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Reset Podcast with Archie Callahan is where faith meets real life.
In a world constantly shaping the way men think, lead + live, Reset Podcast takes a fresh look at men + culture through the lens of the GOSPEL. Each episode features honest conversations, practical wisdom + scriptural truth designed to help MEN reset their minds, strengthen their faith + lead with purpose in their homes, workplaces, churches + communities.
Whether we’re discussing leadership, marriage, fatherhood, integrity, current culture, spiritual growth, or the challenges men face today, our goal is simple: to align our lives with God’s truth + become the men He has called us to be.
SUBSCRIBE + join the conversation as we challenge cultural norms, encourage biblical manhood + pursue a life that honors Christ.
NEW EPISODE EVERY WEDNESDAY.
Hey, and welcome to the Reset Podcast with Archie Callahan.
We're in studio today with Christian, who is on staff at Bridge Church, been on staff for several years.
It's good to have you in the studio today, my friend.
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Who is Christian?
I know you are a Christian, but who is Christian?
Let's hope so.
I've met some people named Christian that weren't Christians.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
But you are a Christian, yeah.
A lot of pastor's kids that weren't so Christian.
But I am a PK that is a Christian, praise the Lord.
But, yeah, great to be on and excited about, you know, you taking all the wisdom that you have and doing it in this format.
But that's a long question that I'm going to put in some bullet points.
Okay, yeah, man.
Because I told somebody my story not that long ago, and they're like, man, I felt like you've lived three lifetimes.
But, you know, when you live your life for the Lord, he just, you know, he does so much.
But, yeah, I grew up.
I was a PK.
My dad was a pastor when I was born.
And then he was a traveling evangelist for a lot of years in the Four Square Church.
And so we would travel every summer with him.
Wow.
And as a family, so it's pretty cool.
We had this magnet board.
We used to put, we'd get a magnet in every state.
And so I've been to almost every state in the U.S.
just on that fun journey.
And when I'm the oldest of my dad's kids, so when I was about 11, he decided he wanted to be home more often and not travel as much.
So he took a pastoring position up in Michigan at a church in a suburb of Detroit.
And was there through high school and through high school, started playing football and fell in love with football and really wanted to.
My dream was to actually one day play for the Dallas Cowboys.
Amen.
Amen.
Yeah.
Amen.
I'm sorry, guys.
Don't turn us off.
Because I was watching the Cowboys as a little guy.
So that was my big dream.
But then, of course, it became wanting to play in college.
And so we moved back to Texas my senior year, the summer before my senior year.
So that was a big shift, you know, from 11 to.
to 18 I was in Michigan then we were back the summer for my senior year and so it was tough because I had a lot of friends you know a lot of teammates and people and was really plugged into our youth and you know just
As you grow up when you're a PK, I had this very short rebellious season, but compared to what?
I think I cussed a couple times, and that was about it.
But I'm thankful to the Lord to be blessed and not to have gone off and addictions and things like that that other people have.
Really got on fire for the Lord at, you probably remember Ron Luce and Team Mania Ministries, so Acquire the Fires.
Acquire the Fires and started going on mission trips with Team Mania, and that really changed my life.
I fell in love with missions at 15, went to Costa Rica, and then just...
I've gone on mission trips.
I've been to over 26 countries through college, going on trips, and really just loved ministering to people in that way.
And so ended up being able to play football in college at Howard Payne University, small D3 Baptist school in Texas.
And I didn't care.
I just wanted to play.
You just wanted to play, man.
No scholarship, you know, nothing like that.
But just watched the Lord continue to mold me and shape me.
And my plan, this was my plan.
My plan was go to Howard Payne, get my basics, then transfer to A&M, do mechanical engineering.
Because, you know, I'd done like construction jobs and framing and things like that.
So I kind of like this.
And then walk on for football and finish out at A&M.
Well, that never happened.
Stayed at Howard Payne all four years, thankfully, because that's where I met Kathy, my wife.
But I had a counselor.
I ended up doing business.
I honestly had no idea.
I asked the Lord over and over again, why am I doing business?
I love missions and I'm doing business.
And it made no sense to me.
And I never, I didn't hear an answer from the Lord.
