Leverage Point #9 - Blood Stained Allies in your Life: Philippians 2:19-30 - Philippians: Joy Leverage

You're listening to the road with After Teacher Steve Holt.

To share your brokenness, you need to share it with broken people.

Character forged in hardship and difficulty.

Maybe you've gone for an ugly divorce.

Maybe you've been through a third form.

Maybe you have an addiction right now.

When you've lost a child.

What you've been betrayed.

We need people in our life in the women that sincerely care, but also have a pretty characteristic.

The character is for three fortune.

At The Road, our vision is to raise up wholehearted disciples of Jesus Christ.

For more information on the road, visit the road.org.

We hope you are encouraged by today's message from Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

Well, guys, today we're in Philippians.

We've been in Philippians.

We've been talking about joy.

We know that the fruit of the Spirit is joy.

Love.

Love and joy are the first two.

I think it arguably could be said that love's the most important gift of the Holy Spirit.

That love is where relationships flow.

Love is where marriage flows.

Love is how you should do your job at work.

You should do it out of love.

How you treat the opposite sex or the same sex with love.

But then right behind it is joy.

And I think God wants us joyful.

And Philippians, while you know, we've been in it for eight weeks, is about a man named Paul who's in prison writing to his favorite church in Philippi, and he's in prison.

And he's in, he's not an American prison.

I mean, he doesn't have pool tables and weight rooms.

He's in a Roman prison.

And in that Roman prison, he is full of joy.

It's only 104 verses.

Only 104 verses in the book of Philippians, and yet 19 times he talks about joy and rejoicing.

And we come to this passage, this one part where he talks about some men in his life that he dearly loves.

That he has a close, deep relationship with.

And so I want to talk about this idea that joy flows through.

Now listen up, blood-stained allies.

That you need blood-stained allies in your life.

Men and women, you need blood-stained allies.

Now, what in the world is a blood-stained ally?

For you that come to worship a warrior, you know it.

I talk about it all the time.

For the rest of you, you're gonna know what a blood-stained ally is after we're done this morning.

Because if you don't have a blood-stained ally, your chance of really making it in the Christian life, and I'm talking about a victorious Christian life, I'm not talking about being saved.

Because you can be saved and be going to heaven, but only experience eternal life when you get there.

But God wants you, and Jesus wants you to experience eternal life right now.

And that's through relationships.

So Matthew 5, 6, and 7, the great Sermon on the Mount, it's all about relationships.

The Ten Commandments, the first five, are all about relationships.

It's all about relationships with God and man.

God and people.

And you women are way better at this than us men.

I look at women all the time who've got some really close relationships.

They talk about all kinds of cool stuff that are helping them grow.

And then I see men tending, not all of us, but tending to be isolated.

And so, men, we need this.

Women, we need this, and that's what Paul's talking about in our passage.

I'm coming out with a book, some of you know, in the summer, we we hope and pray it'll be in the summer, called Worshiper and Warrior, 21-day Journey and Dangerous Life of David.

And I want to quote this one chapter I have on allies.

Most friendships or accountability groups we have in our churches today and men's groups are not bloodstained.

They're not deep, and most of the time they never get past the superficial.

Allies are not men who just fly fish together and talk about Bible verses but hide their porn.

What I mean are men we can trust, be honest with, and fight heart battles alongside.

I use the term bloodstained for a reason.

They are men who identify honestly with each other's personal battles and drop the religious crap at the door to use a theological term.

These are men who will call out sin but share their own, then stick together in times of deep struggle.

I'm so tired of accountability groups where people are being held accountable by someone who's in worse sin than they are.

So it's reciprocal.

When we talk about blood-stained allies, we're talking about a reciprocal relationship, not a mentor-mentoree.

Those are good groups too.

But I'm talking about relationships where we're co-conspirators, as it were, both for the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan.

Because we are all, as Luther said, we're all saint and sinner.

So we come into this carrying a lot of junk, don't we?

