Bobby Bosler: Welcome to the Thee Generation podcast. I’m Bobby Bosler, and I’m speaking to you today from Chesapeake, Virginia. Where I and my two guys are getting prepared for the war this weekend. If you are anywhere near the Chesapeake, Virginia area, we would love for you to come and join us and be a part of The War this Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. That is going to be May 6th, 7th, and 8th from 6 to 9 p.m. at Good News Baptist Church.

But the reason why I wanted to record here today is I wanted to share a testimony and a challenge from what God has been doing in my life and in our family’s lives. God has been doing great things over these last several months. The last time I shared with you all what the Lord was doing, we weren’t exactly in the greatest spot as far as our truck was concerned. I know I had some people who had asked me how things were going with the truck, and boy do I’ve got a lot to tell you. Really, in the process of sharing with you what has happened, I also want to share with you a lesson the Lord greatly challenged me with. So let me back up a little bit.

Back at the beginning of the semester, I had driven the truck from Wisconsin down to Taylor’s, South Carolina with the trailer. Along the way, I heard some things that sounded a little funny, and I started thinking, you know, we are going to be needing to get a new truck sometime soon. On the way down, our trailer brake stopped working, and it was because of essentially a faulty brake light switch. I’d replaced that and found out it actually wasn’t the brake light switch. It was the fuse, and we kept the brake light switch in. Again, I don’t remember exactly where things were when I last talked to you about it. But we drove from Taylor’s to our first meeting in Moncks corner, and along the way, I started noticing it sounded really funny, like something strange was going on. The RPMs were higher than normal. Again, I wasn’t sure what the problem was, but I knew my transmission temperature gauge was steadily climbing, more than normal. So when we arrived at the church, I thought, well, we need to figure something out. I was talking to the pastor, Pastor Frank Bailey, and he said, well, maybe think about getting a transmission fluid change. So long story short, we ended up getting a transmission fluid changed. We got scalped in the process. Long story. But it didn’t change a thing. The next travel day, same deal. Temperature gauge was climbing. I figured out that if I drove slower than normal, like around 50, 55 miles an hour, the temperature remained stable, but still there’s something wrong. There was definitely something wrong. So on the way to the next church, I called the pastor in Winder, Georgia, and he got me connected with a diesel mechanic. And so at this point, I was very concerned that our transmission might be going, which was a multi-thousand dollar repair. And we really weren’t wanting to pour any more money into it. We had had probably about, oh, $7,000, $8,000 in the bank towards a new truck. And we were really wondering if this was God telling us, you need to get a new truck.

 So in the process of working through with the diesel mechanic, he was concerned it could be something significant, like maybe the overdrive going bad. And throughout a series of events, we realized that the brake light switch that I installed was a cheap Chinese knockoff. Once we reinstalled the OEM brake light switch, it actually shifted fine into overdrive, which was the problem. And the truck was back in operation. So we drove from Winder, Georgia, to Somerville, Alabama, where we did our next meeting, and the truck was running fine.

We drove from Somerville, Alabama, to North Carolina. Once again, the truck seemed to be going okay. After we did our meeting in Landis, North Carolina, we drove west, and we were driving to Cookville, Tennessee, to do our next war. As we were climbing up Black Mountain in the mountains of North Carolina, I started hearing another funny noise that I’d never heard before. This was a hissing sound.

It sounded unusual, intermittent, in and out, yet it was almost like it was in a cadence of some sort. As we’re hauling up this mountain, all of a sudden, white smoke began to billow out of the engine compartment of the truck and even into the cab some. I knew I was getting close to the top of the mountain, so I thought maybe if I can push it a little bit just to get the trailer up to the top of the mountain, we’ll be at least be able to get somewhere. But after my temperature gauge started shooting northward, I realized, nope, even on the side of this mountain, I got to pull over to the side.