Kept asking, kept asking.
And then it all came together towards the end of my junior, senior year-ish.
And Kathy had came here to go to Regent to get her master's.
So she had graduated and moved here.
And I came to go on a preview weekend at Regent because I was thinking about getting my MBA.
And I'm sitting in this room where they're talking about the MBA program, and the guy talking starts saying, business mission this, business mission that.
And it's the first time I'd ever heard those two words put together.
Put together, man.
It's crazy.
And I was like, whoa, what are they even talking about?
You know what I mean?
And I had started working at Chick-fil-A as a junior, and I'd never even eaten at Chick-fil-A.
We lived in Michigan.
There was no Chick-fil-A's there.
We went back to a small town in Texas.
That was my first experience with Chick-fil-A.
Are there any Christians in Michigan?
Are there any Christians?
There's no Chick-fil-A.
It can't be Christians.
Well, they have them now.
A couple of years ago.
They got saved, yeah.
They opened their first Chick-fil-A's.
It's funny because a friend of ours from when my dad pastored there sent a video of the line.
It was like out the parking lot down the way, wrapped around when they opened the first one in Michigan.
michigan um but started working at chick-fil-a and the guy who i worked for um at that chick-fil-a i was about to graduate get married come here with kathy and he said hey man what are you gonna do after you graduate i was like i don't know but i ain't working at chick-fil-a he's like what i was making 625 an hour as a night shift manager back in 2006 so i was like i'm about to get married start a family there's no way i can
live you know and so 25 no uh and he was like nah man when i started in dallas you know i started at 10 bucks an hour i was like oh you know that sounded like a whole lot more than 625. i was like well tell me more about chick-fil-a and so he just started telling me about the integrity and the character and just the people are the same from the top to the bottom and i was like well what's next he's like doing what i'm doing and um he was actually what's called an inner manager he was running a corporately owned restaurant at the time
And so he called up here, connected with an owner-operator named Mark Mitchell, and I eventually moved up here, started working for him, eventually became the general manager at that location, and decided this is what I want to do.
I want to be an owner-operator of a Chick-fil-A.
And so pursued that.
I actually got in that interim manager program.
It's basically a program for young people that don't have ownership experience to go prove you can run a multimillion-dollar Chick-fil-A, right?
Mm-hmm.
So I traveled around the country for two years running Chick-fil-A restaurants and all while interviewing to be selected as an interoperator.
So that time period was at the end, and I had my top grade interview, and I didn't get selected out of the program with Chick-fil-A.
And there's a whole story for why that happened.
But I'm a person of faith.
I don't make plan Bs.
I'm like, God's my plan A. And so I was like, Lord, what happened?
I thought this is what we were doing because I would have looked you in the eye and told you I'm going to be an honor operator.
Yeah, yeah.
And the Lord said, you thought I was bringing you to Chick-fil-A, but I was bringing you through Chick-fil-A.
Wow.
That's a big difference too.
Yeah.
And I was like, oh, that makes sense.
Why didn't you tell me?
Why you wait so long?
Well, you know, if you'd have told me, I wouldn't have gone, took my wife, my pregnant wife, two toddlers and traveled around the country for two years and done that.
But it was world-class leadership development and experience and all that stuff.
So, um, and, and ended up going back to Texas, starting a tower climbing company, all kinds of stories in there, but then became a assistant pastor at our church in Texas there.
And pastor Kathy was the kids pastor, pastor there for five years, um, ended up going back into the business world through another tower business.
That's a whole long story.
Um, and then in 2021, um,
We'd been praying into our necks for two years.
We knew God was going to be moving us and didn't know exactly where.
And the Lord opened up to Kathy.
The Lord had put Virginia Beach on Kathy's heart for two years.
And so I knocked on – I made one phone call to Mark, and he connected me with Natalie, who's owner-operator locally.
And from the time I talked to Mark –
Three days later, I had a job offer for job I didn't apply for.
Wow.
So that's the power of, you know, connections, new guides connected you with, but that door, so the door just swung wide open.
We were just kind of like curious, you know, and, and the Lord just swung the door wide open.
So that's how we got back here to Virginia beach.
