Ken Shaver: My name is Ken Shaver.

I'm one of the pastors here at Falls Baptist Church.

I'm the director of student life at Baptist College of Ministry, which is another name for the dean.

I pastored for 23 years in Kentucky.

And then I came up here, like Pastor Bosler said, I had to buy shoes once I got out of Kentucky.

But I pastored for 23 years down there and it was just unbelievable.

So I'm grateful.

Any verification on the room change?

Speaker 3: Oh, yeah.

They had to go build a room.

Okay.

Let's do this.

Let's take our Bibles and turn to 2 Timothy.

Hey, I need to be the only one talking, please.

Thank you.

Let's take our Bibles and turn to 2 Timothy.

Oh, I don't know.

It's all good.

Where do we want to go?

Chapter two.

Second Timothy is what I call the last words of a dying man.

You ever thought about that?

The last words of a dying man.

What are we going to do?

Okay, so we're staying here?

Yes, sir.

Okay, great.

Awesome.

Tremendous.

Wonderful.

Look at that.

We should have sold tickets, huh?

Yeah.

Bye.

10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60.

Man, we got at least 100 in here.

That's amazing.

Okay.

Yeah, let's put chairs right down there.

More chairs down there.

Yes.

Okay, this is getting serious.

This is coat ticket off weather.

Okay.

Oh, thank you, sir.

Thank you, Kay.

You know, one of the things I like about Baptist College of Ministry is it's a college of servants.

How many of you would like to consider yourself to be a servant?

Raise your hand.

Yeah, me too.

Me too.

Sometimes I tell people the best thing I can do is hold the door.

The best thing I can do is carry chairs.

Best thing I can do is carry a box.

What great leadership, huh?

Okay.

For those of you who don't know me, I was a pastor for 23 years and then Pastor Van Gelden asked me to come on staff, and this is one of the greatest honors of my life.

Before that, I was an air traffic controller with the FAA.

An air traffic controller is like a bank robber.

You key the microphone and you say, okay, everybody do what I say and nobody gets hurt.

And they do pretty good at that.

Matter of fact, I worked at the busiest air traffic facility in the world.

It's a room about this size with no windows in it.

42 radar scopes, 40 miles west of Cleveland, Ohio, in a farm town, a college town called Oberlin.

And from that building, we controlled as far east as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, as far west as Fort Wayne, Indiana, as far north as Syracuse, New York, as far south as Columbus, Ohio, Pittsburgh.

we controlled United 93.

That doesn't mean anything to you, except that on 9-11, that was the plane that we wouldn't let the hostages or the terrorists take over.

And they crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.

My crew worked that plane.

John Wirth was the actual controller who was in charge of that.

So I was an air traffic controller.

I ended up being the International Air Traffic Manager for the FAA.

And I traveled all over the world and established aviation programs for foreign countries.

It was pretty awesome.

I lived in Morocco for four months.

I lived in Bahamas for three months.

And I thought God was doing that because he wanted me to be a missionary, but he called me to start a church.

Before that, I flew helicopters in the army.

I flew Blackhawks.

And I loved what I did.

Matter of fact, I'm going to talk about it.

They made a movie out of my friends.

I'm not a Hollywood guy, But they made a movie called Black Halt Down.

And there were three pilots killed over there.

Two of those three were good friends of mine.

And so I'm going to talk about that story a little bit.

We're in 2 Timothy chapter number two.

And I had said these are the last words of a dying man.

You ever thought about what you would be remembered for?

Bubba and Leroy, that's Kentucky.

Bubba and Leroy go to a funeral and they're standing over a casket.

And Bubba turns to Leroy.

He said, Leroy, he said, what would you like them to say about you when you're gone, when they're standing over your casket?

And Leroy looked at the body and he looked at Bubba.

He said, Bubba, I think I'd like them to say he was a good man.

He loved his family.

He loved the Lord.

And Leroy's standing there and he said, Bubba, what do you want them saying about you when you're gone and they're standing over your casket?

And Bubba said, well, if they're standing over my casket and they're looking at me, he said, I'd like them to say, hey, look, he's moving.

What do you want them saying about you?

Look at 2 Timothy chapter number two.

We've got to quit at 1020.

Okay, we've got to.

Look at verse number three.

In 2 Timothy 2, it says, thou therefore endure, what's that next word, class?

Hardness.

What do you think it means to endure hardness?

I've had to pay a price for being a pastor.

And that's okay.

Because that's what God called me to do.

To the point where I ended up sleeping on the floor of a jail for three days.

But that's okay.

Because that's what God called me to do.

I wasn't guilty.

Wasn't guilty of anything.

But some nefarious individuals didn't like me being the pastor, and they were doing everything within their power to get rid of me.

But that's okay.

Thou therefore endure what?

Hardness.

