Bobby Bosler: Welcome to the Thee Generation Podcast. I’m Bobby Bosler, and I’m speaking to you today from Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, where our team, the Cola Clash team, has just finished our training week, and we’re going to be heading out first thing in the morning. tomorrow morning as of the time of this recording to drive down to Indianapolis for our first Cola Clash of the summer.

We’re going to be in Indiana. We’re going to be in Ohio, in Tennessee. We’re going to be in Kentucky and Illinois. If you get a chance to go to colaclash.org and go down to the bottom of the schedule, if you’re anywhere near us, feel free to stop on by and say howdy. And we would love to get to meet you along the way.

But we are very excited about what God’s going to be doing. Please pray that God will put his hand on our team, that God will give us safety on the journey, and that his will would be done on earth as it is in heaven. Now, there’s something I want to share with you here, something that God’s been doing in my heart here recently.

For those of you that heard the last podcast that I recorded a few weeks ago, you know that our trailer was a little bit worse for wear after our spring tour with the War of Special Forces, and we’ve really seriously been considering getting a new one. Just things have been going wrong with it, and we were a little concerned that maybe it’s time.

We prayed about it, and we really felt liberty from the Lord to begin seeking a new trailer. My wife and I, we became trailer hunters for the last month or so, and we’ve scoured the Internet looking for RVs. We’ve done a ton of research. We’ve driven all over the state of Wisconsin and done walkthroughs and different trailers. that we were interested in.

And we really narrowed it down to two different trailers that we’re interested in. And we then began to really do a concerted search all over the country for one of those two trailers, those floor plans. Well, a couple weeks ago, I thought I’d found it. I found this trailer in Georgia. It was everything we were looking for. I called up the salesperson, And he confirmed this was in amazing shape.

The only thing wrong with it was a creaky step when the trailer wasn’t level. I thought I could live with that. So I told the guy, I said, I’m very interested in this. I just have two questions, and then I want to talk to you a little bit about a trade-in. And I said, give me a call back as soon as you have that information.

Well, I waited for him for the rest of the day. He didn’t hear back. The next day, I waited for him, didn’t hear back. The third day, I thought, what in the world is going on here? Does this guy want to make the sale or not? And so I called and called and called and called and called.

Finally, I got a hold of the manager, and the manager told me, hey, didn’t you know that before you called on Monday, he’d already basically sold that trailer to somebody else? Oh, boy. I wasn’t very happy. I was kind and everything, but I felt like I had been taken advantage of. I felt like I’d been used by this guy as kind of a backup plan, Kind of keep me on the line, so to speak.

Keep me in his back pocket in case this sale somehow fell through. And he didn’t have the decency to tell me that this thing was already basically a done deal. Well, I began to call other trailers. You know, there were plenty of other trailers at this time that were out there that were the ones we were looking for. And so I called up this one here.

And they said, I’m sorry, man. Just sold it yesterday. Called up this one over here. hey, sorry, man, just closed the deal an hour ago. And I thought, you’re kidding me. You’re kidding me. If I had called them up like two days ago, I could have had these trailers. And I found myself getting a little frustrated because I felt like this one guy really messed things up for me.

And I got alone with the Lord about it. I talked to God about it. And God directed my mind to a passage of Scripture I know you’re familiar with, Proverbs 3, verses 5 and 6. You know the passage. It says, Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.

I think we’re pretty familiar with the first part of the verse. You know what? Don’t approach things just from a human standpoint. You need to be willing to get with God. Trust in his leadership and guidance. Trust in him with everything you’ve got.

don’t just look at things from the human standpoint but what really what the Lord really highlighted to me in my spirit as I meditated on that passage was the third phrase in all thy ways acknowledge him and what I had to do is I had to take a step back and recognize the sovereign hand of God in this situation you know what yes that guy I don’t know what his motive was I don’t know if he forgot about me.

I don’t know if he was being unethical with me. I don’t know what his mindset was, but I do know this. God was in control of that situation. And evidently, God didn’t want me in that trailer. Evidently, God didn’t want me in the other trailers that I missed as a result of waiting for that situation. You see, I had to recognize this was not an accident.

This was not just some guy mistreating me. This wasn’t an unfortunate set of circumstances. This was the hand of God leading me through closed doors. You know, sometimes a closed door is just as much a revelation of God’s will as an open one is. Did you ever think about that? I think sometimes we want God to talk to our hearts and say, hey, go here.

Hey, do this. Hey. And we just want everything just to kind of fall into place in front of us. And we think that the only way God can lead us is by speaking to our heart or opening up the circumstances. But sometimes a way that God leads you is by slamming the door in your face. And we need to be able to praise God for keeping us from doing something that he didn’t want us to do.

I’m talking about how to discern God’s leadership. This is one way that God leads you by closing the door. Now, there are some times when obstacles come up. I’m not talking about that. When obstacles come up and things get difficult to do what we already know to be his will. And sometimes when there are obstacles, we need to press through those obstacles.

