Welcome to the Daily Blade. The word of God is described as the sword of the spirit, the primary spiritual weapon in the Christian's armor against the forces of evil. Your hosts are Joby Martin and Kyle Thompson, and they stand ready to equip men for the fight. Let's sharpen up. All right.

Good morning, gentlemen, and welcome to this my final day with you. As a guest host of the Daily Blade, it's been an incredible honor to open the word with you these days. And again, if you're you're brand new, my name is Pastor Josh Howerton, and uh I'm a pastor of a church in Dallas and uh friend of Pastor Joby and and Kyle Thompson and and a listener to Daily Blade. Um let's finish today uh what we've done for the last four days leading up to today is we have just been each day like double-clicking on, deeper diving on one of the five commands given specifically to men in 1 Corinthians 16. And today I want to click on the last and arguably the most important one. Um so the five commands are be watchful, day one, stand firm in the faith, day two, act like men, day three, be strong, day four. And then today it says, Let all you do be done in love. What does a man of God do? A man of God acts like the Son of God and empowered by the Spirit of God, let all that we do be done in love. Now, um, it's really uh interesting. Um if you wanted to go like, hey, dude, what's like one word, like only one word, that like probably best articulates what the Christian life is like? Um historically, theologians would probably say, besides Jesus, you know, historically theologians would go, well, man, ethically, I th I think it's probably the word love. So like, just think about this. Okay, what's what's God's command? Well, you can boil it all down to this. You want to do the whole Bible or uh the entire law in a tweet, love God and love people. Man, how should I relate to lost people? Well, John 3, 16, for God so loved the world. All right, that answered my question. How should I relate to people I don't like, people who feel like enemies? Well, Jesus said to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. If you ask questions like, man, I wonder how God feels about me right now, that's a question I think every man asks. You wander into sin, prone to wander, Lord, I feel it. You're like, man, I wonder how God feels about me when I sin. Well, the Bible says, see. See what kind of love the Father has lavished on us that we should be called children of God. He loves you. If you ask, man, what is God like? The Bible says, well, the answer is God is love. Um, if you're in a season right now where it's like, hey, dude, I'm kind of having trouble obeying God, like I'm in fact, I'm pretty terrible at it. What should I do about it? Dude, this is listen, lean in with me right here for 30 seconds. This one little thing like revolutionized how I thought about the Christian life. So if you're going, man, I'm having trouble obeying God, how do I fix it? What should I do? There's this one verse in John 14, 15 that I always read it wrong. And I think like 98% of Christians, they read it wrong because they read it with a wrong tone of voice. Jesus says, if you love me, you will obey what I command. And I think like 95% of Christians, they read it like a threat, where it's like, Jesus, like, if you love me, you'll obey what I command. You know, it's kind of that, it's a threat. But finally I understood that's not a threat, it's a promise. Jesus is saying, Amen. Actually, hey, if you love me, you'll you'll obey what I command. He's saying just love me. And you'll find yourself obeying what I command. St. Augustine actually said that. He said, just love God and do as you please. Because if you love God, you'll just naturally end up doing as he pleases. In fact, like, um, I just want to like, I don't know, I just get the sense that there's a bunch of dudes that need to hear this. If you're like newer to the faith and you're hearing all these big theological words and all these commands you didn't know existed, and you just feel like, man, Christianity is just so hard and the rules are so complicated. I kind of just want to give you encouragement. Stop, just stop thinking about it. Stop thinking about all the rules, just stop thinking about them. Just fall in love with Jesus and everything else is gonna fall into place. I've just found that to be true in my life. Just stop thinking about everything else. Just go, man, I just like want to become totally captivated by Jesus. And if you love him, you'll just find yourself obeying what he commands. So, like when this verse says right here, it says, Let all you do be done in love, it's saying, Man, if you can get the love Jesus and love people right thing, like in your heart, then all you do is kind of naturally flow out of that. Like, let me just let me give an example of this, and then I won't get real practical, and then we can we can go on our day. And I want to give you a question that I think God may use to help you know what to do today. So, like an example of this, if this is not making sense, an example of this, um, the question then becomes so how do I grow in my love for God? Okay. Here's my example on this, man. And then I want to give you the theological breakdown. So when Jan and I, that's my wife, we first got married, um, we were like making like no money. I was like a rural Kentucky youth pastor. We were a single-income family. I mean, like, dude, we like a date, and this is not a joke. I was cutting my own hair. A date night was like supersizing a White Castle value meal. I'm not joking. We had I had a little$800 car, Pontiac Grandam. We prayed over that thing. We anointed it with oil