Bobby: Welcome to Thee Generation Podcast. I’m Bobby Bosler, and I’m speaking to you today from Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, where it has been way warmer than it normally is. I don’t know if anybody else is experiencing this, but I’m considering this the goodness and kindness and mercy of God.

Normally when our family, I think most of you know, our family spends a couple of months every fall ministering to the students at Baptist College of Ministry and spending time in local church ministry here. The rest of the year, we travel in evangelism, and here, normally in October and November, you have some pretty cold spells, and by the time you get to December, it’s cold all the time. That’s just Wisconsin. This is the frozen tundra. But this El Niño year has given us some pretty amazing warm weather. It’s felt like we’re down south in the middle of December instead of up north here, for which I’ve been very grateful and everything as much as normal.

But that being said, we are just a few days, as of the time of my recording, away from heading out to New Jersey, the East Coast, to spend time with family over the holidays and then kick off our ministry year next year.

Now I wanted to give a little bit of an update because I know many of you have been keeping an eye on what’s been happening with us. I’ve shared a lot over the last year over our journey regarding the truck. And I am pleased to tell you about three or four weeks ago we placed an order through a Ford dealership in our area on a brand new 2024 Ford F-350 with the dually wheels, the 6.7-liter diesel engine, long bed crew cab, and so on and so forth. And we’re very excited. The Lord has been so good to us with the whole previous truck. The Lord brought in $31,000 from the dealer we bought it from, making amends for what had happened. Now that was still a loss on the truck, on the amount that we paid, but we take that as from the Lord. We can trust him with that.

And not only that, over the last several weeks, the Lord has brought in money from all different kinds of avenues. We had one man right after the Youth Summit pull me into my office and hand me a check for $10,000. We had $2,000 come from a family friend. We had a thousand come from here and from there and here and a thousand there. And I say all that to say we’re just rejoicing that we have $51,000 that has been given towards the truck between what we had received from the dealer and what has been given since then. And so we felt like we had enough in hand to place an order for the truck.

In case you care and are keeping track, the truck is gonna be probably by time taxes and everything are figured in the $75,000 range. But we’re just so grateful to God’s unbelievable and amazing provision. And young people, I just want to say what God orders, He pays for. And if God calls you to leave the security of maybe a certain area or a certain profession or a certain level of income, and if He calls you to step out in faith and go out into the unknown, I can tell you from experience, He’ll take care of your needs. Your job isn’t to decide whether it’s worth it. Your job is to obey the Lord in His instruction and calling to you.

And so, we are very excited now. Something for you to pray: we have placed an order back in the middle of November. But we don’t know when it’s going to be built. For those of you who’ve been kind of keeping an eye on things, there was a big strike that took place at the end of the summer and the beginning of the fall that’s been resolved. But we still don’t know how long it’s going to take for them to build this truck. It’s possible that it might not be built until the end of January or the beginning of February. So we haven’t received the build date from Ford yet. But as soon as we do, we’ll have a much better idea of how long it’s going to take to get this thing built and in hand. We don’t have to pay for it until it is at the dealer and we walk in to finalize it. I’d appreciate your prayers. I would love to see the Lord provide the remainder of the funds for it so we can pay for it in cash, but we’ll trust Him with however He chooses to provide on that.

And then I did also want to say I wanted to make a little bit of an announcement here. For the last 12 years, my wife and I have traveled in evangelism, primarily focused on teenagers and youth and doing youth evangelistic outreaches with the War and the Cola Clash. And don’t worry, this announcement isn’t going where you might think it is. We’re not going to stop doing that. We love getting to preach the gospel to teens. I really do feel that’s a part of why God called me to preach.

But we also, I have back in 2017… I was at a revival meeting in South Carolina, and in that meeting, I was just attending, it just happened to have an open week, and I decided to attend a service. God spoke to me, and God made it very clear to me there in a very holy moment where God was revealing His will for me that He wanted revival meetings to be a greater part of our ministry. And what was neat is really ever since that point here and there we’ve had a revival meeting spring up here, another place, we’ve had a return meeting or two, and that’s been great. I’ve been excited for that, but I’ve known that the Lord wanted this not just to be a thing that we do every now and then. I’ve known since that moment that the Lord would have us make a time when we end up doing a large portion of revival meetings throughout the year.