Everybody go like this if you know what I'm talking about.

If the guy next to you is not nodding, you need to grab his head and help him nod.

But the reality is, isn't it true?

We're all saint and sinners.

So we have our days where we're saints and we have days when we're sinners, but we're we're washed.

We're washed in the forgiving blood of Christ, but the sanctification part is tough, isn't it?

And I'm from Georgia.

I'm not very smart.

But I figured this out that if there's a shortcut to the same thing, I'm taking the shortcut because I'm lazy.

And when I get around, when I was an athlete in college as a gymnast, when I hung out with Olympic gymnasts, which I did on several occasions, it was amazing how quickly I picked up new tricks on different events and stuff, because I was around guys that were way better than me.

And so, same way in relationship with some men or women in a Bible study or what we call a D group around here, discipleship group, is to be around others that are progressing and we're headed in the same direction.

It exponentializes the spiritual activity of the Holy Spirit in my life because I'm rubbing shoulders.

Iron, sharpening iron is what the scriptures say, and it helps me get there faster because of the power of the Holy Spirit.

David had blood stained allies.

You remember the story?

Remember the story of David?

You're going to really know about David when you read my book, I promise you.

But if you don't know about David, he he's kicked out of the palace.

Saul is after him, he's jealous of him, and he comes to this cave, and in this cave, called the cave of Addalum, all these thieves and all these robbers and all these disenfranchised people gather to him.

Hundreds of them.

He didn't even know them before.

And they began to come alongside, and it says that he became their chief.

He became their leader of this gang.

It was kind of like a gang.

It was like a bunch of hoodlums together.

But you know what's interesting about David is I don't think it could have happened without David being kicked out of the palace, without David being betrayed and David being ripped off.

So suddenly all these guys who had their own story and probably all needed to go through some counseling, they came together.

You know, I can relate.

David, when he was killing Goliath, can't relate to that.

Beautiful worship leader in the palace where demons are cast out whenever he leads worship.

Can't relate to that.

But oh, wait, Saul has got him on the most wanted top ten list.

Oh, that's us.

And they became blood-stained allies.

And guess what, men and women?

They became the mighty men of God.

And it's actually that chapter on the mighty men of God that's the last major chapter on the life of David.

That's his legacy.

His legacy were those men that surrounded him.

Jesus had blood-stained allies.

Jesus had 12 men.

He had these, and do we need to say much about them?

I mean, that was quite a hodgepodge of interesting folks.

And yet he made them arguably the greatest fighting force for the movement of God that has ever been known on the face of the earth.

They literally changed the whole Roman Empire in one century.

Amazing what they did.

Right now, the the church is booming in China.

It's just booming all over China with what God's doing there.

And it's these little tiny house churches that are being moved by the Holy Spirit.

And when you when you read about the relationship of these of these leaders to each other, these guys have blood-stained allies.

So when I went through my deep heart wound and struggle in leaving Mountain Springs Church that I had planted and built and given my heart and soul to, this group of guys, a bunch of you guys in this room, who I didn't even know, hardly at all, gathered around Liz and I and our family and loved on us.

And they became blood-stained allies.

And we sat around the fire pit, hours, and we wept for hours.

And a love began to flow.

Men and women, we need blood-stained allies in our life.

So look at Philippians chapter 2.

Philippians 2 · chapter mention

And in Philippians chapter 2, we're at verse 19.

Philippians 2 · chapter mention

But I trust in the Lord Jesus to send Timothy to you shortly, that I also may be encouraged when I know your state.

So he mentions Timothy here.

For I have no one like-minded who will sincerely care for your state, for all seek their own, not the things which are of Christ.

But you know his proven character, that as a son with his father, he served with me in the gospel.

Therefore I hope to send him at once as soon as I see how it goes with me.

But I trust in the Lord that I myself shall also come shortly.

Yet I considered it necessary to send to you Epiphroditus.