about a quart a week, you know, like it's just all that stuff. So Jana, she has a speech language pathology background. And so she took on some like students to do home speech therapy lessons to make a couple extra bucks. And we had this one kid, his name, I'm gonna call him Samuel. And when he first came in, he was doing some weird stuff. Like he wouldn't look you in the eye ever. Um, if you moved towards Samuel suddenly, he would like flinch and almost like try to hide from you. Um, if you gave him a snack, he had this, he had this weird thing where if you gave him a snack, he would like shove it into his mouth like a like rabidly. And then like if we had a pizza night at the at the student ministry, he would like shove pizza into his backpack. And then he had this um this thing where if he like really liked somebody, um, every now and then he would do this thing where he would like literally lick the person that he liked. And as we saw that, we were like, man, like, man, I wonder what's wrong with Samuel. We eventually came to find out that uh Samuel uh had been in the foster care system and that he had been taken in by a horribly wicked, evil, abusive family. Uh, and they literally, they just wanted the government check. And so both of them had full-time jobs and they were literally locking Samuel in a dog kennel with their dogs during the day. And so, guess where Samuel learned never to look an adult in the eye? Because he had learned that the only thing that an adult would do is hurt you. And guess where he learned to like eat his food real fast? Well, like, because he was like literally competing with other wild animals for his for his food during the day. And um, and guess where he learned to like lick people to show affection? Well, when Samuel was doing these weird things, like he had all these people around him like scolding him and telling him, like, Samuel, you gotta love people. You gotta love people, you gotta love people. And he was commanded to love people a million times, but didn't change anything. Well, then finally there was this godly, Jesus-y family in our church that they adopted Samuel, and they took him in and they gave him their own last name, and they gave him a bed to sleep in, and they gave him three square meals a day, and they loved him really well, and uh, you know, family movie nights, and he had parents that loved him for the first time. And very slowly over time, Samuel learned to look people in the eye when he talked to them and smile. Uh, he he learned to hug somebody instead of licking somebody, and he became a very, very loving young man. And what I want to point out to you is listen real close, man. It wasn't being told to love people that made Samuel love people. It was being loved by people around him that produced love for people in him. And if you're a man of God that's going, man, I I want to let all I do be done in love, and I wonder how I grow in my love for God and people. Here's what the Bible says. It's not well, I mean, it's not being told to love people that will make you love people. It will be you realizing how deeply you have been loved by your heavenly father that will erupt love for him and people in your heart. This is what first John 4 says. It says, dear friends, some some translations says, beloved, which by the way is both a descriptor and a command. Be loved, beloved. Let us love one another, for love comes from God. And everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. And whoever does not love does not know God. Why? Because God is love. Now listen real close, verse nine. This is how God showed his love among us. He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love. Not that we love God, but that he loved us, and he sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. And you man of God, if you want to grow in your love for God and people today, at the beginning of your day, you need to know that the descriptor the Bible gives you is you are a beloved son of the Father. And you need to take the word beloved as a as a command and a descriptor, be loved today. And understand that in his great love for you, the Son of God gave up all the royalties, the thrones, and the comfort and the glory of heaven. And he came down, he became a man to chase you because he loved you. And then he lived a perfect life of extreme discomfort, and he was hated by this world. And then he was flogged and wrongly condemned, and he was crucified on a cross, choked to death on his own blood, because he loved you, and he came to be an atoning sacrifice for your sins. And now, if you place your faith in him, and I hope that you do if you have not, he has clothed you with the robes of his perfect righteousness, and every time the Father looks at you, he doesn't see your sins. He sees the perfect spotless righteousness of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. You, beloved Son of God, be loved today. Why? So that you can go out into the world and you can be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like a man, be strong, and then watch this. So that all that you do today can be done in love. So here's the question that I would ask you to pray with the help of the Holy Spirit as soon as this podcast is over. What does love require of me today? Holy Spirit, please show me what does love require of me today. And then you go and do whatever he tells you. It's been awesome being with you, gentlemen. Thank you for your time. In Jesus' name.

Amen. Thank you for listening to today's episode. Before you go, if you want to help equip other men for the fight, share this podcast around and leave us a five star rating and review. Stay sharp.