And so with that in mind over the last several years, I’ve been just slowly preparing and praying. And just here, actually, honestly today, as at the time of my recording, we launched a new website, bobbybosler.org, and officially made the announcement that we are now officially scheduling revival meetings and other kinds of speaking engagements during any of the times of the year when we’re not occupied with our youth evangelistic work. And so I am super excited about that. But I just got to say that we’re excited about this next stage and phase of our ministry. One of the ways that I put it in the announcement was that we feel not that we’re gonna stop doing what we’ve done but that God is expanding the canvas of our ministry and the kind of things He is calling us to do. And so if you get a chance, check out bobbybosler.org, take a look, and If you are perhaps a pastor, you’re more than welcome to take a look there. And if God would lead you to schedule, I would be more than happy to consider it.

So that being said, our war meetings start up in February and prior to then we’re doing other meetings as the Lord leads and we’ll be in the Midwest and the Southeast during that time.

And then one of the things, two other things actually that I want to mention particularly regarding Thee Generation. You may have noticed, and I think I mentioned this in an email, I don’t remember where I’ve mentioned it, but there’s a new module for the purpose of discovery on the Thee Generation home page. If you go there and scroll down, you will see a new section called recent series. And this is something I’ve been burdened about doing for a long time, but essentially the basic idea of this is the ability to group together like kinds of sermons or sermons that were, or podcasts, or articles that are… that go together.

So for instance, I’ve got Will Esayenko’s, How to Start a Bible study series on there. I’ve got Dr. Jim My Journey series that he started. Harold Vaughn, the Protocols of Prayer series is one of those series. Each one of Thee Generation Youth Summits, at least that had a cohesive theme, is also on there as well. So one of them, Winning the War, is a series on there. But one of the things I’m really excited about is the podcast series. Now I don’t really do series I probably will at some point. I just haven’t had a long overarching plan like that for my podcasts. I typically do them as the Lord leads on a case by case basis. But Ryan Swanson, the girls with their podcast Faith Talks, they have been much more intentional about putting together a series of things revolving around a particular topic. So for instance, there’s a series on Biblical Accountability by Ryan. There is the series on Emotional Purity by Ryan that’s on there. There’s the series that’s testimonies of personal deliverance that’s on there and many more and so I’d encourage you to check it out. The latest two are on that section right below the latest podcast episodes but if you’ll click on view all series or whatever it says there you should be able to see all of the series that have been put together to this point and there may be more from the previous content that we have that will be put together. But I know that’s a helpful way to be able to maybe go back and review some things you’ve heard in the past or maybe if you just have a burden on your heart and you want to listen to a number of podcast episodes in a row, you’re welcome to do that via that tool.

And then I’m sorry, I know I’ve got a lot of announcements here. I really do have a burden for this podcast. So hang tight. There’s also something else I’ll leave a link to in the comments in the description for this podcast. But we do have a TG insiders channel. When WhatsApp rolled out the new channels feature at first I was really upset because I thought this was gonna open up the door to things that I don’t wanna open up. But I recognize there are a lot of young people that are on WhatsApp and if you’re not on it and your parents don’t want you to be on it, please do not get it just for this purpose. But if you are already on WhatsApp and there is a link that I’m going to include in the description. Now, for some reason, I don’t think you can search for it and find the channel, but if you click the link in the description below and you have WhatsApp installed on your device, it will take you to our channel. If you can give it a follow. And on this insider channel, my plan and my desire is to post some more insider information, maybe pictures of podcast recordings, kind of for you to be the first person to hear about maybe a new feature on the website or to be aware of milestones and listens or other insider information that might be of interest to you who are all about Thee Generation. And so if you want to follow us there, you’re welcome to take a look at that link that will be in the description below. And I may end up with a short link or something through the website at some point as well.

And one other thing I want to mention, there’s a message that I preached in BCM Chapel as I was meditating on this podcast today. I just couldn’t get away from this concept, but I didn’t really feel like I was supposed to podcast about it, and yet I wanted to bring it to your attention. There’s a message I preached in Baptist College of Ministry College Chapel back at the beginning of October called God Can Lead You. And I’m not going to preach it here. I’m going to include the link below for you to check it out, but I know God was right in the midst of doing a lot of things in my heart, and there’s a lesson that he taught me. It didn’t make it into the podcast or any of those other things that I’ve been speaking on here, but I really feel like you’re the kind of person who’s listening that would really benefit from this kind of a challenge. Sometimes I think especially as a teenager or as a young adult, it’s easy to think that I am incapable of confidently knowing the will of God, of hearing the voice of God. And I want you to know that’s just not true. And I take you through a Psalm that God really spoke to my heart in the midst of my own truck journey, some things the Lord taught me about that I think will be a real help and blessing to you there today.

