Bobby Bosler: Welcome to the Thee Generation Podcast.

I’m Bobby Bosler and I’m excited to be speaking to you today from Byron, Georgia.

Well, I and my team, we have been for the last several weeks, six weeks or so, out on the road doing the war across the country.

And I’ve been thrilled at how the Lord has worked.

We have thus far been in North Carolina.

We’ve been in South Carolina.

We’ve been in Tennessee, Florida, and we’re wrapping up here this week with a spring tour in Georgia.

It’s been neat to see, and again, those of you that follow the podcast, you understand that I’m bringing my team members on a journey, and it’s just exciting to see the journey of faith God is bringing all of us on to.

Last week as we came into the week, I’ll be perfectly honest with you, I was feeling pretty weak.

We came into a church in Pensacola, Northwest Pensacola, Northstone Baptist Church, and there’s a certain sense in which we were excited about the opportunity, and yet as I looked around at the town, it’s not exactly a populated part of the town.

It’s kind of a main drag.

Not a ton of neighborhoods nearby, at least not the kind that are good for recruiting, and so I was feeling like we’re in big trouble.

We just happened to have some extra time on Wednesday last week, and so our team.

We got before the Lord and we admitted our weakness.

And you know, one of the things that I’ve been finding here this year is that it seems like COVID, even though many of the states are kind of moving past it in a certain sense, at least down South, it’s the convenient excuse.

It’s the convenient excuse to say, yeah, no, we’re not going to let you into the school.

Well, because of COVID or, hey, I can’t let you in the ROTC group because, well, you know, COVID.

And it seems like every time we turn around, somebody is saying that the virus, the sickness, is the reason why we can’t do what we’re supposed to be doing, what we need to be doing, really.

And it seemed like the virus was hindering our effectiveness at reaching people for the gospel.

Well, as we got on our knees, we were pretty honest with God about our own failures, our own weaknesses, our own lack of faith, our own lack of ability to do anything that God had called us to do.

And as we were praying, God brought my attention to that verse in 2 Corinthians 12, 9.

And the verse says, for my grace is sufficient for thee, right?

And it’s important to remember that was an answer to a prayer.

The prayer was, God, take the sickness.

Whatever this was, this infirmity, this thorn in the flesh, God, please take it away because I could serve you so much better if this obstacle was gone.

And God’s answer to Paul when he asked him three times, God, take it away, take it away, take it away, his answer was, no, I’m going to give you my grace.

My grace is more than enough to overcome.

It’s more than enough to enable you to do what I’ve called you to do.

And okay, yeah, sure, I’ve preached that.

I’ve preached this passage.

Some of you have even heard my sermon, The Strength of Weakness, that I preached at the Youth Summit a year or two ago.

But, you know, as I was sitting there in the room and as I was challenging the guys, I was feeling challenged myself at just how completely incompetent we were.

This wasn’t working.

It wasn’t happening like it ought to happen.

And the Lord directed my attention to that verse, and God kind of tied the context to me.

I’m asking God, take away the virus, take away the virus, take away the virus.

And, you know, the excuse that seemed to be hindering our effectiveness at getting into the schools like we normally do, it was there, and I wanted it to be gone.

And so God just brought my attention to the last part of that verse that says, Most gladly, therefore, will I rather glory in mine infirmities.

And I know when we preach that, we make a point about the strengthlessness idea of the word infirmities, and that certainly is true about the word, but you also need to remember the primary idea of that word infirmity is sickness, right?

And it was like the Lord in that prayer meeting tied together, oh, wait a minute, I should glory in COVID that the power of Christ may rest upon me.

Therefore, I take pleasure in infirmities for when I am weak, then am I strong.

And I remember as we were praying, as we had humbled ourselves in the eyes of the Lord, as we declared our complete incapableness of doing what we had been called to do, and as we came before the Lord in desperation, God met with us young people, and God spoke to us and said, I’m going to bless this week.

Well, the guys, keep in mind, And we had not been in a single public school since COVID hit.

And the guys went down to a high school that honestly wasn’t really initially on my radar.

They went down to the high school and went to the ROTC commander.

And he gave them a bunch of classes in the public school.

And honestly, young people, it was a miracle.

And you know what?

I didn’t even find out until just yesterday even how much of a miracle it was.

Oh, I found out.

Yes, he let us come in.

And yes, he showed one of our promo videos at the beginning of every class.

And I knew that he had had one of his cadets create a sign-up sheet for us to use that.

That kind of thing never happens.

This was amazing.

But not only that, but there was a young man, and maybe he’s listening right now, named Winfred, Winnie for short.

No relation to the Pooh, all right?

But Winnie, he was so pumped about the war during that first class session.

He, in essence, by his spirit and in his attitude said, dude, we got to do this.

And a lot of people signed on as a result of his his excitedness about it.

And you know what?

That didn’t stop when recruiting was done because he came on that first night.

And I’ll never forget the very first time Colin said, give me an oowa.

He was one of the first guys to scream his guts out, both he and his sister.

And you know what?

All week long, he and those that he had brought with us, they came.

They had an amazing time.

We saw a number of them trust Christ as their Savior.

