Bobby: Welcome to the Thee Generation Podcast. I’m Bobby Bosler, and I’m speaking to you today from Fort Scott, KS, where I and my team, the Cola Clash team, are almost ready to finish up our final week of the summer, and actually my last Cola Clash/War of the year. It’s been a very, very fruitful year thus far. We’ve seen well over 300 young people trust Christ as their Savior here this calendar year. And we’re grateful to God for His hand upon our lives.

Many of you have followed our journey with our truck issues earlier on in the year, and then the trailer issues, and then the trailer issues, and then the trailer issues. Yeah. You know, honestly, as I’ve looked back over this year, I know that as I’ve shared previously, God was making me weak so that He could make me strong. And in many ways, a few weeks ago, I felt like I was through it and learned the lessons God wanted me to learn. I think we’ve all been there, right? And then God says, “No, you haven’t.”

I’ll give you just a little update, and this is gonna be somewhat of my launching point. Little over two weeks ago, a week and a half ago, I guess now as of the time of this recording. We were driving from Dayton, Ohio, where we had a great Cola Clash, awesome stuff. And we were on our way to Springfield, Missouri, and we were about an hour and 15 minutes away going up a hill with a new truck, with a trailer, which at that point we got the wheel and axle and all of that stuff figured out. And I had installed a couple of new leaf springs just for peace of mind. The trailer was good to go, going up a mountain. And my truck started to overheat.

And… I don’t even want to go into all the details right now, to be honest with you. The Lord showed his good hand by taking care of us. In fact, the very exit we pulled off on, two doors down from the exit was a trailer park and at that point, we thought, well, we got to stay overnight here, send the team to the church and in the trailer park the owner just happened to be a former Baptist church planter. What do you know? What a coincidence. Not only did he give us a… free two nights there to stay while we figured out what was going on. Couldn’t believe it. The guy handed us a check to help with repair expenses.

Well, through a whole series of circumstances, honestly folks, the last week and a half have been, I feel like I’ve been in and out of one mechanic shop to another one and so we ended up getting the trailer to the church. The problem wasn’t fixed what we thought it was but it wasn’t. We took it to one guy, he didn’t have time to do it, and at one point when that mechanic—I think it was Wednesday—contacted me and said, “Hey if you really want this thing worked on, you’re gonna need to take it somewhere else.” I will be perfectly honest with you young people, instantly the adrenaline started to pump through my veins. You know that feeling of worry, that anxious feeling you get in the middle of your core? That was going on overdrive.

I called around, it was the very end of the workday, found a mechanic in town who said they could take a look at it and brought it in there the next morning and they said, well, we think it’s this and spent a lot of money on diagnosis and a fix that didn’t really fix it. So we, I was calling friends who were diesel mechanics and other friends who knew what was going on and it wasn’t overheating, it was just losing coolant like crazy and I couldn’t tell where it was leaking from. We thought it could be a head gasket issue, which for those of you that are mechanically inclined, it’s probably one of the more expensive fixes. You’re talking $5,000 a ballpark for a fix like that. And… I couldn’t figure out whether it was or not, but it seemed to be working well enough that we would venture the trip on Saturday from Springfield, Missouri, to here in Fort Scott, Kansas.

Thankfully, the truck made it, made it through the trip, didn’t have any issues. But when I got here, the coolant was almost bone dry, and I thought, “We’ve got to figure something out.” I preached on Sunday what I feel like I’ve been preaching all week. You know, “This is going to be good,” 2 Corinthians 1. God is the God of all comfort. The worse it gets, the better it gets. I’ve been preaching, you know other, in fact, I’ll be honest with you, young people, I did not want to preach those things on Sunday because I was kind of sick of it. I was kind of sick of being weak, kind of sick of being in the midst of a crisis. God wanted me to preach it because he wanted me to die.

But you know, on Sunday, some men talked to me. They said, “Hey, we’ve got some people we want to contact and see if we can help you get this figured out.” And Monday morning, a man talked to me and said he’s got a guy that’ll take a look at it on Tuesday afternoon. On Tuesday, I found myself on a roller coaster of anxiety. I felt like it was affecting me physically. I just felt sick, almost physically sick, because of the worry. Even though we were supposed to get it to somebody who knew what he was doing and thought he knew what the problem was, I’ll be honest with you, I had no peace.