And then, you know, it's a crazy story of how Kathy came on staff at bridge.
unplanned.
We're doing our shadow day with Rob and he's like going over planning center services and Kathy's like, oh yeah, we use that at our other church.
And he was like, oh, what'd you do at your other church?
And she said, I was over the kids ministry.
He's like, what do you mean over the kids ministry?
She's like, well, I was the kids pastor.
He's like, you know, we're looking for a kids pastor, right?
Yeah, I remember that, man.
We needed one too.
Yeah, three months.
Y'all went three months.
And the story I heard is that
Y'all interviewed people, and it just wasn't the right fit, and you just felt like you were supposed to wait.
Yeah.
And here in comes Kathy.
Right.
She was already in church, and y'all had attended Bridge years before that for a while.
No, so Kathy's best friend.
Best friend.
Yeah, that's right.
And Jonathan had attended when y'all were in the schools and everything.
And so they invited us when we moved back because we went to a different church.
Yeah.
Loved our church we went to when we lived here before.
When we came back, it just didn't feel like that's where we're supposed to be.
And I came because I came first and started working before I moved the family.
And Haley and Jonathan invited us.
And the first Sunday I came, I was like, this is the place.
Mm-hmm.
And so that's how we got here.
And then however many months we'd been coming and then showed up to serve the first Sunday.
Wow, that's a journey.
That is about three lifetimes, guys.
That story is a whole lot larger than my story, man.
You ought to be 70 years old, man.
How old are you?
43.
43, and has been through all of that with, what, three or four kids?
Four kids?
Four kids.
God bless you.
But Christian's a great guy.
I just want to, just for a few minutes here, we're going to talk about what men deal with.
And there's a verse of Scripture over in the Song of Solomon, and the Song of Solomon is a great area of Scripture, but it says this, that
It's the small foxes that spoil the vines.
It's the metaphor that if we don't watch these small things that come into our lives, they have the potential to destroy the big purpose that God has for our lives.
And so we have to watch these small little creatures, these foxes, these things that come in and eat away and really destroy our lives.
And sometimes we think small things are not big things.
until they destroy something beautiful.
And what do you think, Christian, man, for guys, for dudes, for men, young and old, what are some of those small things that have a big negative impact in people's lives and they don't realize it until things collapse around them?
You know, I think there's a couple things.
Being an entrepreneur, being a driven person, you know, and understanding that mindset.
And I've listened to a lot of things and read books about driven people and specifically men.
You know, I think that we're, a lot of times we're chasing something.
A lot of times it's a dopamine hit.
You know what I mean?
Something that gives us a high, that energy.
I've always been adventurous.
I've done all kinds of crazy stuff.
And
Haven't jumped out of a plane yet, but I'm looking forward to it.
But like that adventure, that excitement, you know what I mean?
And I think a lot of times if we don't have that in our lives, we're going to look for it.
And I even realized in myself, there was a time period where the Holy Spirit showed me that I was living vicariously through shows or movies.
Wow.
Because you have these spies.
Like I always said, if I had another life, I'd be a spy.
You know what I mean?
Like these – Jason Bourne is one of my favorite series.
But this ability to go do something cool, obviously something that brings justice, you know what I mean, to evil and those types of things.
But I found the Lord was showing me like you are getting something from that –
that is replacing what I wanna do, the adventure and the excitement that I wanna do in your life.
And I saw that happen actually before when I was in college.
Um, and I was, I was crazy.
I, you know, do crazy stuff.
We went to Israel on a mission trip when bombs were going off.
You know what I mean?
As adventurous.
And so like, I just, I love that kind of stuff.
And you know, when you're in college, you, you don't always understand the danger and all that stuff.
You think you're invincible.
Right.
Exactly.
Um, but there was a time in college when we were out having fun, doing something crazy.
And, um, I was actually leading.
what we were doing and without getting into all the details, but, um, a very good friend of mine almost lost her life.
Woo.
Um, and, um, basically, um, we made a chemical bomb and you're no bomber, man.
Go ahead.
Well, see, I had gone with some of my other friends in college and watched them do it.
And it was cool.
And it dropped down and we were up high on the suspension bridge and it dropped down on the water and exploded.