And honestly, for us and our team, we looked at that, and we did not think, ah, that was just a coincidence.

We didn’t think, oh, that was a lucky break.

We thought that was God.

And the reason why I want to bring this up is because right now, the time of my recording, it’s Thursday.

We had a time of prayer yesterday, and I do believe the Lord spoke to us.

And already, as of the time of this recording, we got classrooms in an ROTC again, and we actually have two PE periods in the public high school here nearby in Roberta, Georgia.

And I’m just so thankful that God answers prayer.

But you know what?

I’ve got a point that’s bigger to make than just that God answers prayer for the war team.

And I think it’s pretty obvious here that part of what I’m getting at, young people, is that God answers prayer for you too.

But what is God actually trying to accomplish in all of this?

Quickly, I just want to point out something God’s been teaching me here lately.

Romans chapter 5, I’ve been studying through the book of Romans, and in chapter 5, verse 2 here, the scripture says, by whom?

By Jesus also we have access.

The idea of that word access is when a person actually gives you, ushers you into the presence and gives you access to a person.

So we have access.

We have an entrance, an introduction into the throne room of God to stand before God.

We have an access by faith into this grace wherein we stand.

And it’s almost like even though the word access has the idea of an introduction to a person, it also is access to a set of resources, which is God’s grace.

If you can think of it this way, God has a storeroom full of grace.

He has all kinds of supplies.

He has enablement.

He has boldness.

He has joy.

He has physical strength.

He has all kinds of spiritual airstrikes and convictions of the Holy Spirit in a storeroom up in heaven.

And he not only gave you access to him, he gave you access to all of that too and said, hey, come and take whatever you need whenever you need it.

So we have access to all of that by faith.

That’s awesome.

The end of verse 2, he says, and, okay, we have access and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

So we have, because of our accessing, our ability to access God and his grace, we have hope of a glorious future.

And you know what, young person, I want to say, maybe you’ve listened to this podcast for a long time, maybe you haven’t, but I do want you to know there’s going to come a day when God’s going to usher you, if you’ve trusted Christ as your Savior, to heaven, And that day, all weakness, all sickness will be gone.

At that day, all temptation to sin, all desire to sin will be gone.

Young people, we have a glorious future in store for us.

But I want you to notice at verse 3, he says, And not only so, in other words, we don’t just have a glorious future ahead of us.

And I think sometimes we Christians can get so enamored with heaven, and we can get so enamored with the glory that’s coming down the pike, that we miss the fact that there’s glory now.

We have a glorious now just as much as we have a glory then.

Okay, so he says, not only so, but we glory in tribulations also.

What?

So here Paul is saying, listen, there’s a glorious future.

We have access to God, to his abilities, his power, his resources, and it’s going to be good one day, but even more so it’s going to be good now.

Look at this.

We have afflictions and tribulations.

Isn’t that awesome?

And you might be thinking what I was thinking the first time I ever read this.

Wait a minute.

Why in the world would we ever glory in tribulations?

Why in the world would we ever be excited when tribulation and affliction and hard times and curveballs happen in our lives?

That doesn’t seem to make any sense whatsoever. and I can relate to this.

Again, as I shared with you last Wednesday, a week ago, a little over a week ago probably by the time this is published, we were in tribulation.

We were in anguish.

We felt like we were failures, like we didn’t measure up, like all the things that are supposed to happen with the war were not happening, and we tried, and we failed, and we tried, and we failed, and it just wasn’t working.

Wasn’t working for us.

That was tribulation in a certain sense.

And again, there’s a whole lot more to tribulation than just feeling like you’re a failure.

Sometimes tribulation is health trials.

Sometimes tribulation is genuinely getting persecuted for your faith.

But the point of all of this is he’s saying here, we can glory in tribulation.

So we don’t just have a glorious future.

We have a glorious now in our tribulations.

How in the could we ever say that?

Well, he says the next word, knowing.

Now he says, in order for you to glory in tribulations, in order for you to have a glorious now, you need to know the process.

You need to understand how this stuff works.

And he gives a couple steps of how we can know that we have glorious tribulations right now.

And I’ll just try to walk through this here real quick.

Knowing that tribulation worketh patience.

Tribulation makes something possible that possible otherwise, and that is enduring faith.

In other words, I think many of us have taken steps of faith.

I think many of us have at times in our lives, we’ve trusted God for something.

We’ve depended on God for something.

And you know what?

Maybe God pulled through for you right away, right?

But then there’ve been other times in our lives where we’ve trusted God, we’ve relied upon God for the breakthrough in something, and it didn’t happen right away.

And you know what we had to learn?

We had to learn not to give up at this first sign of difficulty.

We had to learn not to back off or slack off when things got difficult and hard.

And that is really important.

You can’t learn how to endure if you don’t have something that you need to endure, hence the significance of tribulation.

So he’s saying here, we glory in tribulations also because we know the tribulations work patience, that stick-to-itiveness of our faith, that willingness to believe God even when it doesn’t look good right now.

And you know what happens when we begin to believe God in the long term and believe him in spite of what we see, in spite of what we feel, in spite of what we foresee as possible?