So we pulled over to the side, and I was honestly stressed does not even begin to describe. There was genuine fear. Honestly, I didn’t know what was wrong. I knew my truck wasn’t gonna get to the top of the mountain, and I had a trailer. We’re on the side of the road, people whizzing past us at high rates of speed, and I’ll be honest with you in that moment, I didn’t know what to do. I called around, found a wrecker who ended up coming out, and he said it’d be no problem for him to haul this somewhere, but I needed a place to haul it to, and in calling around, nobody it seemed was able to get my truck in and service it. That being said, the Lord was good even in the midst of this.  Dr. Jim and the War of Special Forces team happened to have some time off and we had already planned for the three Special Forces girls to come and join us with the Special Forces Excursion Vehicle. So our tentative plan was once we hauled the truck and trailer to somewhere, the girls were going to get all of our equipment out of the trailer and out of the truck. And they were going to drive it, and my wife and the kids and us, once we figured out what to do with the truck, to the next meeting and hopefully be able to continue. Well, things got worse, okay? We knew we had the girls, we had vehicles, but we weren’t sure where we were gonna take it. So there was one place he said, well, you can at least take it to my storage lot until you figure out where it can go. And so the wrecker arrived, and he’s getting the front of my truck hooked into this little platform thing to pull both the truck and the trailer. He was under the truck, and apparently when you haul something like that, you need to disengage the driveshaft because you can’t just roll it on its back wheels or else it will completely destroy the transmission. So he’s underneath, and there’s a couple of bolts that he has to undo in order to disengage the driveshaft. And he comes out from underneath, I’m thinking everything’s squared away. And he says, can’t get the driveshaft disengaged. I said, why not? He said because it’s really rusty. Every time I try to move the bolts, it turns, it’s stripping the bolts, and I just can’t get them disengaged. He says, your only hope is to get the truck started up. At this point, he’d contacted a friend of his who came, and he was helping us, and he couldn’t get the bolts loosened either, and I tried to start the truck. And we put a little bit of coolant inside of it because my coolant reservoir was completely empty, and we didn’t know why at that exact moment. But we put some coolant in, and I went to start it, and it wouldn’t start. It would turn over fine, but it would not fire up. And I remember as I was sitting in my truck, as I was trying to start it, looking over at those two men. When it wouldn’t start, they both kind of changed. They looked down, and the friend who’d come, he said, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think your truck is toast. I don’t think she’ll ever start up again.

We didn’t have money for a new truck. I had no way to get my trailer to the next church. I was at a complete and total loss as to what to do. The options were pretty much either we could just risk it and haul it, but they told me for sure if we hauled it without the driveshaft engaged, disengaged, or it started, it would definitely ruin the transmission. The other option was to get two different tow vehicles, one that could put the truck on a flatbed and then another vehicle to haul the trailer, but that was going to take hours. And as it was already, we had to be in Cookeville that night. We were three hours away to start off our kickoff service and things were getting late. So I didn’t know what to do. I was tempted to just go ahead and have him haul it and ruin the transmission just to get it off the side of the mountain. I called a friend, and he said, don’t do that. Don’t do that. And yet I didn’t know what to do. I was so beyond my own capacity at that point. 

The friend who’d come, as we were just about ready to pull the trigger and call for a flatbed truck and a bunch of extra towing charges, he said, hey, let me try to start it up one more time. He hopped into the driver’s seat, turned the key. And it started up. Um, honestly, I said, “are you an angel?” I literally said it to the guy. “Are you an angel?” And, uh, he ended up having a storage, a fenced-in storage area and a shop. And he said that he would be willing to have the men look at the truck and figure out what was wrong with it.

And we got the truck and the trailer to their location. We got the trailer parked, and we got all the equipment out, loaded up with the girls, and we left. We did figure out before we left that the radiator had blown a hole in the side of it, is what happened. So all that smoke was not only things heating up, but it was radiator fluid burning off on the heat of the engine.

So I say all of that to say when we arrived in Cookeville, I had no truck, I had no trailer. Thankfully, they had a very nice prophets chamber there, a mission’s house that we were able to stay in. And we did have a plan for getting the truck looked at. They were going to replace the radiator. 

But when I arrived, I was just at the end of myself. I preached a message I’ve preached many times out of 2 Corinthians 1 entitled, “This is Going to be Good” or “the worse it gets, the better it gets. And I believe the Lord was going to bless there that week because of the extreme weakness that we were experiencing.

So we posted some things on Facebook, and folks were aware of it. And when we got to the church, I had a friend who called me, and I don’t know how else to say this. I’m just being straight up real with you all. I did not know. My heart has always been reluctant to talk about financial things online in front of people who could be potential givers because I don’t want to persuade people to give to our needs. I want to know that God is in it. But I had a friend who called me and challenged me on that point and challenged me, again, I won’t go into all the specifics, and the Lord, I believe, spoke to my heart and said, you need at least to make people aware of what’s going on and the fact that your truck may not, may be the end of the road for this thing.