I mean, it was like pretty cool.
And so I went and attempted to do this with a different group of friends and it exploded in my hands.
And I was almost unharmed.
which is the protection of the Lord.
She was standing to my right and was taking pictures and it basically exploded on her.
And so that's, we don't have time for that whole story.
But
And God's grace, you know, God's grace in dumb situations, like, God did miracles.
Yeah, we've all done dumb things.
She probably shouldn't be alive.
Yeah.
But, and she, anyways, that's a whole story and God's grace in that.
But my point is, is that after that, I was like, God, what do I do with this?
I have this desire to do crazy stuff.
Like, I can't, like, I don't think it's going away.
So, like, what do I do?
And he's like, submit it to me.
And so kind of the next – I don't remember the timeframe, but the next action after that, there was a particular type of church – I won't say the name – down the street from where we lived.
And me and a friend went and prayed seven times around that.
And rejoiced at the end, kind of like in Jericho.
And sometime later, that church closed down.
It collapsed.
And so it was like the Lord was showing me, like, this is how I want you to use this.
I'm saying, what was the purpose of going out and marching around the church?
Was something— Well, it wasn't a Christian church.
Okay, okay, I got you.
Maybe specific.
Maybe we'll go across the country marching.
I want to take you to Iran and different places.
But that adventure, that desire, you know what I mean?
Like we're fulfilling it many times in ways that we shouldn't be.
And sometimes if I carelessly through these cool movies, not that there's anything wrong with these movies, but if we find ourselves living through these characters, then we're not fulfilling what he put in there in our lives.
This thing where we're like driven to do whatever because we don't see a way to do that.
We're not trusting him with that desire.
Yeah, because we all want to live vicariously through somebody.
I think we're all—men, by nature, most of them are adventurous.
And public schools and elementary schools, they try to get these boys to sit in classes for eight hours, and they're going crazy, and they're trying to discipline them.
All they need is recess.
Let them go out.
Let them fight a little bit.
Let them play in the dirt.
Let them play football.
And because men by nature are adventurous, we just have to direct that adventure in a way that is positive and life-giving and God-honoring and living life on purpose.
I know you're adventurous, man.
You'll go up in the mountains and spend a couple days in the snow, and I'm like, you're crazy.
It's too cold to do that.
You're sleeping on the ground in caves.
I think you said you went in one cave with a bear or something.
Yeah, I'm not like that.
He did it on accident.
Was that last year?
Yeah.
He went to the mountains, climbed in a cave with a bear.
I left very quickly.
He was hibernating.
That's crazy, man.
And so you disciple a lot of guys.
You speak to a lot of young men, middle-aged men, older men.
What are some of those small foxes that rob guys of their passion for God?
You know, give me one specific one.
Well, you know, along the lines of dopamine, along the lines of that feeling, you know, a lot of times, you know, what do guys struggle with?
Our eyeballs.
Yeah.
The things we see and we look at, right?
And normally it's women.
Yeah, yeah.
You know what I mean?
And they're made in God's image.
They're beautiful.
Right.
And you can say a girl's beautiful, but you can't let that get out of control.
Right.
So when you go to lust...
Um, you know, the way that I like to tell guys, cause some of times, sometimes guys struggle and they're like, ah, I don't know if I'm sinning.
You know what I mean?
I'm like, look, it's like when the preview or the commercial comes on, right?
The ad we're on phones now, like the ad comes on.
You didn't determine, you didn't know if the ad was popping up or not, but you can determine if you watch that whole ad or if you keep going, keep strolling, keep your eyes moving.
Something comes across, you know, we live in a beach town, right?
Obviously you go to the beach around here and,
Well, I've been too busy to go to the beach.
I have not been to the beach not one time this year here in Virginia Beach.
It's crazy, man.
I live like 20 minutes from the beach.
I've not been to the beach.
You need to do something about that.
I have to live vicariously through somebody else, I guess, right now.
But yeah, you live in a beach town, summer comes, people want to take off their clothes.
How do you navigate that as a guy, as a man?
As a man who wants to honor God, how do you navigate that?
What are some of the guardrails that you can put up to really keep your life in check?
Paul said, I buffet my body.