Are you willing to endure hardness?

My boys played football, and they had this thing in football called two-a-days.

It's another word for purgatory.

Okay?

Two-a-days.

And it would kill my boys.

My one son was born to play football.

he's a missionary in Iceland now, and he was conference MVP two years in a row in football.

But man, two a days, it tested your manhood.

And they would come home from two a days, and they would crawl into a bathtub somewhere and spend the rest of the day just dying.

But the good thing was, now, when he goes through something difficult, and he's in Iceland, it's very, very, very difficult.

Iceland has the highest concentration of atheists in the world.

And it's very, very, very ugly.

And he's battling some very, very, very serious battles.

And we'll joke with each other and say, this ain't nothing.

You went through two a days.

Thou therefore endure hardness.

Some of us get offended when somebody doesn't speak to us.

Some of us get our feelings hurt so easily.

And so we, I worked for a pastor.

He was a tough guy.

He was special forces.

And if somebody, one of his staff members started whining, he'd take out a pacifier and he'd give it to him.

He didn't have something.

Thou therefore endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.

No man that woreth and tangleth himself with the affairs of this life, that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier.

And if a man strive for the masteries, yet is he not crowned except he strive lawfully.

the husbandman that laboreth must be first partaker of the fruits.

Pray with me.

Lord, would you help us in these few minutes?

Lord, I'm so grateful for these young people, and I pray that you'd bless them.

And Lord, I pray that your name would be glorified.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

No pain, no gain.

I have six feet of scars on my body.

Isn't that funny?

six feet.

I'll not tell you how they got there.

I will tell you one.

My brother had built a go-kart and we had this big hill.

It was about 43 miles long, straight down.

No, not really.

And he goes down the hill.

He's two years older than me.

I'm 10.

He's 12.

My brother was very gifted, very mechanical.

He could build anything.

When he was 17, he rebuilt a Mustang.

I mean, inside and out.

And he was just very gifted.

So he built this go-kart and he got done and brought it up.

He goes, "Kenny, don't go down that." He goes, "It's not good." And I'm thinking, "What do you know?

You're just trying to get me to not drive this." So I got in the go-kart and I take up down the hill and I am going down the hill and just as I approach the speed of sound that go-kart turned right but I kept going straight.

I was flying!

It was the beginning of my aviation career and I'm going up and up and then Newton came out with this law.

And very simply, what goes up must, and here I come, baby.

And wham, face first into the road.

That's why I look the way I do.

And I busted my teeth, And I slid down that road in my home body.

It was horrible.

I didn't do that in my helicopter.

I didn't do that.

No pain, no gain.

If you're a soldier of Jesus Christ, you've got to have a warrior mindset.

Because we're in a battle.

We're in a battle.

Let me give you very quickly some examples of bravery.

First of all, I want to tell you about Stonewall Jackson.

I'm not talking about his politics.

I'm talking about him as a soldier.

Jackson, you know about him from the Civil War.

He was identified as greatness before the Civil War in the Mexican-American War.

He worked under a general by the name of Winfield Scott.

It's very interesting.

Almost all of the great generals in the Civil War, didn't matter what side they were on, they all served under Winfield Scott in Mexico.

Robert E.

Lee was his chief of staff.

Stonewall Jackson was just a lieutenant, but he had a warrior mindset.

Stonewall Jackson loved the Lord.

A little confused on some of his aspects of life and relationships, but he loved the Lord.

they had run up against the mexicans outside of mexico city and they couldn't break through the line and the mexicans had beaten down an ambush and they were just dealing with all of the soldiers and the americans were stuck stonewall jackson as a young lieutenant had a cannon and he's firing and he's trying to rally the troops and none of the troops would follow.

They thought this was a fruitless cause.

So Stonewall Jackson with his cannon and a sergeant ran out into the middle of the battlefield right in front of the enemy.

He's got cannon fire landing all around him.

I mean, literally right between his legs.

And he didn't run, but he fought.

And they're looking, all the Americans are back there looking, who is this crazy guy on the battlefield?

It's Stonewall Jackson.

And he's firing right in the middle of him, just firing away, not running, standing in the middle of the battle when it seemed hopeless.

But his bravery rallied all of the other soldiers.

Here comes another cannon and those two cannons, and then there's more and more, and they're able to break through the line.

They promoted him three ranks that day because of his bravery in battle.

What would you have done?

Would you have run?

What would you have done?

I told you, I flew for many years.

And I flew with some great, great, great men.

One of them was Cliff Walcott.

We went to flight school together, Cliff and I did.

They called him Elvis.

I never did.

I called him Cliff.

Cliff was the first pilot killed in Somalia in 1993 in Black Hawk now.

another guy was Ray Frank I flew with Ray for four years I thought I was a pilot until I met Ray Frank and then he was doing things I'd never even heard of compared to him what I was doing wasn't flying best pilot I ever met Ray flew with a guy named Durant.

