into school. So, the Lord worked it out so that I could leave the truck down there in Kansas while we figured out what we were going to do. Caleb Reed, a good friend of mine, drove down from Wisconsin with his truck specifically to come down and hook up to my trailer, and he and I would do an all-nighter to get home. My wife left early that morning, and she passed Caleb actually on the way somewhere in Iowa. Caleb got down there about 5 p.m. on a Saturday, and he and I hooked up, turned around, and started driving.

Now, from where we were at in eastern Kansas, south of Kansas City, up to Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, it’s about a 10-hour drive. So, leaving at 5 p.m., we knew we were going to be driving through the wee hours of the night. We had some great talks, great discussions. We solved all the world’s problems and probably a few that we shouldn’t have. We got home at 5 a.m.

Now, I say all that to say, we left on Saturday, right? Got home 5 a.m. Sunday morning. I went to sleep and I was out like a light. And you know, I had every excuse in the world not to go to church that morning. I’m just being straight up honest with you. I woke up shortly into Sunday school, and all I can say is this, young people, as much as I was completely trashed, I was a ball of nerves. I was discouraged, glad to be home, but down in the dumps.

As much as I had every reason in the world just to roll over again and go back to sleep, I don’t know what to say except I just felt like I needed to go to church. I didn’t get out of bed and get ready for church because of what anybody would think about me. That would have been the wrong reason. I just had a great need and desire in my heart to get in to hear the preaching of God’s Word.

So, I got up. I got ready. I snuck in. And there were several things that happened there that morning that I can’t even begin to describe how meaningful it was to me. Probably one of the first things that hit me was the folks of my church here, Falls Baptist Church, to see their genuine concern, to speak to people who wept with me in the hallway and I could tell weren’t putting on a show but had genuinely been bearing our burdens in prayer and intercession for us.

To have people who not only wanted to hear what was going on but cared, that was the epitome of bearing one another’s burdens. Honestly, as I travel, there are folks all over the place that are very kind and very, very hospitable and caring. But there is something about folks who know you, who know your strengths and your weaknesses, when they come alongside of you and offer you that emotional support and stability. It is incredibly meaningful.

The Lord spoke to me through so many of my fellow church members, and it was such an encouragement. Now, because I was light on sleep, I would say I probably wasn’t the most emotionally stable. I shouldn’t admit that publicly on a podcast that thousands of people are going to hear, but I wasn’t. I came in, and I sat in the service, and I was so tired. I couldn’t sing (from the standpoint of just my voice was trashed. If I opened, I sounded like a murdered frog.) But even as I tried, I don’t know what it was, but every song seemed to talk about the goodness of God or how God cared for us.

And I wouldn’t get but two words into trying to croak out some tune, but I was so emotionally overwhelmed by the presence and reality of the goodness and love of God that I broke down and wept. In fact, it got to be such that I couldn’t even listen to the words of the songs without weeping. And I didn’t want to make a scene. Here I am, I’m home. I just got home from a summer ministry, and I’m sitting in the chair in my auditorium just weeping, and I didn’t want to make a scene. I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself. So, I left the service. I have an office that’s just off of the lobby, so I can still hear everything that’s going on. I went and sat in my office there and just kind of listened to the songs and wept and listened and wept, and the Lord just was speaking to me.

When it got around time for the sermon, I thought “I’m going to try to get back inside again.” So I went back in and sat, and Pastor Van Gelderen preached on Ephesians 3: “Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto him be glory in the church…”

As he spoke, he talked about the fact that God can do anything, and these are things you know, I know. God is able. He’s able. I know He’s able, and so do you, but there’s something about being at a time when I needed God’s intervention in a great way. When I felt as if there was no valid pathway forward, when I felt like I was staring major impossibilities in the face, to hear a message that God is able –  it spoke to my soul.

Again, I wept, but at this point I was being fed. I just needed to be there. I went a little further into the sermon, and he spoke about not only He’s able to do what we ask, but He’s able to do exceedingly above. God’s ways are so higher than my ways! God is capable, his desire is to do more than I ask. In other words, as I was staring at this absolute tragedy, this “end-all trial” as it appeared to me at the time, God had plans that were better than I could ever imagine.