By the way, have y'all ever known anybody who named their kid Epiphroditus?

What a name, man.

My brother, fellow worker, I mean, it'd be a cool name to name somebody, I guess, because look look what it says about him.

My brother, fellow worker, fellow soldier, man.

But your messenger and the one who ministered to my need, since he was longing for you all and was distressed, because you've heard that he was sick, for indeed he was sick almost to death.

But God had mercy on him, and not only on him, but also me also, lest I should have sorrow upon sorrow.

Therefore I send him the more eagerly that when you see him again you may rejoice, and I may be less sorrowful.

Receive him, therefore, in the Lord with all the gladness, and hold such men, hold such men in esteem.

Because for the work of Christ he came close to death, not regarding his life to supply what was lacking in your service toward me.

So here's joy leverage.

So for you that have missed it, I use this metaphor right over here, this illustration, of a fulcrum and a lever.

And our thesis here is that the more we press in with joy, you see the blocks there on the side of what it looks like a seesaw, that the more we press into our problems with the joy and the power of the Holy Spirit, the easier it is to lift those issues in our life.

So here's joy leverage number nine.

Joy leverage number nine is joy is found through having some blood-stained allies in your life.

That's right.

Because, see, they help too.

Like if I, you know, as a kid, I'm I'm five foot nothing now, but I was four foot nothing back then.

And I remember one time we had this one big kid, this one big kid that was like my best friend.

His name was Eddie in fifth grade, and he but he was big, he's like seven feet tall, you know, and at least it seemed like it to me.

And I remember two of us little guys would get on one end to push him up and get the thing going.

And then he would really start slinging us around, and we we, you know how you have a bar?

They have a bar right here, and you'd hold on, so I would hold on to him around his waist, and he'd hold on to the bar, and we'd go flying up like a foot or two, and it was cavetti.

So it took two of us to get him going.

Right?

So sometimes we need two or three guys or two or three women in our life that help us leverage some of the issues that come our way.

And it makes it easier.

They help us lift it in a powerful way.

So joy comes through having some blood-stained allies.

And then look what Paul says here, because he gives us some of the awesome qualities of a blood-stained ally.

Here's the first one, verse 19.

But I trust in the Lord Jesus to send Timothy to you shortly that I also may be encouraged when I know your state, for I have no one like-minded.

So, number one, here's the first quality I think of someone's a blood-stained ally in our life is they're like-minded.

They have the same values, they have the same vision.

Not your bartender, where you go order beers from.

Like, what do you think about my wife?

No, I'm not talking about that.

I'm talking about someone who's like-minded, has your values of the kingdom in his life.

So here's what I would define ally.

Here's what an ally is.

This is what the dictionary says.

To enter into an alliance, to enter into an alliance with a person that is associated with another or others of a common cause or purpose.

So a so listen, guys, a friend is a friend.

Great to have friends, but a friend may not be an ally.

But an ally is always a friend.

Okay?

So, so I'm not talking about just someone who's a friend.

I have many, many friends.

Most of you in this room have probably many, many friends, but not but a few you can be an ally with.

As a matter of fact, that's the way it should be, because you shouldn't be sharing your heart with just everybody.

Honestly, you shouldn't.

Because people, many people, cannot be trusted.

They'll betray you if they don't love you with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength.

If they're not behind you as an ally, they could betray you.

So sometimes it takes a while.

And as you get to have that relationship, man, hold on to that.

Hold on to that.

You need that.

It takes a while to develop, but don't run from it.

You need that.

Anybody here old enough remember why Y2K?

Remember Y2K?

Oh my goodness.

I mean, in some of the circles I used to run with, everybody was always apocalyptic.

I call that apocalyptic Christianity.

I mean, it's like we're in the end times, which I believe we're in the end times.

I do believe we're in the end times.

But it's like anything that would come became an excuse to run from any kind of relationship or the church or whatever.

And I had so many people like high-tailing it to the hills of Colorado.