He didn't say buffet it.
He buffet.
He guarded his life.
He guarded his mind.
He guarded his body.
So how do you do that?
You know, it's funny.
Most things come back to daily habits, you know, James Clear, Atomic Habits, all this.
But, you know, the things you're doing every day.
I watched – I had a realization in college.
You know, I went to a Christian school, college.
But let me tell you, 90-plus percent of the guys on the football team, they weren't living for God.
Yeah.
No, they just wanted to play football.
And so most of them are drinking and they're partying every weekend and all that stuff.
But I'd listen to the conversations in the locker room.
And I would pray over every locker, those guys.
I would go in if nobody's there and I'd pray.
But I'd listen to the conversations that they would talk about.
And they were making decisions –
ahead of time of what they would do in particular situations.
You know what I mean?
The conversations guys have, man, if this happened, if this girl came up to me and did this.
Premeditated sin.
Yeah.
And I was thinking about it.
I'm like, they're losing the battle before the battle's even there.
Oh yeah.
They lost it in their mind, man.
Already.
Cause they're like, man, if this were to ever happen.
And so I think a lot of times as guys, we haven't prepared.
ahead of time oh yeah of how we're going to handle a situation it's just it's in front of us and i'm weak at the moment so i'm going to give in you know whether it's in reality you know what i mean in the workplace or whether it's on your phone you know in front of the computer or so they they already lost before they ever got in the situation yeah because they already predetermined what the outcome would be and what they would do before they were ever put in that situation now oftentimes the battle is already lost in the mind
Because I think it's Joyce Meyer's The Battlefield of the Mind.
You know, as a man thinks in his heart, so is he.
So your life always drifts toward your thoughts.
So if you want to change behavior, you've got to change the way you think.
Because thoughts produce attitudes.
Attitudes produce behavior.
And so it's those thoughts.
And you have to nip it in the bud, man.
I remember the first time I was exposed to pornography.
I was 12 years old.
You know, when I was growing up, we didn't have cell phones.
And my kids will often ask me, said, Dad, what kind of cell phone did you have when you were growing up?
I was saying the one that was connected to the wall.
We had one in our home.
We didn't have cell phones, so pornography in those days was hard to get to.
But I was exposed at 12 years old.
My cousin and I were walking through the woods, man, and there was a pornographic book in the woods.
What in the world?
I didn't get hooked on pornography, but it set a flame on the inside of me.
And I had to deal with lust for the next eight years and had to learn how to conquer that through prayer, through the Word of God, submitting my life to the Word of God, and training my eyes not to lock in.
Because there are habits you can put in place that really help you.
You know, if you see a beautiful woman, you're in your car, and you're riding down the city, and you see a lady, you know, that's not a sin.
But when you make a couple trips around the block, you probably already fell.
You know what I'm saying?
So you train your eyes.
And sometimes it's that one, you know, when we are slimed by pornography or torn by porn, and it sets a fire in us.
How do we, when that happens, and it's, man, the access to porn today is very easy.
Social media, you know, X, it's, you gotta watch your eyes.
The way ladies dress, and I'm not blaming ladies, but we live in a culture that's lewd.
Yep.
So how do we deal with that?
How do we look at ladies in a way that honors God, if we're married, honors our spouse and our kids?
How do we stay true?
You know, I was on a run the other Saturday at the state park, and I'm there before anybody else is there, but as the day the sun comes up, it gets flooded with people, and there was a group of young people
And there was a whole group of girls running.
And of course they're wearing what you wear when you run.
Some of them wearing less than others.
And, um, but they run up in front of me and I'm, and so they're in front of me now on this trail and I'm looking at, I'm like, man, that's like my daughter.
You know what I mean?
Obviously when you have kids that are teenage ages, you're like, I can't even entertain any kind of thought the enemy would want to put a man.
Cause like, that's like looking at my daughter.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
So, yeah.
But, you know, there's it's just, you know, you said buffeting, not buffeting, not golden corralling.
But when you are, you know, we haven't all many of us haven't been taught how to have self-control.
You know what I mean?
We may have grew up in homes and families or with fathers who didn't do that.
So we don't have them being taught what it means to have self-control and discipline.