But the thing that hit me in the gut during that sermon was the phrase “unto him be glory in the church.” This is really subtle, young people, yet when you find yourself in the midst of a trial and needing deliverance in some way, it’s very easy to get your focus off of God’s glory and onto something else. As I heard Pastor speaking, God was speaking to me.

And what God was telling me was, “Bobby, I’m not going to deliver because of all you’ve sacrificed for me. Bobby, I’m not going to deliver you. Don’t look to me to deliver you because of all of the money that donors have given towards this truck and what could be wasted. Don’t look to me to preserve your reputation. Don’t look to me even for the sake of the faith of those who followed your story, who are following your story. Don’t worry about that. Don’t look to me for deliverance for you at all, for the sake of your ministry so that you can do what you believe I want you to do. You don’t need to worry about that. What you need to be asking for deliverance for is for the sake of how it’s going to make me look, for the sake of my glory.”

God spoke to me that, you know, it’s so easy, and I’m not wired to really typically care what people think. But you know what? To be honest with you, I want you all to be encouraged. I want my kids and my wife to be encouraged. But God was telling me “what you need is, yes, you’re going to walk out of this with a story. No doubt about it. You’re going to walk out of this thing with a testimony, but it’s not going to be a testimony to your ability to hang on. It’s not going to be a testimony to your great faith. It’s not going to be a testimony to your willingness to persevere and to wait on the Lord and trust Him and depend on Him and surrender to Him. That’s not going to be the star of this story whatsoever. That’s not the point. I’m supposed to be the star of this story,” God said. “This is to make me look good. This is to draw people’s hearts to me to encourage them with what I can do in their lives.”

And that may seem like a very subtle shift, but that subtle shift is for me what unlocked peace. God has a story that he’s writing in this whole trial that we are going through, and that story doesn’t feature me. I’m not the star character. I may be an important part of the story, but I’m not the hero of the story. God is, and this story is one that must lift up Him.

Well, God spoke to me there through that, and I tell you, it was one of those times where I went forward in the invitation, young person, and I got on my knees and I said, “God, I’m done. I quit. I’m done trying to tell You what to do and why You’re doing this. I’m done trying to convince You to deliver me. I quit. trying to fix this or figure it out. And I’m just gonna submit to You and let You write the story that’s going to make You look good.”

That next morning, Monday morning, I, still recovering, spending some time with the Lord and one phrase that had come into my heart several times and I even said out loud with zero feeling whatsoever to my wife, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” And my heart was drawn to the book of Job, and I began to read just that story at the beginning and how Job was a man who hadn’t done anything wrong. He was, I mean, it says he was perfect in the sense that he was blameless. But this thing that came upon him that Job is known for wasn’t a matter of chastening. It wasn’t a matter of God’s judgment or justice at all. It was an opportunity for God to write a story about Himself that showed His amazing goodness.

Yes, it was a test for Job. There’s no doubt about that. That’s explicit in the text. But long story short, Job started off very strong. He started off trusting the Lord when all of his possessions were taken away. And even when things got worse and God took his health away, even when the closest person to him, his wife, told him to curse God and die, it says that he didn’t sin with his lips. And he had a heart of trust in the Lord.

And yet when his friends came and just sat there staring at him for however long they did, and then they began to subtly and then not-so-subtly imply, “Job, this is all your fault. You did something wrong. If you’ll just get right with God, then God will fix everything, and you can get back to life as it was before.” And Job is saying, “I don’t think I should confess something that I didn’t do. I didn’t bring this upon myself! So be quiet, you miserable comforters!”

But Job, at one point in his discussion, begins to subtly shift to feeling sorry for himself. He begins to shift to demanding that God gives him an answer,and getting maybe a little sassy with his God in saying, “God, you’d better tell me why this happened. I’m going to stand. If I stand before you, I am going to be shown to have done nothing wrong, and I demand to know why you are doing this.”

And when God finally shows up onto the scene, God does not commend him for that demand to know why. In fact, God gives chapters and chapters of telling Job essentially, “You know how to run this universe? I don’t think so.” And if I can summarize what I believe God was getting at, really what I think the point of the whole book is, and what God taught me that Monday morning was – you don’t need to know.