And they always felt like that they were somehow more secure if they were in Breckinridge.

Or Aspen.

Y2K.

Everything's shutting down.

I said, look, man, why don't you just tell me you want to move to Breckinridge and ski all the time?

Well, you don't ski, do you?

Well, yeah, we we go a lot.

Oh, okay.

So let's just be honest, man, and quit running from everything.

So anyway, we need people with the same mission, the same vision, so that when you share your heart, they've got your heart, you've got their heart, and they know you're a kingdom person.

Person says, man, drop her.

Just drop her.

I mean, this other one that you've got, man, she's she's way better.

Just divorce her.

Look, I did it three times.

You know?

I can show you how to do it.

The cheapest lawyers you can get, and we can get you can get that thing.

That's not who you need.

You need people in your life who say, fight for the marriage.

Battle for the marriage.

Learn to love, learn to be kind, learn to grow in the power and the ministry of the Holy Spirit in that marriage.

Number two, look at verses uh 2021.

Who will sincerely care for your state, for all seek their own, not the things which are of Christ Jesus.

So number two, sincerely care.

You need authentic people who sincerely care that will let you vent and love you.

Let you vent and love you.

If you're so religious that you can't ever vent to someone that loves you, then it's gonna go somewhere.

It's gonna go somewhere, and usually it goes toward bitterness.

And you start getting a bitter root.

And I don't want bitter roots in my church.

Do you?

I mean, do you want bitter roots in your family, in your home?

Some of you already have it.

So, again, I'm gonna use a little bit of a theological term.

I I don't want to be offensive, but no BS here.

Because the reality is that everything in life at some point is hard.

And we've kind of built up a form, a caricature of Christianity where you always have victory in Jesus.

You don't.

You don't always have victory.

We have failures, and we blow it, and we make mistakes all the time, don't we?

So we need some folks that understand that, and they've had a few failures in their life, and they sincerely care.

You need men and women who sincerely care.

He goes on.

But you know his proven character.

Verse 22, number three, proven character.

A mentor of mine once said, Don't trust anyone who doesn't walk with a lamp.

To share your brokenness, you need to share it with broken people.

Character forged in hardship and difficulty.

And maybe you've gone through an ugly divorce.

Maybe you've been through three or four marriages.

Maybe you have an addiction right now, or you've lost a child, or you've been fired, or you've been betrayed.

We need people in our life, men and women, that sincerely care, but also have a proven character in the midst of that.

You see, the character has been forged through hardship.

And here this morning, I'm blessed to have a brother who I'm getting to know and his beautiful wife, who uh have a ministry called Mountain Gateway.

They're out of Mexico, and now even have, listen to this, even have a coffee plantation, a church planting movement happening in Nicaragua.

And I'm getting to know Britt Hancock so much the last few days.

I keep inviting you to every day.

Then we just hang out and laugh all the time.

Pray.

Pray and laugh.

That's the way it ought to be.

So Britt was sharing with me the other day about some stuff he's been through that's really kind of scary stuff.

And uh, and Britt, I wanted you to come and share about how what blood stained allies have meant in your life.

So let's welcome Britt and Audrey and the whole family.

Would you guys all stand?

Those that are here.

Good morning.

God bless you.

We made Colorado Springs our home in 1992, and so I keep running into a bunch of y'all in here that have been following us and we've known each other and know our story, and and it's a really it's a it's a real blessing to be here today.

Um but you know, a lot of you may have heard, or some of you in here may have heard us me preach, and you kind of followed our story, and and so you know we've seen extraordinary things.

We've seen God raise the dead and heal cancer, and and we've we've been a part of amazing, amazing things on God's part.

And um, I I wrote a book about our life, and I determined that I was gonna be bluntly and pretty brutally honest about our failures, our struggles, our defeats, our victories, and the amazing things that we've seen God do.

And um I because sometimes you know when you only have like an hour or forty five minutes or thirty five or thirty minutes to get across a point.