I put a call out there on Facebook and I just said, “here’s what’s going on, here’s what’s happening, just wanna make you aware, we may not have a truck, we’re not sure.”

So I put a call out there, and the next day I was called, and they said the radiator was fixed and they said the truck seems like it’s running okay and if I wanted to come and get it I could get the trailer and bring it to Cookeville. So I got my wife and I the next day on Thursday we went out and we got the truck and the trailer, I hooked it up and to be honest with you I was shaking like a leaf. I didn’t know with the heat of what had happened if it had permanently damaged the truck or not with the radiator blowing out going up the mountain. And so as we were driving I was aware of every funny sound, I was aware of every little bit of smoke that was maybe blown out of the tailpipe. We actually pulled over a couple of times because I was afraid something was going wrong. And eventually I had somebody, a friend of mine who said, “just push it, just push it, get yourself to where you’re going. If things go bad, they’re going to go bad whether you baby it all the way there or not.” So we drove and drove up a number of steep hills as well and it seemed to be getting the job done. I’ll be honest with you though, along the way, I was wondering if the truck was being held together by an Ancellic pit crew.

We got to the church late that night, got the trailer parked, and as I was unhooking the truck and pulled the truck into its parking spot, it just sounded rugged. It just sounded ragged to be honest with you.

And I mentioned that on Facebook and I said, I don’t know how much longer this truck has in our service. Well, that week, to be honest with you, was a week full of God’s blessing. You know, the things that really matter, the gospel. Honestly, I was feeling very much under it, feeling like here I am, I can’t even provide for my own family and give them a reliable truck to pull things with.

 And yet in the midst of all of that, God was moving. We didn’t have a large crowd that week, but I remember on the first night, there was a young lady, don’t remember her name off the top of my head, but she came, I think she may have ended up bringing some friends on some of the other nights. But I remember that first night particularly, the moment I began to preach, she began to weep. Just straight up, mascara everywhere, weep. From the first five words that I had said. The invitation, she and a number of others went back and got saved. And I found out the rest of the story. 

Apparently, this young lady was, I think, at the mall or Walmart or something. And earlier that day, she had sensed her great need, her spiritual need. And she had uttered up a cry to the Lord, to God, and said, God, something’s wrong. I don’t know what’s wrong in my heart. I need something. I need God. I need to get back to church or something. Would you please show me what you want me to do? Not a half hour after that, one of the girls on the team encountered her, invited her to come to The War, and she signed up, and she called her mom shortly after that conversation and said, God answered my prayer. So when I started preaching, my preaching intersected with what God was already doing in her heart. She knew, and that’s what we had prayed for. We prayed for God to lead us to young people whom God was already working on. 

There were a number of other young people that got saved, young people with huge potential for follow-up and following the Lord. It was a very encouraging week. And after we’d wrapped things up on Monday night, Tuesday morning, we were going to do our very best to get down to Greenville with the idea that if something went wrong, we had an extra day to work on it. We didn’t want to end up traveling down there at the last minute and having something go wrong. So that morning, the girls came to say goodbye, and I started up the truck because I was going to back it up onto the trailer to hook things up. And I saw clouds of blue smoke start to come out of the tailpipe. Now, sometimes that happens with that truck. That happened with that truck, and it would kind of wear off after a few minutes. But this was unusually blue and cloudy, and I thought, uh-oh, what’s going on?

So with the truck running, I popped open the hood and I looked underneath and to my shock and horror, I found that there was diesel fuel pouring out of the engine. And I could have been wrong, but I thought, I don’t think it’s supposed to be doing that. So I took some videos and pictures, texted some friends and called some folks, and they said, you definitely need to get that looked at. And to be honest with you, and I forgot to mention this prior to this moment, I had been getting phone calls from the time that our truck was stuck on the side of the mountain all the way until this happened. God began to move in people’s hearts about giving towards our truck. I had an evangelist friend who sent us $200. I had some family members who found out about our need and sent us money. I had an anonymous donation of $7,000 towards a truck. I had someone else that we hardly even knew who found out about our need and sent me a message and said, “The Lord has told us to send $5,000 towards your truck.” I felt like everywhere I turned, people were being moved to give towards the truck. And by the time this had happened, regarding the fuel leak, we had had about $20,000 to $24,000 that had either been given or were promised towards a truck. 