We as humans, we want to know why. But that Monday morning, I quit trying to figure out why. You always try to project ahead on how this is going to work out. And there’s a sense in which that’s perfectly reasonable. There’s a sense in which you can and should try to plan. But I just had to stop because I found myself worrying and getting my hopes set on this particular thing and then it didn’t work out the way that I wanted it to, and I just had to give up. I had to say, “I’m done with this. I quit.”

Coming home, I was supposed to speak at the seminary retreat, which at first I wasn’t sure if I was going to be back for it. But then, as I said, the Lord allowed us to get home and get the trailer home though we didn’t have a truck. I was able to get to that seminary retreat, and I spoke on trials and challenges.

And I spoke, as I did in the podcast previously, about that concept of constant death that God has for us. And I kind of gave blow by blow the whole story. Several things that I kept bringing out was we thought we were through it, right? I was dying, we thought we were through it, but we weren’t. But the point of that was that’s God’s plan, as I’ve said. Then I talked and gave an overview of the book of Job and preached a message entitled, “You Don’t Have to Know Why.” We talked about the fact that in James 1, God does tell us why, though He doesn’t have to. And part of it is He’s building our faith.

But I’m saying all of this to say, young people, to say this: In our lives, in our current journey, I don’t know the end of the story. I don’t know how this is going to turn out. But my job isn’t to try to figure out why. My job is to yield to God and to obey Him, to leave the results up to Him, to trust Him, yes, for deliverance, but to let Him define what that’s going to look like and what that’s going to mean. To not be in this for my comfort, just to be through this, to be out from underneath this heavy load, not so that I can look like some hero that had some great faith. Young people, if this has taught me anything, it’s taught me how weak my faith is and how much I need God.

But at the end of the day, it’s about His story, the story that He’s writing. Just to maybe give you practically where we’re at right now, I’ve spent the last several weeks investigating, discussing things with friends, folks who know the law, and other folks who are familiar with this kind of situation and discovered a few curve balls of some things, as I mentioned earlier. I discovered that my county will not let me pass emissions with this deleted truck. I discovered that the dealer registered my truck in the wrong county in Wisconsin, a county that is exempt from emissions, which is why I didn’t find out until it was too late to do anything about it. I found out that the deletion is very likely what caused Cylinder 6 to go bad.

And so in talking with different forms of counsel, I… Last Thursday, a couple of days ago, I sent an email to the dealer one more time and explained the new things that I figured out and discovered and said essentially, “I think you all did the right thing, and I’m not dismissing your offer off the table yet, but I’d like for you to consider and make a renewed appeal to give us all of our money back. 

Young people, if you can pray, I don’t know what the Lord is doing. I don’t know how this is gonna end up. I’ve been challenged to be meek and to trust the Lord. Psalm 37 has been a very regular source of blessing to me there: the balance between the wicked and they’re prospering and the child of God who is waiting on the Lord and God’s deliverance, and how God will take care of those who wait on Him and are meek. But I just covet your prayers. I appreciate those of you that have reached out. There have been a couple of you that have reached out and offered notes of encouragement to me, and you have no idea how timely your notes of encouragement were. They ministered to my soul.

And it was  exactly what we needed. The Lord has been in the midst of this bringing money in. I don’t even know what this money specifically is going to be for. I don’t know how everything’s going to go. It’s dog-eared towards the truck. And I’m very appreciative for those that have sought to help us out here. I don’t know what the specifics are going to be. I don’t know if we’re going to end up with a truck that I can’t drive and have to sell it and lose money on the sale. I don’t know if… I don’t know. I don’t know. But I do know this: the Lord is good. And this story is going to be awesome when it’s all written. And God is going to be the star, and I’m done. I’m done. With viewing myself as the primary protagonist in this story.

So young people, I don’t know how this has touched your soul. I don’t know what you’re going through. I’m sure some of you are going through some difficult circumstances. Don’t idolize. Don’t make your focus the deliverance. Make your focus yielding to the Lord, surrendering to him, trusting Him to do the rescuing so that He can be the hero of the story. And I just trust that this has found you well, and I hope to see some of you at the Thee Generation Youth Summit. There’s still time to register at theegeneration.org/summit. Hope to see you there, but thank you so much for listening. God bless!