We, it says, verse 4, in patience work of experience.

In God deliver.

Now, the word experience is an interesting word.

It has the idea of proven character.

And honestly, most of the commentaries I looked at, they think that the proven character is ours.

But as I look at this, that doesn’t make any sense.

I don’t get hope because I was able to endure.

I get hope because as I endure, when God pulls through, I see that God’s character was for me the whole time.

In other words, when you find yourself up a creek without a paddle and you cry out to God and God comes in and helps you and God steps in in spite of the impossibilities, in answer to your prayer, you learn a little bit more about God’s character, that he’s faithful.

And young people, that’s what we learned.

Our team learned a week ago.

We learned that God is faithful and that when we get desperate before him, when we have no hope in and of ourselves, and when we put our hope in God, God pulls through and he does it.

And you know what happens when we begin to develop that experience, when we prove God’s character, when God proves his character to us through afflictions and endurance and as we see him then deliver?

It says, an experience worketh hope. you begin to develop confident expectation in God.

I want to read just a little bit to you of what I wrote about this passage here as I’ve been recently studying and kind of just putting this in my own words, just from my own processing of this whole thing.

This knowledge, that is, that we have a glorious now, isn’t immediately intuitive to us, is it?

We rarely think of exciting possibilities when life throws us a curveball, do we?

We rarely imagine miracles in the making at the first sign of trial, do we?

Even though that’s God’s design for our dark valley, it takes a process to build that confidence and expectation in our hearts.

Once we understand the process, we can expect and even get excited about the coming miracles embedded in our troubles.

So what is this process?

It’s really not that complicated.

When trouble comes in one form or another, God wants us to hang with Him, stick to our guns and believe him anyway, even though we don’t feel it or see it at all.

God wants us to endure the difficulty, banking on God to rescue us, no matter how impossible or unlikely it might feel or seem to us.

And here’s the exciting thing.

When we endure, God delivers and we see his design.

We see that even though for a time we didn’t know what was going on, God was behind the scenes moving on our behalf, bringing us closer to him and making us rely upon him more completely.

We see that God didn’t leave us out to dry or up a creek without a paddle.

He didn’t lose control over the situation one bit.

He was whipping up an amazing victory, even though we felt like he was ignoring our trial and tribulation completely.

Even though it seemed like God was being unfaithful to us, we see that he was actually faithful all along and even better than we’d hoped.

And when we catch a glimpse of God’s glorious character, when we grasp his plan to deliver out of difficulty, when we see God’s design is for our troubles to turn out for our good, when we realize that the miracle wasn’t a fluke or an exception, but the rule, that is when we get excited.

It is that enduring experience that brings us to confident hope.

Young people, God wants to bring you to confidence in his ability to work, in his willingness to work.

But you can’t experience that unless you stick with him, unless you continue to believe him, unless you continue to count on him and trust him.

And as you begin to see, maybe small at first, but bigger and bigger as God grows your faith, God will build your experience.

You’ll know how God works because you’ve seen him do it many times before.

And as God builds your experience, that will build your confidence in him.

You wanna know how George Mueller was able to sit down with a group of children and thank God for the food that hadn’t arrived yet just to see it show up at his front door as soon as he said amen?

I tell you, that didn’t happen in a day.

That happened over years of affliction, building experience, building confidence and expectation.

And young person, maybe you’ve seen God deliver you many times in the past.

Maybe you haven’t seen a whole lot.

Well, it’s time now to stop running and giving up when things get difficult.

It’s time to stop saying, well, I must have been wrong in depending upon God and just stick with him.

And as you stick with him, independence upon him.

He’s going to grow your faith.

And I really do believe, young people, that there are young people listening to this podcast who will be George Mueller’s one day, who will have their own major breakthrough answers to prayer that will affect whole people groups, that will affect whole families, whole churches, whole nations.

So how do you get to that?

Well, start today.

Today, what is it that you’re believing God for today?

Are you believing him for anything or have you given it all up?

Identify what God wants, how God wants to work.

Get alone with him.

Spend some time with him.

Let God stir your faith.

Attempt something for him.

Don’t let go.

Don’t give up.

Trust.

Rely.

Stay with him.

And bank on the payoff.

Young person, thank you so much for listening.

Do continue to pray for us.

This is our last week on the road for our spring tour.

I’m ending it a little early because I got a little thing happening back home.

My wife is having a baby.

A little girl should be born.

The due date is April 27th.

I’d appreciate your prayers for a safe and healthy delivery for both mama and the baby.

And I would appreciate you just to pray for our summer tour.

We’re going to be doing the Cola Clash all over the Midwest and then up into the Northeast and to Maine again.

And we’re very excited about all that’s in store for us and excited about what God’s doing in your lives as well.

If you’d like to share a little bit more about that, feel free to send me a line at bobby at thegeneration.org.

That’s B-O-B-B-Y at T-H-E-E-Generation.org.

I’d love to hear about what God’s doing in your life and maybe even how this particular challenge has been an encouragement to you or a challenge to you.

And so, young people, please continue to surrender your life to Jesus every day, every moment of every day, and depend on his power to use you to turn the world upside down with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for listening.