And I’ll be honest with you, I knew God was going to supply a truck for us. But with this fuel leak, I thought, well, I guess I’m going to have to cancel the next meeting because there is no way we’re going to be able to make it down to Greenville, Mississippi with a fuel leak like this. And honestly, I thought this was God’s answer from the first time I saw the fuel leak, even though I was horrified by it, I had a peace because I thought God’s got this God is providing, he is supplying, he is working.

And I thought, well, this must be God’s answer. I need to cancel the next meeting and we need to take the week and look for a truck. And maybe this is God’s way of giving us the time to find something. And so I called up the pastor and I said, “Hey, let’s not pull the trigger quite yet, but I don’t think my truck is going to be able to make it down there. I think we’re going to have to cancel the meeting.” And he was fine with that. He understood. 

But I really couldn’t believe it. I found a shop five minutes away, who said they could look at the truck right away. And so even with it spilling fuel out, I hopped in the truck and I drove it down there and he took a look at it and within a few minutes he said, I can fix this. In fact, I can fix this within an hour as soon as I get the part and I should be able to have the part here within an hour. So I thought, wow, we could be on the road in two hours. So at that time, I was just thinking, I’m going to go get the truck. I’m going to go get the truck.

At a certain point in time, young people, I’ll be honest with you, I had a decision. Was I going to cancel the meeting, or was I going to try to let this truck get us down to Mississippi? It was about an eight-hour drive from where we were, a seven to eight-hour drive, and I thought to go. The thought that I had was that I could not take my hand off of the plow. Even though it was sketchy whether we would get down there, I just, in my heart, felt like I could not in good conscience go through with canceling the meeting.

So I called the pastor up and I told him, “Hey listen, it looks like they’re going to be able to fix my truck here today. So we’re going to try to get down there to you all either today or tomorrow. Just wanted to give you a heads up. We are going for the meeting if we can get down there.” Well, we all came back and we were just going to wait until the truck was fixed. And my wife had been doing a lot of research. She’d looked at a lot of vehicles, and our thought was maybe if we looked at dealers along the route down to Mississippi, maybe we could find something, and the Lord was providing; money was coming in.

So as I was looking at the listing she was sending me, I saw one just to the east of us in Cookeville, Tennessee. And I don’t know how else to describe this young people, but as soon as I saw the listing, I had peace. Now that was very unusual because most of the time when I looked at a listing, I had nothing but anxiety. Like I hate looking at listings. I hate shopping for vehicles. I hate it with all of my heart. It’s worse than getting a root canal or something like that. Okay. I hate it more than getting trapped in a social setting where I have to sit and be with people and talk to them for long periods of time as an introvert. Okay. I just can’t stand it.

And so when I saw this listing and I had peace in my heart, at least I said to Abby, I said, “Hey, let’s at least go look at it. I mean, it’s 30 minutes away. Let’s go drive and take a look at it. It’s a dealer. Honestly, it looks like everything that I’d want in a truck. Not necessarily all the bells and whistles, but all the stuff that we need in a truck. So let’s go take a look.” So we hopped in the van with the guys and we went and we took a look at it, and from the price to the condition of the truck itself to even as we talked through potential terms because we didn’t have the whole amount.

Again, I’m not hiding anything from you guys. It was a $47,000 truck. We didn’t have all the money for that, but at least with the money that we had in hand, the money that we had promised, we thought I think we could do this with some financing. And so we talked it through, and it seemed that it was a good deal even as far as the monthly payments and so on. And long story short, by the end of the day, I had bought a 2019 Ram 3500 with the high output motor in the ASIN transmission. Some of you know what that means. I did not totally at the time, but it seemed like a good idea.

I was blown away. Not only that, we found a fifth-wheel hitch right near the dealer on Facebook Marketplace for a fair price. We were able to pick that up, and there were a lot of other things I could share throughout the day. There were bumps in the road for sure along the way. But all I can say, young people, is I knew this was the truck that God had for us. Um, we drove home with the truck and I was flabbergasted, blown away. We had gone from the impossibility of being stuck on the side of a mountain with a truck that blew up essentially to now, and they actually accepted my truck as a trade-in too, which was crazy that they took my truck, and I told them what was going on with it.