Sometimes people kind of in our vernacular on the supernatural side that see a lot God do a lot of things, we leave everybody with the wrong idea.

And that is, there's you know, like like we've had hundreds of people come and visit us through the years, and a lot of times they come with the idea that we're just going to bounce from village to village and see God raise the dead in every village.

And that's not really not how it is.

And so what I wanted to do is um I remember I stood on the platform in New Life Church and the first Sunday night in January 2006, and we were taking questions, and this lady asked this question about she wanted to go to the mission field, and I was I answered her question in this way the best fo the best way for you to get ready for the mission field is to build the best relationships you can right now.

That's right.

The closest relationships that you can right now.

We lived in Colorado Springs for about five years and we built relationships.

Some of you that we built relationships with are sitting in here today.

And so I want to just kind of bounce through my uh our life and articulate some of the hardest things that have happened that I I could not have and my family could not have negotiated through those times without the quality of relationships of people to come around us and love us.

And I kind of have a hyper drive for relationships, and I'm glad that I have because I've had to maintain relationships long distance across borders.

And I can tell you that we would be mad, bitter, and broken now if it weren't for two things: the presence of Jesus in our life and the fact that we work hard at relationships and we do our best to try to love each other.

So when I was a freshman at Auburn University in the state of Alabama in 1984, I went blind.

And I stayed blind for four, I stayed blind for four months.

I was going to get some water, and then you told me you went blind.

And that's like and I really locked in with Jesus to increase the presence of God in my life.

But we were we were really, there was a group of us that were really trying to have close, meaningful, substantive, open, vulnerable relationships.

And I can tell you that the thing that helped me navigate and continually point my attitude at Jesus and the presence of God was not just the fact that I was trying to drill into my prayer life, but that those brothers rallied around me.

They didn't know what to say.

It's awkward.

What do you say to a guy that's going blind?

Right?

Except that you kind of feel ugh.

But we all loved God together.

And now I can see.

I'm happy about that.

I had an incurable thing, you know.

Then we moved here in '92, and we spent four or five years purposefully building relationships.

And then in 1996, I moved my family onto the mission field.

And boy, you know what that's like, right?

Do you remember what that's like?

What have I done?

I like staring at this thing like a cow staring at a newgate.

You know, that's like, huh?

I'm from Alabama, actually.

That's right.

Yeah.

Alabama.

Audrey's from Atlanta, over there by where you're from.

Anyway.

Hall of Fame, father, Georgia.

Grandfather?

Grandfather.

There you go.

Olympics.

Do you guys know that that the there was baseball in the Olympics in the 1930s?

36.

And her grandfather was on the team.

He was a catcher.

Yeah.

That's crazy.

We grow them, we grow them big and strong in Georgia.

Come on with it.

I'm an exception.

I'm an exception.

Red.

See, right here, this is red.

Pure red.

That's right.

Georgia Red.

That's right, bro.

That's right.

Yeah.

Georgia Clay.

That's right.

Georgia Pete.

Don't say anything about Crimson.

Okay.

Don't, I don't want to hear about it.

I agree.

I went to Auburn, right?

That's right.

So anyway, let's see.

I'm now he got me all off track.

What am I saying?

Oh yeah.

So we went to the mission field in 96.

Or yeah.

In 96.

And that set up a whole bunch of I'm lost.

And I felt like a failure.

I felt useless.

I felt all the emotions that you feel.

Totally incapable.

And I kept stumbling into the glory of God and God doing extraordinary things.

But inside I didn't feel like that.

And I don't know.

It seems like I spent a thousand nights bouncing in my four-wheel drive truck or riding on my motorcycle on the backside of nowhere, struggling to try to figure out how to minister in a culture that was not my own my own through two language barriers.

And it was the quality of relationships that we had up here that I would think about in the dark and being so sometimes full of fear because it's dangerous out there and there's bad things that happen to people and and and the lies that the devil tell you.