So that being said, I have a verse on my heart that I wanted to speak about to you here today in James chapter 4. Near the end of the chapter, James writes and says, “Go to now ye that say, Today or tomorrow we will go into such a city and continue there a year and buy and sell and get gain.” Here we find kind of this caricature of an individual who’s making plans, right?

I don’t know; some of you are the planner kind of people. You love to plan every single thing in your life out in great detail and you do not like to do anything that has not been planned in great detail ahead of time. And I just have to say, if you’re that kind of a person, I do not understand you. I love the adventure of the spur of the moment going out and grabbing a bite or heading out on a date with my wife not exactly sure where we’re going to end up and just discovering and finding things out together and hey, that looks cool let’s go try that out.

Personally, I love that kind of a thing but I’ve also learned in my old age of approaching 40 that life doesn’t work if that’s how you live all of the time. There are some things that do require planning ahead of time. And life is enjoyable when you have at least a skeleton of a plan in place.

And here we find, here James is saying, hey, listen, there’s some of you that are saying, “Hey, listen, today or tomorrow, we’re going to do this stuff. We’re going to go here. We’re going to be there for such and such a period of time. We’re going to buy some things. We’re going to sell some things. We’re going to make money. OK, easy money, right? Some of you know what I’m talking about when I say that.

But that’s good and it’s not necessarily wrong to have a plan, but there is a great danger when it comes to having a plan in your life. And James points out this problem in verse 14. He says, “Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow.” You know young people, it’s okay to have a plan. In fact, I would argue that it’s good to have a plan for your future, at least a working plan that can flex and flow. But ultimately, you may have your plan for where you’re going to be in five years, ten years, but you don’t know how things are going to shake out.

And what can happen sometimes is when you have a plan and when you’re trying to do stuff and you have a particular goal or objective in mind for your life, for your business, for your schooling, for your… future marriage perhaps and when things don’t go the way that you expected them to go you can respond in a few different ways.

You can get angry. Oh, I see this all the time. You know you planned on doing such and such a thing, you’d made these detailed and intricate plans and then somebody goes and throws a monkey wrench into it and it’s so easy to grumble and complain and to get disappointed and crestfallen and upset and angry maybe at the person or the circumstance that made that happen.

But listen, to get bitter at people for messing up your plans or circumstances, that is not a way, a biblical way to live life because I want to ask you a question. Who’s behind those monkey wrenches really at the end of the day? You might say my brother or my sister or my parents or that person at church or my boss. Well, remember the King’s heart is in the hand of the Lord and as the rivers of water he turneth it whithersoever he willeth.

And if you’ll remember that God’s desire and design are to work all things together for good. And so when you get bitter and upset and ticked off at things not working the way you wanted to, really your problem is not with the people or the circumstances, it’s with God. He’s saying, listen, you people who have these plans and you’ve got these outcomes and goals. You don’t know how things are truly going to work out.

He goes on and says, “For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appeared for a little while, for a little time, and then vanisheth away.” And if I can just say this, life is too short to get ticked off at plans that don’t work out. Honestly, there are some of you who are listening, you have spent days and weeks pouting because things didn’t work out the way you wanted them to work out.

Listen, I’m talking to some of you, you were planning on perhaps, I don’t know why this is just the one that’s on my mind, about getting married to such and such a girl and guess what, it didn’t work out. And you can spend days and weeks and years pouting about it. Or you can get the mind of the Lord and realize either she’s wrong or he’s wrong, the other person that is, or you’re wrong and let’s get on God’s page here instead of getting upset and spending a year of mourning in it.

Maybe you planned on buying a car and it didn’t work out and you spent a week pouting about it. Or maybe… You really wanted that job, but you didn’t end up getting that job. Or maybe you wanted to go to such and such a school and it didn’t work out and God had you sit out for a semester. I don’t know what it is, but when you have your plans and they don’t happen, we can get upset about them.

And I think one of the things that James is saying here is life is too short for that. Life is too short to spend your days getting upset that things didn’t work out. Now, there is another response that you can have when things don’t work out or when things don’t go the way you planned, is you can push. Oh, I know people like this.

When things don’t work out, when it seems that things aren’t going to happen the way that you thought or wanted them to happen, what can happen is people get in the flesh and they just push and push and push. They push through people and hurt them. They manipulate circumstances to get their desired outcome.