So the next day we hooked up the truck to the trailer, and man, that thing could haul down the road up hills with the cruise control. I had to look in the rearview mirror several times to make sure the trailer was still there because the thing hauled so well. And we got down to Greenville, Mississippi, and I was rejoicing in the Lord. Well, that ain’t the end of the story, young people. The next morning I was, after we’d gotten down to Greenville, Mississippi, got a knock on the door of my trailer and somebody dropped off a check for $12,000 towards the remainder of the balance of our loan for the truck. And not only that, young people, as we began to go recruiting, we got into schools we’d never been in before. In fact, on the first day, we got into a school we had never been in before. The Lord had given us a connection, and we got in. The guys did tremendously in recruiting. The next day, the guys just kept trying for lunchrooms and things ended up materializing to the point that we had three lunchrooms in one lunchtime of day. I had to go do a lunchroom all by myself. Alex did one, Tim did one himself. And, uh, we ended up with a lot of recruits. In fact, Alex got a Bosler record. He blew the previous record out of the water by like 30 or, like, 40 recruits for a personal record in a week. He got 350 recruits in one week just by himself. And when the rallies came around, we had a ton of young people, 70, 80. I think one of the nights we even hit 90 teenagers from the community. By the time everything, the dust had settled. And it was pretty crazy. Thirty-nine young people had trusted Christ. And I thought, wow, and I almost canceled this meeting. Unbelievable. 

Well, we were blown away just at what God had taught us about keeping our hand to the plow and not letting up when it comes to the forward march of the gospel. But young person, this story ain’t done yet because things got worse.

We were driving from Greenville, Mississippi. Our plan was to stop overnight in Dayton, Ohio. A friend of mine, Josiah Kagan, is a pastor there, Kettering, Ohio, Grace Baptist Church. It was a long trip. It was a 10-hour trip from Greenville, Mississippi to that place in Ohio, and the next day, we had another three to four-hour trip to get to Lisbon, Ohio, our next meeting. And as we were driving, a bunch of things went weird. There was a weird accident that happened on one of the highways, literally standstill for two hours.

We ended up having to back up and get off on the previous exit. It cost us a bunch of time. And as we were driving though, one of my team members told me, he said, “‘Mr. Bosler, is it supposed to look like that? “‘Is your trailer supposed to bounce like that back there?’ And I turned around and looked, and I saw as we were driving down the road, the kingpin, which is the steel, for lack of a better term, connector that comes out of the nose of the trailer, the bottom of the nose, and hooks into the bed of the truck. That and the actual nose of the trailer seemed like they had shocks between them. And I thought, I don’t know if it’s supposed to do that. Not only that, we’d found that underneath our front cap there’s a seam there and that seam had become separated and we didn’t know why. And it got worse when you lowered it onto the trailer. And I called up a couple of evangelist friends of mine. It was about 10 o’clock at night. We’re driving. We still had two hours to go. And two different evangelist friends said, “Brother Bosler, you may have a cracked frame. That is highly dangerous traveling with that trailer. If that frame goes all the way, your trailer will literally fall off the back of your truck, and it would be a complete catastrophic loss.”

 I went from being super happy and excited to being, I don’t even know the, have words to describe what I felt. Stressed is an understatement. I didn’t know if my trailer was gonna fall off the back of my truck or not. I slowed down. I drove a lot slower for the rest of the trip and I couldn’t stop. It was too late to get an RV campsite, and I knew I just needed to press on to get to the church. And so we got to the church. Boy, it’s getting me worked up just thinking about it all again. We got to the church, and even in the process of reopening the trailer, one of my slides, the gearbox went. I couldn’t get the big slide out. And as I lay down that night, I looked at my wife and I said, I don’t know if I can keep doing this. I hate to admit that to you kids, but I was at the end of myself. I was at the end of my ability to handle the pressure and the stress. There’ve been a number of things this semester that have been putting huge, huge stress upon me. And I felt like this was the straw.

that broke the camel’s back. I’ll be honest with you, I was about ready to throw in the towel and give it up. And yet, as we were talking, we both came to the conclusion that, but we can because God is clearly in us being on the road. Look at this new truck, a 2019 Ram 3500, God brought in $36,000 towards this truck in a miraculous answer to prayer, God wants us on the road.

But I’m now homeless. I couldn’t bring the trailer to the next meeting, I knew it. And I decided to do my very best to put it out of my mind and just get a good night’s sleep. The next morning I woke up and I thought, well, I need to take this to somebody who can look at it to tell me what they think. I got to two different places and one of the guys said, Mr. Bosler, think you just need to get yourself a new trailer.