We need to have endurance. We need to have an ability to fight through the challenges to where God has called us to go. So I’m not talking about it, the first sign of difficulty, throwing up our hands and walking away. I’m talking about when something just totally doesn’t happen that you thought was going to happen.

I’m talking about when you really thought you were going to go on that missions trip, and then the whole thing gets canned, and you don’t go at all. I’m talking about when you thought you were going to get that opportunity to preach, and you were so excited, and you were preparing, and you were looking forward to it, and then the service gets canceled because of a blizzard.

I’m talking about when you really thought you were supposed to serve in this one place, but then circumstances prevent it from happening at all. God takes you to the frozen north or to the sunny south and someplace you weren’t expecting to go. What do you do then? Okay, praise God. Praise God for it. Praise God. It’s as much of his leadership as anything.

Now, you got to pray it through. Don’t quit. Don’t give up. But I’m telling you, sometimes you’ve got to recognize, acknowledge God in the circumstances. Prices. The saga continued, actually. It was the following week. I had almost given up. I had some preaching opportunities that kind of boxed me in as far as my schedule was concerned, and it was the end of last week, Friday morning, actually, the night before I’d found a trailer in Ohio.

I thought, oh, wow, this looks pretty good. The price is really good. Called him up the next morning just to confirm some details, and he told me the trailer was in great shape, and I thought, oh, this might be it. And I told him, I said, can I put a deposit down on this thing? He said, yes, you can.

So I hopped in my truck and I drove six hours down to Ohio. Looked at the pictures. Things seemed to be on the straight and narrow there. And on the way down, even we were praying, we were asking, Abby and I were asking for specific things. She was up in Wisconsin. I was driving down by myself and got answered on several different fronts.

And we were getting pretty excited. We thought this was confirmation that this trailer is the one for us. Well, got down there, ready to pull the trigger, ready to buy this trailer. But before you buy the trailer, they take you in a walkthrough. We walked around the outside of the trailer first. And as I walked around, I found a bunch of things wrong with it.

Went inside and I walked around the trailer. And the more I saw, the less peace I felt about this situation, this circumstance, this trailer. And I’m telling you, it was a discouraging thing. Walking around, well, for one, I drove six hours. For another, I’d expended a bunch of emotional energy. We prayed about it. It seemed like this is the way that God was leading us.

And yet when I got down there, it was like, this is not it. All peace vanished. And I remember telling the fella, I said, hey, I hope you sell this thing, but I’m not going to be the guy to buy it. I’m really sorry. And I hopped in the truck and I began driving home.

there were a couple of conflicting thoughts I had in my mind one of my thoughts was the guy said it was in great condition it’s not in great condition he lied to me but the other thought I had is I went back to that verse in all thy ways acknowledge him and you know what I believe it was God’s will for me to drive down and look at that trailer I believe it was God’s will for me to pray through a number of those things and I believe God answered prayer because he wanted to prepare me to be ready to buy a trailer when the right trailer came along.

God was in the trip. He just wasn’t in the trailer, if that makes sense. And here’s the thing, this new thought, I mean, I’ve thought it before, but this thought of in all thy ways acknowledge him. I didn’t go down there and then turn around and think, boy, that was a big waste of time. I didn’t go down there and get upset at the guy because he told me that it was in great shape when it wasn’t.

I didn’t get upset at myself for letting myself drive all the way down there and spend 12 hours of driving in a day just to come up empty. No, I recognize the fact, you know what? God was in that. God was doing something. It wasn’t how I expected things to turn out, but that’s okay. God is the one who’s in charge of my life.

God is the one who can direct and redirect me wherever he wants to direct me to go. You see, total surrender doesn’t mean everything’s going to work out the way you at this moment in time think it’s going to work out. Total surrender is being willing to turn on a dime when God says turn.

Young people, there are going to be times in your life when you’re going to be heading down a path and you’re going to get a major roadblock and God’s going to say, no, step no further. And you’ve got to be willing to obey God. There’s going to be some times when God’s going to reroute you from something you’ve really thought was it for a long time.

And God’s going to say, nope, that’s not it. I got this over here. And as a surrendered servant of God, you’ve got to be willing to do whatever God wants you to do, whether you are expecting it or not. Ultimately, young people, are we not slaves of God? Isn’t total surrender mean not my will, but thine be done? Doesn’t total surrender mean that my life is not mine to live?

It’s not about my hopes and dreams and plans. It’s about the hopes, dreams, and plans that God has for me. Young people, the point of this challenge here today is if in all of your ways you don’t acknowledge God and if you just view things from a human standpoint, you’re going to get really upset at people that step in the way.

You’re going to get really mad when doors close. You’re going to get really twisted up inside when things turn out differently than you thought they were supposed to turn out. But if you will recognize and acknowledge God in the roller coaster of life. I’m telling you, in all thy ways, acknowledge him and he shall direct thy paths. Young people, it’s what we’re all about.

Total surrender to the will of God, whether you foresaw it or not. And then total dependence on his power to turn the world upside down with the gospel of Jesus Christ.