But that's, you know, our minds, you know, we need our minds washed and renewed.
But it takes discipline.
And building habits, you know what I mean?
Even if it's a habit of looking away, right?
What did Joseph do?
You know what I mean?
He ran.
He ran.
He left his coat.
He's like, I'm getting out of here.
He had a coat of many colors.
He left that dude there, man.
So how are we proverbially running when we're presented with something?
You know what I mean?
Or are we entertaining it?
Or are we giving it space?
Yeah, you don't sit there and pray.
You run.
Yeah.
In the New Testament, it says flee sexual immorality.
That word flee means to run.
It doesn't mean to pray.
It doesn't mean to prophesy.
It doesn't mean to pray in tongues.
Run.
You've got to leave that situation.
That's the discipline in that.
That was the problem with –
Samson, he laid his head in the lap of Delilah one too many times.
And here's the funny thing.
The Bible never says that Delilah was beautiful.
Not one time.
Now, all the movies make her beautiful.
Right.
But the Bible never did that.
I think Delilah touched a place in Samson that was a void of emotional connection.
She could have been the ugliest lady on planet Earth.
It wouldn't have mattered.
It wouldn't have mattered because there was a void in his life, and she filled the void by touching his hair.
He laid his head in the lap of Delilah, and he lost his power.
Yeah.
He lost his vision.
He lost his life.
Because the enemy plucked his eyes out after they cut his hair.
Then he had to work in the grinding in the mill.
Eventually, he kills Philistines, but he loses his life.
All because he laid his head in the lap of Delilah one too many times.
David, he got bored.
He should have been out to war, but the Bible says he stayed home and sent Joab, his military commander, to war.
That's when he fell.
Men usually fall in boredom.
They stop doing what they're supposed to be doing, and they fall off the wagon.
Talking about young girls, this is what Job said.
He said, I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a young woman.
I think one way we do that as men of God, as followers of Christ, we need to begin to see women, ladies, young girls as sisters, not sex objects.
Think about that.
Because we live in a very perverted world.
Oh, yeah.
Some of the stuff I hear, I'm like, you can't even fathom how perverted people have gotten.
But people, the further they get away from God, the more perverted they become.
So we live in a very perverse society, a very lewd society.
And so when we look at girls as men, we need to shift our thoughts and say, hey, that lady, that woman, that girl is made in the image of God, and she's my sister in Christ.
I think fundamentally you have to have that shifting.
I think, I don't remember, it was probably a youth pastor or somebody when I was a teenager, but someone talked about that that is someone else's wife.
Whether they're married or not, one day, if it ain't yours, it's somebody else's.
And so treating them that way.
But the things that we put in, as you're talking, I was thinking about the things that we input.
You're talking about society and all that.
What are we inputting?
Because if you listen, depending on what you listen to, you know what I mean?
There's lots of music out there.
Yeah.
That was one of my kids was listening to a song the other day.
And I'm like, do you know what that means?
Yeah.
And they were clueless.
But I'm like, that's horrible.
It's terrible.
And it's like if that's what you're listening to, you know what I mean?
If you listen to something here and there, not going to affect you.
You listen to something all the time.
You're hearing it all the time.
And people say all the time, well, I don't listen to the words.
Well, the words are going in.
Yeah, you might not be listening, but subconsciously.
And so what you listen to, what you put in, what you pay attention to, what you watch, and you got to be careful what you watch, you know what I mean?
What you allow in your home, what you allow on the TV, because...
you know, there's all kinds of things they put in shows and all that, you know, are you skipping it?
You know what I mean?
Are you watching it?
Cause you're married and you're like, Oh yeah.
You know what I mean?
Like, and, and you have all that input, but then you also have the word input.
How much of the word are you inputting?
Because I was thinking about, I think it's tough when you feel bombarded, you know, guys can get bombarded.
Yeah.
And I have a guy I was talking to the other day and he's been just like,
immersing himself in the word and in Christian podcasts and all this stuff, right?
And he's been studying and really, and he hasn't been seeing the effects of it until recently.
And he started getting bombarded, like feeling like he's just getting hit with the enemy and thoughts and things.
And he said, all of a sudden, he started getting hit with Matthew 12.