And you know, honestly, young people, if you’ve been in a situation where you’re full of anxiety and worry, you know that it is not a fun place to be at, and it’s hard, and it kills you. You can’t enjoy anything. There were times where I’d wake up in the morning and think, “Oh bummer, I wish I could just be asleep because I didn’t want to face the real world.” And I know this is terrible to admit all this to you all, but honestly, it’s where I was at.

I found myself asking the question, even as we’re driving to the place, to the mechanic, “Why am I worrying so much? Where is this worry coming from?” Honestly, I’ve experienced a lot of anxiety this year through the various things. The Lord has given great peace, and it’s been amazing. But it’s funny, there have been moments of time just in my humanity, right? Where I just was full of nerves or full of fears or full of worries, not knowing. And um… You know, got to the mechanic, met the guy, and I felt a whole lot better after that.

But you know, honestly, the last several days I’ve been grappling with this question, and this is really what I wanted to talk to you about. Where do our worries come from? Why do we worry? And, you know, if you’ve not been through a time of intense anxiety, this question may not maybe strike you as being particularly important. But when you’re in the middle of a really challenging set of circumstances, this is a question you can ask for, really be thinking about and wondering about.

So I’ve just been thinking about it, and I got a couple of sources, and I want to give you a couple of things the Lord has taught me here this last week or two. One of the things for me personally that is one of the biggest causes is the unknown. When we started having our truck issues, and I had no idea why, why did it overheat?

This is a new-to-me truck. This is supposed to be the stable part of our whole rig and our caravan. What’s going on and go from one possibility to another possibility and folks throw out, “Well, it could be the worst possible of all possibilities.” And just the unknown, not knowing what’s going on is so incredibly difficult.

When you’re not sure what the next step is, when you’re not sure what the problem itself is and yet you know there’s a problem, that can lead to some pretty intense anxiety. And, you know, as I thought about the unknown, one of the things I had to continuously remind myself is, it is not unknown. It may be unknown to me, but it’s not unknown to God. God knows everything. He is omniscient. I know this is more of a theological point, but the eyes of the Lord are in every place. He knows the end from the beginning. God knows the problem. He knows the solution. And though I don’t know it, I can trust Him that since He knows it and He has my best interests in mind, I don’t have to worry about the unknown.

Another source oftentimes of our worry is uncertainty. You’re not sure how things are going to turn out and you know the unknown; this could be pointed towards this but sometimes the unknown about what currently is, you know, you don’t know if somebody is upset with you or not. There can be that sense of the unknown. But when it comes to this uncertainty, you don’t know how things are going to turn out. Is my truck even going to be fixable? Am I going to be able to find a mechanic who can figure it out? So I’ve got it into a mechanic right now. Is he going to be able to fix it? Or is he just going to slap a few new parts on and call it a day and charge me a thousand dollars? Okay. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. And that uncertainty can really wear at you.

Honestly, when I drove from the RV park to the church, an hour and 15 minutes, I was uncertain that I was even going to be able to get there. When I drove from Springfield to Fort Scott, I was uncertain that I was going to be able to get there. And that uncertainty, am I going to have enough money for this? Right. There’s just so many things where you just don’t know, especially when you’re looking at a future, you’re not sure how things are going to turn out, you’re not sure how other people are going to respond.

You’re not sure how so-and-so is going to take such-and-such a thing. You’re not sure whether you’re going to be able to actually pull off the thing that you feel that you’re supposed to pull off. And that sense of uncertainty is just a killer. And, you know, when it comes to this, sometimes we can feel like, is God, has he just checked out? You know that he hasn’t, but you can sometimes wonder if he has.

There’s this Psalm, Psalm 121 was particularly special to me last week. It says, “I will lift up my eyes unto the hills.” And I put that phrase, “the hills,” in bold because that’s what I was afraid of at that moment. Hills, going up hills with my truck and having it overheat. “From whence cometh my help? My help cometh from the Lord which made heaven and earth. He will not suffer thy foot to be moved. He that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is thy keeper. The Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil. He shall preserve thy soul.”