Now listen, I’m not saying that there isn’t a place for stick-to-itiveness and tenacity. There is. If something is the will of God, don’t let go of it. But we also need to have a certain dose of humility about understanding the will of God. Because you see sometimes we have our plans and maybe we thought it was God’s will, but God said or he said not now or he said not in this way I’ve got something better for you and we whine and cry and say but I wanted it this way.

Listen you can rob yourself of a miracle by pushing by pushing and making things happen from a human standpoint. Again I’m not going to go and preach about Abraham and Hagar and Ishmael and all of those things but there is biblical precedent in the narrative. of people who knew God’s will and what God wanted and thought they knew how it was going to work and they pushed ahead and just made it happen anyway.

Don’t do that young people. Life is too short to waste years on your Ishmael experience. Your life is a vapor. It appears for a little while and vanisheth away. So how are we to respond to these things? Verse 15 tells us, he says, “For that ye ought to say, if the Lord will, we shall live and do this. or that.”

You know young people, the fact of the matter is any plans you make must be surrendered to the Lord Jesus Christ. Any things, outcomes, goals that you really want to accomplish even once you believe the Lord wants you to accomplish ultimately needs to be subjected and submitted to the approval or rejection of God. He is your master and if things don’t work out the way you wanted them to, don’t get upset, don’t just push through get before God and get His mind on the matter.

I think sometimes people, they hear this, if the Lord will, and they basically mean that whatever plans you say, you just need to say, if the Lord will at the end of it, to be spiritual. I don’t think that’s the idea of this, though I do think it’s healthy to acknowledge that God is the one in charge of my life through your words, but ultimately, I think this is an attitude of God. This is what I’m planning to do, but you have the right to change this anytime. You have the right to mess up my plan. And so God, I am submitting to you.

And if things go wrong, we get before the Lord and say, God, am I supposed to keep pushing on this thing? Or am I supposed to give up or just wait until I get instruction from you? Listen, young people, with this whole truck thing all year long, it’s been one long waiting thing. And there have been moments where God said go and there have been moments where God said hold. And my job was not to project what I wanted to happen. My job was to submit to Jesus. That was my job.

But what does he have to say here about the other attitudes? In verse 16 he says, “But now you rejoice in your boasting. All such rejoicing is evil.” You know, there is an attitude of being a self-made man, of someone who knows how to get his thing done, and maybe has accomplished much and has made a lot of money and has made a name for himself because of his own ingenuity.

And there’s a certain sense in which there’s a strut that they can have, a chip they can have on their shoulder because they got themselves here and they know full well they did. And that kind of attitude that maybe has a… played fast and loose with the will of God who has not been willing to submit when God said no and has just pushed ahead and has humanly made things successful.

God says that’s evil. Oh, they may look successful, they may look like you want to emulate them and do what they do and do it how they do it, but listen, do not mistake my words here young people just because they’re successful doesn’t mean they’re godly.

just because they appear like they have it all together and they know what they’re doing, just because they’ve got a bunch of followers and just because they seem to be successful and things seem to be going well for them does not mean that they are good or worthy to be followed.

Ultimately, the test of your surrender is what you do when God messes up your plans. And I want you to notice in closing here verse 17, he says, “Therefore to him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”

Listen young people, when God says hold and you just bowl ahead, that’s sin. When God says no and you throw a pity party, that’s sin. When God, in fact, I’ve been talking a lot about God saying no to plans, but when God says go and you say I’m not ready, that’s sin too. When God says, go do something for me, it is time. It is time. And you say, no, it’s not. I’m not ready. That is sin, young people.

See, I think we look at this and we say, well, if we know that such and such a standard is the right thing and we don’t abide by it, that’s sin. And we talk about conscience and so on. And yes, that all applies. I’m not arguing against that. But I’m just trying to look at the context here.

If you do not submit to the will of God in stopping or going. and sweetly and submissively aligning yourself with his leading through his providence and the circumstances in your life and the promptings that he places in your heart. That is sin.

It’s so easy sometimes young people to get on autopilot and just do the next thing, but God wants you to submit to him whether it’s stop, hold, or go. And your job and my job and all of our jobs is to be completely surrendered, right? total surrender to God and totally dependent on Him to enable you to do what He’s called you to do.

Listen young people, this has been a challenge to me. Again, there’s so many things God has been telling me. I feel recently it’s been more go than hold. But you need to take it from me. Listen I’m living this. I’m learning. Submit to Him. When it makes sense and when it doesn’t. Life is too short to not. surrender to Jesus Christ.

Hey, thanks so much for listening. We’ll catch you later.