Mike Durant's probably the most famous of all of them because Mike was the one who lived.

So they're in Mogadishu, Somalia, going after a war, a terrorist over there.

Their Black Hawk helicopter was struck by an RPG.

And they started losing control of the aircraft and they'd ended up crashing into a bunch of buildings, killing a bunch of people.

This was really when CNN was starting to get a worldview and they were showing this in real time on the news.

Ray's widow, a friend of mine, Willie, she was German, Willie Frank, she's watching this in real time.

They landed.

Ray had just been put back on flight status because he had his tail rotor failed when he was in North Carolina and he was carrying a bunch of guys in the back and he was under the night vision goggles and he'd lost all the lights came on in the helicopter and it shut down his goggles.

He was blind and he had to figure out how to land this helicopter when he couldn't see at all.

And he misjudged the ground and killed 13 guys in the back.

He had just gotten back on flight status.

But when that helicopter crashed, it rebroke his back.

And Ray tries crawling out of the helicopter to defend himself and the aircraft.

And they killed my friend.

Mike Durant was alive.

There were two Special Forces guys that were up in the helicopter, another helicopter and they requested to land to extract those guys because you don't leave anybody behind one of them was named gary gordon and the other's name was randy sugart they'd been denied so they requested again and they were denied again because it was just too unsafe so they requested a third time And the commander put them on the radio and said, I want you to tell me you understand what you're

doing.

They said, yes, sir, we understand.

So they landed the helicopter and the two guys got out, trying to get Mike Durant out.

They were able to pull him out of the helicopter and set him off to the side.

Ray was dead.

They were trying to get his body.

one of the guys was killed.

So the other guy gets the machine gun that's left and gives it to Mike.

And he goes back around and he's killed.

Their bravery costs them their lives.

The highest award any service member can receive in combat is the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Most times, when you read about the award, it always says they are awarded this posthumously.

Anybody know what posthumously means?

What's it mean?

after their death they died those two men received the congressional medal of honor the first time that award was given out since the vietnam war go over to in your bibles go to uh first chronicles 11.

we've got 10 minutes Now don't quit interrupting me, okay?

1 Chronicles 11.

Do you consider yourself a warrior?

I'm not asking you if you're angry.

Those men weren't angry.

They had master's degrees.

Stonewall Jackson wasn't an angry man.

Stonewall Jackson loved the Lord.

Look at 1 Chronicles chapter number 11.

skip down to verse number 22.

Just for time's sake, I'll read a couple of verses.

Do you see it?

Say amen.

Good.

Look at verse 22.

Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, the son of a valiant man of Kabziel.

I am the son of a valiant man.

My father was a Marine in Korea.

My father was a firefighter.

They called him Superman.

He was a firefighter in Washington, D.C.

He was up on the second floor when a backdraft came into the room where he was and just filled the room with flames and he was totally trapped.

So what did your dad do?

He just made a door.

You say, what?

Yeah.

He started at one end of the room and he ran and he ran through the wall outside.

Next thing you know, all these firefighters are on the ground and they see this crazy man flying up through the air.

So they called him Superman after that.

I am the son of a valiant man.

Look what it says.

Who had done one act.

Is that what it says?

Had done many acts.

Look what it says now.

He slew two lion-like men of Moab also, almost as an afterthought, also.

Então, ele foi e saiu um antigo de um pito na snowy day.

Um antigo de um pito na snowy day.

Podem de imaginar que em um pito?

That would ser horrible.

Podem de imaginar que em um pito na snowy day?

That would ser mais horrible.

Mas que não era nada.

he's in a pit on a snowy day with a lion.

So what's he do?

Well, I guess I'm just going to have to kill this lion.

Could you imagine that?

You say, Pastor Shaver, what would you do?

I'd scream like a girl.

Could you imagine that?

Now, go back to 2 Timothy.

2 Timothy chapter 2 let me just give you a couple of things in the seven minutes that we have left we talked about the examples of bravery but I want to talk now about the enemies of bravery I'm not going to ask you if you struggle with here.

General George S.

Patton says, "Take not counsel of your fears." Some of us get so fearful, we become immobilized.

I mean literally.

I have dealt with people who were so afraid they could not move.

The enemies of bravery.

Look again at our text.

Thou therefore endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.

Here we go.

Look at verse number four.

Here's the first one.

No man that woreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life.

Do you know an enemy of bravery?

An enemy of bravery is the affairs of this life that you entangle yourself with.

Give me one of them.

Somebody tell me, just shout it out.

Money.

Money, money.

When God called me to preach in his wisdom, the Lord knew what I was doing.

I was the international air traffic manager for the FAA.

He called me to preach in 2001.