That phrase, “preserve thy soul.” Wow. That touched me last week. There’s a certain sense in which I knew the Lord would end up causing things to work out, but my soul, my innards still felt like they were being rubbed up against a cheese grater all the time. And the fact that God not only promised to preserve me from calamity, He also promised to preserve my soul, my inner life. That was a special thing. “The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth and even forever more.” That was a special phrase for me, thy going out and thy coming in, you know, again, and as an itinerant minister traveling a lot, God said, “I’m going to make sure you keep getting there.”

Honestly, young people, it’s a miracle that we haven’t had to cancel any meetings this year. It’s a miracle that we’ve made it to the meetings that God has given us. And wow, the Lord has been definitely faithful to help us in that. So okay, so sometimes there is an uncertainty as to whether how things are gonna turn out, whether it’s gonna end up okay, and because you have God, you’re gonna be alright, but sometimes we’re uncertain in people. We’re just not sure if people will be able to pull it off for us. We’re not sure if people are going to be able to do what maybe you know you can’t, and you’re leaning on somebody else to do it.

I feel that way, to be honest with you right now, with the mechanic that I’ve sent it into, will he be able to do it? And you know, yesterday morning the Lord reminded me of this Psalm 118 verse 8. “It’s better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man.” Jeremiah 17:5 “Cursed be the man that trusteth in man and maketh flesh his arms.” Psalm 60 verse 11 “Give us help from trouble for vain is the help of man.” And you know what even when you do need to lean on people and the uncertainty of them gives you anxiety you got to look past the people to the Lord. You’ve got to keep your eyes on Him. He is the one who will help.

In fact, Psalm 62:5 was very special to me yesterday. “My soul, wait thou only upon God for my expectation is from Him.” Before the man from the church here and I left to go to the mechanic, I prayed for our trip because we weren’t sure if the truck was going to overheat on the trip or not. And I quoted that verse and you know what? It was just an encouragement to me, you know, as much as I have to step into a mechanic shop or bring my truck to somebody, my expectation is from the Lord. God will be the one to give wisdom skill. He will be the one ultimately to deliver.

So we can feel anxious because of uncertainty. Sometimes young people, we feel anxious. This is another, another source because of selfishness. Now I know this kind of seems like it’s a departure, but this is something that I have felt. Last week when things, when it became clear that our truck had a problem and that it wasn’t just a hiccup, there was something wrong, I’ll be honest with you, there was a part of me that said, “Lord, I don’t deserve this.” There was a part of me that didn’t want the heat of the trial. You know, you’d think the Lord would have taught me this year that the weakness is God setting me up for a miracle. And I know that and I believe that.

But there are times when you just don’t want the trial anymore because you jusst want your life to be hunky-dory. You want just want your life to be okay. You just want God to lay off and leave you alone. As much as you want fruit and effectiveness, you’re just kind of sick of it. On Sunday, the Lord led me to preach the message “Decisions of Death,” which is on the website on theegeneration.org somewhere. I think it’s from last year’s Youth Summit. God wanted me to preach it. I said, “I don’t want to preach that because I don’t want to die to self right now.” I preached it, and it was a decision of death for me to preach it. But you know what? My own preferences, dying to my own preferences, my own plans, that hit pretty close to home.

Because you know what I would prefer? I would prefer for my truck to be working fine. I’d prefer for this constant death that I talked about in my last podcast just to be over and for me to be able to live in victory with everything going right. But to be following the Lord and experiencing that difficulty was not what I preferred, and it’s certainly not what I had planned. I really had to die to my own selfish desire to just have an easy life, to have all these problems behind me, and to submit myself to the plan of God. I feel like in many senses this last trial has really gotten at me. I feel like I’ve been able to take most of them in stride; I’ve had my moments, but this last one has really thrown me for a loop. It’s because I’m selfish.