That was not what I wanted to hear. Neither of the people thought it was the frame, but they said it could be, they couldn’t quite tell. Could be the walls sinking, and in either case, it was a bad deal. And I didn’t know what to do. But I had learned something from the Greenville meeting that I needed to keep my hand to the plow. And so I called the pastor, I said,

I’m sorry for the last-minute notice, but we’re going to try to pack our stuff up in the truck and the minivan, and we’re going to try to get there to you all tomorrow, but we need a place to stay, I and my wife and my kids. We left the trailer there, honestly having no clue what in the world we were going to do with it. We packed all the equipment and my wife did a quick once-through of the trailer and packed everything that we would need for maybe a week, maybe longer.

We were leaving our home behind. Can you imagine young person if you came home one day and found out, Oh, I can’t live in my house anymore. Uh, that’s what was happening to us. We went from the heights of just thrilled and excited with what God was doing to now we are literally homeless and I had four weeks left of The War to do.

We, that night, the night we had arrived at the church, as I was putting the kids to bed, my kids said something to me that was both a rebuke and one of those just makes you wanna weep for joy and spiritual encouragement moments. Both David and Eva, they looked at me and they said, “Dad, it’s gonna be a good week, isn’t it?”

They’d heard me preach that sermon so many times. They believed it. Well, we packed everything up, like I said, the next day, and we got to Lisbon, Ohio, and we’re sitting in the office talking to Pastor, and he said, “I’ll be honest with you, I had nothing. I had nothing to give. I knew what I was gonna preach that night. I was gonna preach 2 Corinthians 1 again. The worse it gets, the better it gets, not because I felt it. It’s what God said and I believed it even though I didn’t feel it and he’s taught me at one point he says, Brother Bosler, are you okay and I told him I don’t know I was in shock.

So we pressed on with recruiting my wife and kids. My kids were amazing. They did great. We had a great, whole lower level of a family’s house. And the kids did their schooling at the church. And

As the guys went out to invite people, we got into two lunchrooms. One of them was very key and they said the lunchrooms were exciting. What the Lord was doing. We got into an FCA and. All I can say young people is God’s fingerprints were all over the week. We had the largest crowd we’d ever had there on the first night, and that was the smallest night of the three nights. We had a huge response. I think we had like 23 people go back. We ended up with like 19 saved. I don’t remember all the numbers on the specific nights, but I know each night we had a large moving of young people. And I told my wife, and I say this to you all, I had nothing and I knew it. I didn’t even feel like doing The War yet. I knew it was what God had called me to do and I knew that God was going to bless my weakness. And I felt like though I had nothing, I felt like as I was preaching, and I don’t want this to come across wrong, I told my wife after the second night, again, I’d preach Saturday night and Sunday morning for the church and Sunday night, I told her, I said, “Hon, I feel like when I preach, I’ve got nothing but I feel like I have preaching superpowers. Like, God is just taking my words and just using them beyond me.”

And by the end of the week there were 41 young people that had gotten saved. And I was absolutely blown away once again. And on Sunday, began hearing that the husband of the family that we had stayed with, God had put it on his heart, and he had expressed a desire, he said, he wanted to take some time off and get his men that worked for his business, and they wanted to go out to Dayton, Ohio, on the other side of the state, and assess the roadworthiness of my trailer. And he had a big one-ton truck and he said if it was roadworthy he would bring it back to his place and he would set his team of men to work on trying to diagnose the problem and fix it. And you know sometimes when people express their desire to do something like that it’s like you don’t just because somebody says they’d like to do it doesn’t mean they’re really committed to do it. And so I didn’t want to call his bluff, so to speak. I just didn’t want to inconvenience anybody else. But when I began to realize this man was serious and that he was committed and willing to do what it took to get my trailer back up and running, I agreed. I’d asked some folks, I said, “Is this guy capable of doing the fix?” And from everyone I talked to, they said, “If it can be fixed, he will not only fix it, but he will make it better than it was from the factory.”

 And so I agreed and he took the men. And they went out and they figured out that it wasn’t the frame thankfully. That it was road worthy. They got it back to his shop and long story short Not only did they fix it they they beefed up what was wrong and not only that I Had had an alignment issue on the the axles and they noticed that too and they replaced all my leaf springs Which put things back into alignment and on top of all of that the church because that had been wearing the tires the church church has put new tires on the trailer to brand new tires which they’re expensive tires.