One day I'm making $127,000 a year.

The next day I'm making $27,000 a year.

I took $100,000 a year pay cut.

what can i do say no what are you gonna do you're gonna say no sometimes people even come to bible college and they don't want to finish because of money people won't even come to Bible college because of money.

What else is this affair of this world that we entangle ourselves with?

Sin.

Sin.

Sure.

I have to confess something to you.

Before God really got a hold of my heart, I was a selfish man.

There was only one person I cared about pleasing, and it was moi.

that's it and god had to get a hold of my heart now my wife never knew that guy my kids never known that guy i've got grandchildren here today whose parents are in the ministry and i'm so glad they never knew that guy and i'm so i've been running from that guy for 45 years but it's easy to be selfish isn't how many said pastor i struggle with selfishness anybody in here or was I the only one?

Sure.

That's easy.

It's easy to get consumed with this world.

So we let our sin, we let our selfishness, we let money come in.

We let our entertainment come in.

I like to golf.

Any golfers in here?

I like to golf.

And God had to take that from me.

somebody stole my golf clubs, my richest possession.

And somebody stole them.

You know who stole them?

This isn't the right word now.

You know who took them?

The Lord did.

Because I had my eyes too much on golf.

I could have made my linen on a golf course.

I could make that ball talk.

I could.

I could fade it.

I could draw it.

I could chip it so good that if it was in the ball washer thing, I could have gotten out of there and gone into the hole right there.

No, not really.

I couldn't.

But I always had trouble with the windmill hole.

No, forget it.

Never mind.

So look at another one.

Go back to our text.

verse 5 and if a man also strive for masteries yet is he not crowned except he strive lawfully you know what another problem that keeps us from being brave we don't do things god's way we don't strive lawfully you know that verse in the bible where there's no vision the people perish, but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.

That verse isn't just talking about I have a dream.

That verse is talking about seeing things the way God sees them.

Where there is no vision, if you don't see things the way God sees things, the people perish.

It will kill you.

So it doesn't matter what I think.

I have students come to me on a daily basis, Pastor Schaeber, what do you think about?

Well, it doesn't really matter what I think.

What matters is what does God think?

If I can live my life finding out what God thinks and then just do that.

You know, my wife's such a smart woman.

She married me.

I mean, sure.

My wife's actually, that's only her only flaws, her judgment, her taste in men.

You know, you'll get it.

Anyhow, anyhow, my wife said, you know, I think we'd be better off instead of asking God to bless what we do.

Why don't we just do what God blesses?

Wouldn't that make our life simpler?

So number one, I said the affairs of this life.

Number two, not striving lawfully, but look at verse number six and I'll be done.

The husbandman that laboreth must be first partaker of the fruits.

You know what that means?

I like gardening.

I had, you would grow strawberries that were the best around.

And I'm working out in my garden.

It was an organic garden.

My neighbor's getting his basement waterproofed.

And one of the guys is sitting back there on the back porch, just walking me, watching me work away.

And he comes over to me and he says this, hey, those big strawberries you got there, those are the sweetest strawberries I've ever tasted in my life.

what a loser but you know the nice thing taking a tomato right off the vine nice thing about organic gardening you don't have any pesticides on the plants take cutting it out just eating it fresh peppers oh oh Corn.

Strawberries.

One less thanks to loser man over there.

But spiritually, you're setting yourself up for failure.

If you don't first partake of the fruits, you're going to go out so well in this afternoon.

The husbandman that laboreth must first be partake of the fruits.

You want to be brave?

Partake of the fruits.

You know the nice thing, and I'm done.

I've got to be done.

You know the nice thing?

The nice thing is when you do that, people will follow you.

I was in a church, that same church, and I had some men try to throw me out.

They'd done this twice before, three times before.

They tried to throw me out, and I said no.

They stood up in a church service to throw me out.

And I said, you're not doing this.

I said, Constitution says you can't do this.

Bible says you can't do this.

20 minutes, me and five guys are going at it.

They're yelling at me, and I'm just saying, no, we're not doing this.

We're not having this conversation.

We're not doing this.

You guys need to stop.

We're not doing this.

Finally, my wife, who's very ill, stood up in the back, didn't say a word.

She just came forward, and she knelt down, and she started praying.

A widow woman over here, whose husband had been one of the pastors they'd thrown out, stood up, came forward, knelt to the altar, started praying.

Here comes another woman, never said a word.

Another one, never said a word.

And these men realized that they were the losers.

They lost.

I'd like to think maybe because I was willing to stand and not run, people took strength from that.

Because if you run, those 10 spies killed a million, over a million people because they were afraid.

You be brave, child of God.

You be willing to pay the price, no matter what that price is.

And you watch what God can do through you and how God can use that to impact others.

Amen.

And all God's people said, amen.

All right, God bless you.