Because he's been putting it in.
And it just started hitting him.
But it was a good hit.
You know what I mean?
I remember I was in college.
And it was my senior year.
And me and Kathy were engaged to be married.
And once you know you're going to marry someone, you're engaged, it's like the enemy starts to try to mess with you on what's okay and what's not okay.
Because that's my wife.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
She ain't my wife.
Not yet.
Not yet.
And so I'd already come to –
come to terms, for lack of a better word, with the Lord and the Holy Spirit on where that line is.
Right?
Guidelines, yeah.
And so then I'm sitting in class.
I'm sitting in class with a professor, my entrepreneurship class, and I'm getting bombarded.
So you know like when a thought comes in your mind, you kind of shake it off, go a different direction in your brain.
So I would do that, go a different direction, I'd hit another one.
And everywhere I turned, there was a thought.
And it was...
Sexual thought.
Yeah, fiery dart.
About my future wife.
Yeah, fiery dart, man.
And so I'm like, what do I do?
I'm sitting in class.
There's nowhere to turn.
And so I started praying in the spirit.
And I started praying, not where anybody could hear me.
Nobody knew what I was doing.
But praying in the spirit, and it lifted.
Yeah.
Because my brain was no longer active.
Because I was praying with my spirit, man.
And, you know, that, like my friend with the word, the Bible, me with praying in the spirit, like, if you don't have that in you, what is it about to say?
Hide God's word in your heart so that you might not sin.
Well, if it ain't hidden, it ain't coming.
Yeah, no, it ain't coming.
Psalm 119, man.
So you got to prepare by putting that stuff in.
Because then when the time comes, when you're in the heat of the battle, you know what I mean?
Like the battle, the challenge, the difficulty reveals who you are.
Oh, yeah.
You know what I mean?
It doesn't make you something else.
It reveals what you've been doing for the past months and years.
Yeah, the storm in Mark chapter 4 revealed the fear that was in the disciples.
It was already there.
And Jesus stands up, you of little faith.
Why are you fearing this storm?
And so basically, you said the output of your life is related to the input of your life.
What are you inputting?
You know, we talk about diets all the time, and we're talking about physical food.
But what's our spiritual diet?
What are we putting in?
Are we putting in the word?
You know, what kind of music are we listening to?
What kind of shows are we, you know, because all that stuff is framing the way you think.
And you got to choose which frame is going to frame you.
It's either the frame that the world gives you, the pattern the world gives you, or the frame that God gives you in his word.
You get to determine the frame, but you better pick the right one.
And we make a lot of compromises, man.
It's the small foxes.
A lot of compromise.
Well, it's country music.
It's not bad.
Well, listen to the words.
What is it saying?
I'm not saying all country music's bad.
I think there's some secular music you can listen to that's not bad.
It's great music.
But the majority of it, a lot of country songs, you lose everything.
You know what I'm saying?
You lose your cat, your wife, your car, your dog, your house.
You lose life.
You're sitting in a bar, you know, you lost it all drinking.
But you have to determine what are you going to put in.
That comes with discipline.
The Holy Spirit, fruit of the Spirit is discipline.
God has not given us a spirit of fear but a power of love and a sound mind are disciplined.
So this discipline is very important.
You know, I think most of us are disciplined to get up and go to work, but not most of us are disciplined enough to get up and read the Word.
We just jump in the shower and go right to work, and we haven't put anything in our mind that's going to help us fight the good fight of faith for eight hours at work.
See, we want God to give us a job around Christians, but most of the time he's not going to do that because we need to be the light and the sun.
So we've got to put something in because there's going to be a spirit that bombards us when we get to work.
So that's good.
Man, I want to thank you for being with us.
I'm going to have you on again.
And we love you, man.
We love you and your wife.
And we're excited about God's plan for your kids and Cathy and yourself.
And I'm glad you're a Dallas Cowboys fan.
I think this is our season, man.
We're probably, at this point, probably, I don't know what our record will be, but it will be good.
We're going to win the division.
And you can see I'm speaking by faith.
You have to pray into it.
Yeah.
thank you for joining us today guys on Reset with your host Archie Callahan we'll see you next week