It just runs ceaselessly.

And the quality of the love relationships with some of you in this room helped me stay the course and not cave in.

And then the time came where Jacob, Jacob wave your hand.

See him?

Stand up.

I want him to see how tall you are.

See how tall he was?

See how tall he is?

That's my oldest son.

He works with us in Nicaragua.

The time came where we were struggling to open churches and we were fighting with the devil and seeing dramatic miracles, and we had a blind leper healed, and churches were opening, and I was leaving the house early and coming back late.

And in the middle of that, he got typhoid fever, and we didn't know what it was, and we're trying to believe God, and he was getting sicker and sicker and sicker and sicker.

And then the time for 10 weeks he had typhoid fever, and I would go out and I would come back in, and I would find my wife, she's sitting right there, holding him in bed, crying, praying this prayer.

Oh Jesus, please help him breathe.

And so we were in the middle of that, and we called some dear friends because we were collapsing.

Our faith was caving in.

So we called some friends that were our first friends at New Life Church, Mark and Christy Marble.

Some of you may know them.

He pastors in Castle Rock now.

And they dropped their schedule and they came to our house in Mexico.

And you know what he did?

He and his wife, they made us laugh.

And I can't tell you how meaningful that was.

What did they do?

They came around us and they said, They don't, what do you say when your son is dying?

He was pallid, he was pale, he couldn't walk, he didn't have strength.

And there were other people that their opinions were, you know, why don't you do this, why don't you do that?

And we're doing our best to follow God.

They didn't judge, they didn't do any of that.

They came and made us laugh.

And that put iron in my backbone for Jesus.

Now he didn't die.

Number one killer of children in Mexico, he didn't die.

He's there.

Look at him.

Now he's serving Jesus.

That's his little boy that Audrey's holding.

Thank you, Jesus.

I'm so glad he didn't die.

And there's so many occasions like that.

And then in 2011, we were betrayed by one of our coworkers who tried to steal all of our churches and tried to run us off from Mexico and did all kinds of underhanded things, and it even turned to criminal.

That guy engineered a threat against my family, principally my wife, by one of the drug cartels, and a phone call came and it melted my heart, and I turned into a failure in that moment.

And we were able to get out of the situation.

Nobody got kidnapped, nobody, nothing bad happened.

And you know, they they they're really smart, those guys, those bad guys.

They know how to utilize kind of the going thing against you.

And I had to go back to my house after I moved to my family, and my best friend in this world flew down there to Mexico to go back to my house with me at a time when my heart was melted with fear.

You know, I did not feel full of faith and power.

Wow.

I had an emotional collapse over all of this.

Yeah.

And for the first time in my life, I premeditated disobedience to God.

And here's what I said to God.

I said, Lord, if you ask me to keep my wife here in this threat, I can't do it.

And I don't agree with that.

I don't think that's right.

I don't think it's wrong.

And he could have said, he didn't, but it didn't matter to me.

I could imagine a context in which I would say no to the Lord, and that's bad.

I'm just being honest.

And nobody judged me.

And they just went, here, let me help you.

Let me help you go sleep in your house.

That those guys wanted to do all kinds of, you know, the stuff they tell you on the phone.

It was terrible.

And had it not been for him and other dear brothers that rallied around us, we would have collapsed into brokenness and utter defeat.

And instead, we help each other sort through the mistakes that we make and not end in failure.

A mistake is one thing, ultimate failure is another.

And we gotta lock arms.

We gotta stand with each other.

And that's what he's talking about.

That's the real kingdom of God.

And so I applaud you.

I affirm you.

You got love working here.

Amen.

You got real relationships working here.

Keep going.

God bless you.

I mean, we can't even get you guys to come in from the lobby to come worship because you're talking so much and hanging out with each other so much.

But you know, in the same way for me, Brett, I share with you briefly how four years ago that these men and women came around us.

They're in this room.

Many of them are leaders in the church today and loved us.