In fact, on this, in this way—and again, I don’t know what some of you all are going to think about this, but I don’t care—my mind got brought back to a story by C.S. Lewis in “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.” I know some of you I probably just lost you with that statement, but it’s good literature. There’s a section where Eustace had turned into a dragon because of his selfishness and greed. There came a point where Aslan said, “Peel the dragon’s skin off of you,” and he tried several times. Every time he looked down, there was more dragon skin underneath. I thought about this for a really long time. This is how I felt yesterday. I’m going to quote a little bit from it:

“Then the lion said, ‘You will have to let me undress you.’ I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you. But I was pretty nearly desperate now, so I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it. The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off.” You know, if you’ve ever picked the scab off a sore place, it hurts, but it is such fun to see it coming away. “Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off, just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times. Only they hadn’t hurt. And there it was, lying on the grass, only ever so much thicker and darker and more knobbly looking than the others had been. And there I was, as smooth and soft as peeled switch and smaller than I’d been.”

Again, there’s more that I could read there, but you know, I’ve identified with that. I felt like the Lord here with this last bout of challenge has been taking his claws and digging not into the husk around me but right into me. I wrote this yesterday: “Lord, I lay flat on my back and let you peel the self away. I feel that it is what you’re doing anyway, so I may as well cooperate. Lord, just do the job. I’m done doing it. I trust you.” Yet, I ask myself, “Why am I under such intense tension of soul? Why do my insides feel like they’re getting torn out? Why do I question the path I’m treading, and why do I question the pain? Is this the devil trying to destroy me? Is this my own flesh failing under the weight of human difficulty, or is this the claws of my Savior ripping into my flesh to make a new man out of me? Why do I struggle against him? Why do I resist the weight of his haunches on my chest? Oh Lord, take me, but deliver me.”

Sometimes the reason for the anxiety is because we don’t want the circumstances. So there’s this tension between what God’s doing and what we want. One other aspect to anxiety, I briefly mentioned it there, and that’s this: because of spiritual warfare. You know, sometimes we may be handling something decently well, so to speak. But for some reason, beyond our understanding, we’re just full of heaviness and anxiety. And sometimes, young person, I really do believe that is part of the devil’s toolkit, part of his fiery darts.

He sometimes can put a magnifying glass over a circumstance or set of circumstances and make them feel so much bigger, so much more horrible than they actually are. And in that case, I just remind myself personally, the greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world. The Lord destroyed him that had the power of death—that is the devil—and it’s important to remind yourself of truth. It’s important to go back to the Word of God time after time after time.

Again, a few verses here that spoke to me this morning: “Hast thou not known? Hast thou not heard that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth fainteth not? Neither is weary; there is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint, and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youth shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall, but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk and not faint.”

In Isaiah 43, he said, “Fear not, for I have redeemed thee. I have called thee by name; thou art mine. When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee, and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee. When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon thee. For I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Savior.”

In Matthew 6, Jesus said, “Therefore I say unto you, take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air, for they sow not; neither do they reap nor gather into barns. Yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? Therefore, take no thought,” and that word means to be anxious. “Take no thought, saying, ‘What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or wherewithal shall we be clothed?’ For after all these things do the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you. Therefore, take no thought, for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.”

You know, my job is to focus on seeking His kingdom, obeying His will. My job is not to worry about the details; He’ll take care of that for me. I think sometimes we have no mission to live for, and so all we have is to worry about the piddly little details. Listen, be about your Father’s business, young people. Don’t get tied up in anxiety and worry. And yet at the same time, you do need to pray about it. Philippians 4 says, “Be careful for nothing but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your request be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”

Why do we worry? We worry for a number of reasons: because of the unknown, because of uncertainty, because of selfishness, sometimes because of spiritual warfare. But in every case, we can trust the Lord. If we will look to His cause, His will, His kingdom, if we will labor first for Him and take our requests to Him, He will take care not only of our circumstances but of our souls as well. So, young person, I don’t know who this podcast was for. I know it was for me. But you know, if you’re worrying, look to the Lord, yield to Him, surrender to His will and to His kingdom, and depend upon Him in prayer to not only keep your heart but to deliver you in your circumstances as well. Thanks so much for listening.