 It’s not all complete yet it’s it’s in process but my wife and I and my kids and the team really have been absolutely blown away I keep saying that but I can’t underscore the depths to which we had fallen the goodness of God not only to take care of our needs but also to supply and to enable us in the midst of frankly some of the most wearing trials I…Listen, as a man, you want to be able to provide and supply for your family and provide peace and security and stability. And I just felt as if I could not. And that hits to the core as a man. To know that my God has us. And you know, it’s been thrilling to see God work.

And yet, as I was thinking about this podcast here today, and I know this is much longer than our podcasts normally are, but I knew many of you have wanted to know where things stand with the truck. And at this point, three quarters of the amount for the truck has been given approximately. And the trailer, again, we’re not exactly sure how it’s all gonna fall out, but I don’t think they’re going to take a dime for the work that they’ve done on the trailer, which just humbles me to the dust, honestly. And we saw more saved in Greenville, Mississippi, and Lisbon, Ohio, than we had seen the whole tour prior to that. And there’s a sense in which I’m glad that the unknowns of the trial are gone, and yet I’m also amazed at how God blessed in the midst. It brought the verses, “My grace is sufficient for thee, for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly, therefore, will I rather glory my infirmities, but the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore, I take pleasure in the necessities, distresses, weaknesses, persecutions,” and I’m not quoting them all in the right order there. “For when I am weak, then am I strong.” I felt as if God taught me that on a new level. 

And I’m not saying I want trials, I’m not saying that I want things to go crazy again. But the spiritual preaching superpowers that God gave while I was in that weakness is something I will never, ever forget.

So there were two lessons the Lord gave me through this. One is that don’t despise the trial and the weakness, embrace it. It may be the very height of your effectiveness in God’s work. But another thing that I learned is not to take my hand off the plow.

The text that I had turned to was Luke 9:57-62. I’m not going to read all of the verses except the last verse. Jesus said unto him, “No man having put his hand to the plow and looking back is fit for the kingdom of God.” And while I’m sure there are a lot of different applications and maybe I’m not even fully understanding it in the context, but I know for me the way God spoke to my heart regarding that keeping my hand to the plow concept is that if you’ve got an opportunity in front of you no matter what you’re facing, keep your hand to that plow because I really do think that it is that combination of intense trials and also a stick-to-it determination not to let up in our gospel witness that results in Acts level power and many souls saved.

Young people, I want you to know that I did not feel like a good THEE Generation director these last couple of weeks, especially when things were going wrong. I was grateful for the peace the Lord gave me. I’m grateful that I don’t think I lost my temper at all in the midst of it, that God gave me a calmness. But yet even in the midst of the calmness, you know, there…Not knowing what to do and just looking to the Lord to know what to do and to see his hand in every step along the way. And again, I shared a lot of the details just because perhaps some of you are going through some stuff right now and you feel like, “Well, I am trying to follow the Lord with all of my heart. Why is this stuff happening? Why is this going so wrong? I just want to give up. I don’t know that I can take it.” Please don’t take your hand off the plow. Don’t take your hand off the plow. Don’t hold back. Don’t cancel because things are going crazy or wrong. Keep going. Look to the Lord. And I think you’ll find a greater capacity for depending on the Lord than you would have had had things been going well.

So I say all of that to say young people, God is teaching me, he is shredding me, he’s humbling me like I shared last time we talked. And I’m grateful for what he’s doing and I am thrilled to be in his work knowing that God has me right where he wants me. He knows what I can handle and what I can’t handle. He knows how to squeeze that blessing out of me. And he’s doing it.

And so this is much more of a testimony here today of just what we’ve been through.

The last three weeks of the tour, I actually, two of the three are near my parents’ place in New Jersey, and so I left my wife and kids so they can have a little bit more stability. I’m going with the guys. My wife was able to join us for our last week in New Egypt and she’ll join us for our final week in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania. But I and the guys are doing it solo here without her and the kids in Chesapeake, Virginia this week. But we’re just grateful and we’ve got major optimism in what the Lord is doing and what he’s going to do. And so I just ask that you pray for us and I ask that you pray for God to continue to bless and provide and supply and enable that we would see many people saved here this week as we just glory in our weakness and keep our hand to the Lord.

It’s all a part of our surrender process and God teaching us how to stay yielded to Him, to His work, and to His labor that He wants us to do and teaching us in a new way to depend upon Him, to do what we know we can’t do in our own strength unless He enables us to do it. Thanks so much for listening to me rant and talk a little bit. I trust the Lord has encouraged your heart through it. God bless you.