We didn't even know them back then.

Well, you guys are worshipers and warriors, so I got you a hat.

So, Brett, come over here.

Jacob, Jacob, I don't I don't think your wife wants one.

She wears one.

Alright, you get one.

And there you go, okay.

You got you get one.

There you go.

All right.

We love you guys.

We're excited for you.

We're gonna come to Nicaragua and see you.

That coffee better be good.

That coffee better be good, Jacob.

I want to come down and get some of that coffee.

So first, bless stained allies are like-minded.

Secondly, sincerely care.

Thirdly, proven character.

Look at verse 22.

Verse 22, Paul continues and he says, What?

What am I saying?

I'm looking at it.

I went to you know I went to I went to Ephesians 5.22.

Wives, submit to your husbands.

I just turned the thing to that.

I don't know why I did that.

I did a wedding yesterday, and that was my I that's what I always do in my weddings, is tell the wives they need to submit to their husbands.

Only kidding, only kidding partially.

But you know this proven character that is a son with his father, he served with me in the gospel.

Therefore, I hope to send him at once as soon as I see how it goes with you.

But I trust in the Lord that I myself shall also come shortly.

So, fourthly, church, we need people who serve alongside us in the proclamation of the gospel.

We do.

I mean, you really need people who serve with you.

And so, I mean, when you're helping out with next gen junior with the kids downstairs, those are those are potentially bloodstained allies that you're serving with.

We got a Guatemala trip coming up in June.

Some of those guys are gonna come back, and you guys are gonna be lifelong friends because you did Guatemala together.

Uh, the group that went to Rwanda last year, they're still in connection with each other because they did Rwanda together.

And the hospitality team out in the lobby and the greeting team in the lobby, and those who help with teleos and those who help with the well.

I mean, folks, look around.

And if you're not serving, then you're you're missing out on a big section of people that would love you because you guys have the same vision and values, and then you're getting dirty together.

It's good to get dirty together.

And then this summer we're gonna do the Springs Initiative again.

For the third summer in a row, we're gonna paint houses in the poorest section of the city, and you're gonna be hanging out with a bunch of people that have got paint all over their face.

And we're gonna laugh.

Everybody just go, oh, that's what we do.

We laugh and we work together.

And so we do it together.

And that's where that's where Paul developed such a love for Timothy and Timothy for Paul is they were in the gospel together.

And then lastly, yet I considered it necessary to send to you Epiphroditus, my brother, fellow worker, fellow soldier, your messenger, and the one who ministered to my needs.

So, fifthly and lastly, they minister to your needs, men and women.

They minister to your needs, people who will minister to your needs.

Brene Brown, in her classic work on shame and vulnerability, talks about how in her study of 10,000 clients, 10,000 uh case studies that she did in her social work, why do some people make it through the most difficult of times with so much joy?

And why do others just fall apart?

And she said it's vulnerability.

It's learning to be vulnerable with others.

So here's what she says: quote, vulnerability is the birthplace of love.

Listen to that.

Vulnerability is the birthplace of love.

It is the birthplace of belonging, it's the birthplace of joy, it's the birthplace of courage and empathy and creativity.

It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity.

If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.

And what they found, and what she's found, I've read all of her books except for one.

Just love what she says.

She says, what we tend to do is we run from our problems.

We run from our shame.

And she says, turn around and face it.

Be open and honest about it with some bloodstained allies, people you can trust, and it will set you free.

And I'm a testimony.

I'm a testimony of that.

Many of you know my story.

I'm not going to tell it right now, it's not enough time.

But vulnerability is the key to be set free.

You've been listening to The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

We hope you have been blessed by today's message.

To connect with us further, visit theroad.org.

If you are walking through a difficult time, we want to pray for you.

Go to theroad.org, click on the ministries tab, and go to our prayer page to send us your prayer request.

Thanks again for tuning in today, and be sure to listen to the next edition of The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.