Welcome And Why The Blade Matters

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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.

A Real Injury And A Resilience Test

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For those of you that watch my main Undawn in Life show, you know that I preach about resilience all the time. So even as I'm saying this, I'm at a place in life right now where I need to really practice what I preach because I recently suffered a ruptured bicep tendon while boxing, and I'm in the early stages right now of what looks to be a very long recovery process, very painful, just to try and get back to where I was, right? So it kind of feels like I'm, you know, staring down both barrels of this horrible, frustrating process in the hopes that I can regain some semblance of where I was prior to the injury, right? So the situation has caused me to think about stories of resilience quite a bit, you know, where men faced circumstances that are way more insane than the one I'm currently facing, and they did so with grit and determination and faith and resilience. And I'm going to share some of those stories with you this

Shackleton And The Endurance Survival Story

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week. So it's October 1915, and the ship is dying underneath them. Ernest Shackleton stands on the deck of his ship called the Endurance, and he watches the Antarctic pack ice do what it's been doing for months at this point, squeezing the ship that he and his men are on. So the whole of the ship is being crushed, all of the beams are splintering, the pumps can't keep up, and essentially the freezing ocean is coming into the ship now. And there's absolutely nothing Shackleton nor his men can do to stop it. And from there, he does something that no captain ever wants to do. He gives the order to abandon ship. So all 27 crew members climb off of the ship and onto the ice with whatever they can carry in their hands. And their nightmare is realized when they see their ship sink beneath the frozen surface of the Waddell Sea. They are roughly 1,200 miles away from civilization. There are no outposts nearby. There are no radios, there are no airplanes, there are no satellites. Really, no one on Earth except them even knows where they are. And it's 40 degrees below zero. And the ice shelf that they offloaded onto is drifting north away from the land and it's breaking apart beneath their feet. So with every measurable metric that you can think of, these men are already dead. The ice should have claimed them. And honestly, this is where most stories like this end, right? So we actually don't even know the circumstances of many stories like this because the people inside of them didn't survive to tell the tale. And a lot of men in this situation simply would just stop. They would lie down and accept what they feel like is their reality. And in this situation, the odds of survival are essentially zero. But Shackleton makes a decision. We are going home. And what happens over the next 22 months is some of the most insane real life stories of survival that we know of. And in modernity, there are military historians and leadership scholars and just interested observers that study exactly what went down during this period. And they camped on the drifting ice for five months. They ate their sled dogs, they dragged three small lifeboats across the ice into open water, and then they decided that they were going to sail those boats in the open southern ocean during the wintertime for 800 miles to a small barren island called Elephant Island. So it would actually be the first time in almost 500 days where any of them would stand on solid ground. So again, they make it to Elephant Island, but it's a barren island, and no one knows they're there. And Shackleton decides to take five men and climbs into the smallest of the three boats and sails another 800 miles across the Drake Passage, which is one of the most violent, if not the most violent, stretch of ocean on the face of the planet. And he's doing so in a wooden boat that's roughly the size of a Chevy Solerado. So they end up making it to South Georgia Island, but they land on the wrong side of the island. The whaling station is on the other side of the mountain range that had never been crossed in the history of humanity. And Shackleton and his men, they have no map, they have no gear, they have no mountaineering equipment, but the decision had already been made. They were going home. So Shackleton and two of his men cross it on foot in about 36 hours. And so Shackleton walks into the whaling station. He has frostbite, he's completely famished, but he's alive. And Shackleton borrowed a ship and went back for the other men that were still waiting on Elephant Island. And amazingly, against all odds, every single man survived.

What Actually Saves Men In Suffering

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So let's talk about what did not save Ernest Shackleton and his men. It wasn't optimism, it wasn't positive thinking or meditating on better times or a good attitude or a motivational speech. What actually saved these men was the willingness to be refined by suffering rather than destroyed by it. And in Romans 5, the Apostle Paul uses a word that we translate as endurance or perseverance. So the original Greek word does not really convey the kind of, you know, white-knuckled, gritting your teeth determination that most of us think of when we think of endurance or resilience. It's more so remaining under the weight. It means bearing the

Romans 5 Endurance And Refining

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load. And this is how Paul writes it in Romans 5, verses 3 through 5. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character. And character produces hope, and hope does not push us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. So look at the progression there. Suffering doesn't just automatically skip straight to character, right? It doesn't just go straight to hope. It has to go through endurance first. You have to remain under the weight of your circumstances before you can be forged. The refining process is not instant nor comfortable, but God can and does use it. So think about it this way Shackleton and his men did not get an instant rescue, right? They got a process. It just so happened to be a nearly two-year process where they faced the brutal cold, the crippling starvation, and the ferocious ocean. And Shackleton and all of his men endured something that forged them into something different, into different men.

The Question You Need To Face

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So here's a question I want you to sit with today. Where are you abandoning ship too early? Like seriously, I want you to think about that. There are times when we need to cut ties and get out of a situation, but a lot of times we quit way too early. We just roll over and die. And as soon as we feel any pressure, as soon as we feel any hesitance, as soon as we feel any type of unease, or as soon as we feel any kind of turbulence, we see that as a sign that we're, you know, just supposed to stop, just pop smoke and get out of there. Now, whether it's your marriage, which might be in a rough spot, whether it's a relationship with a child that's gone to IC, whether it's a business you're running that's going under, whether it's a you know, some dark night of the soul brought on by a bad diagnosis from a doctor or your own bad decision making, whatever the circumstance you're in, realize that God has been using it to forge you and to refine you. I'm telling you to remain under pressure. That is where character is made.

Share The Show And Stay Sharp

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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.