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WITH DOUG JOHNSON

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455 Dreams … And Idols

As I read this morning, I was convicted:

Genesis 37 5 Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him all the more. 6 He said to them, “Listen to this dream I had: 7We were binding sheaves of grain out in the field when suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright, while your sheaves gathered around mine and bowed down to it.”

Lord, what does this have to do with me?  And what does this have to do with what I might talk about today?  …  I say that because I was convicted to speak about:  

“The Fight Before You”

What could this possibly be about?

I am not the sharpest tool in the box … And God sometimes has to hit me over the head for me to even begin to understand …

The reality is this:

All of us have dreams.  And all of us are destined and called by God to pursue those dreams.  And all of us are going to have to STAND UP AND FIGHT for those dreams.  Because those dreams will not be given to us … 

And Jesus proved, without a shadow of a doubt, that He does not want us PLOWING OVER THE BROKEN IN PURSUIT OF OUR TRIUMPH.

Now while what I am saying is obvious, this is exactly what what do, and we should all be willing to admit, confess, that this is exactly what we do.

And so it was with Joseph.

God had put a dream on his heart, he was proud to stand over his brothers and lord over them … even in their brokenness.

God had given him a dream to save them, and he was professing it like bragging rights in a high school locker room.

And so here are my words for you today.  Because whether you are 2 or 14 or 17 or 35 or 50 or 90 … you should be pursuing your God-given dreams like they were the most important things that you could ever hold onto.  But as you do … be warned of that very verse above.  Because that’s the verse that set Joseph up to be a slave and put him on his way to prison.  It broke up his family and devastated his parents.  It wreaked havoc on his life and the life of his family.

So here is my advice today on March 1, 2024:

  1.  Jesus Is The Lion Of The Tribe Of Judah.  God has put a pecking order over our universe.  Watch the pecking order in a pride of lions.  One King.  One Rule.  One Ruler.  And in that order they are safe, well-fed, and loyal.
  2.  Dreams Can Never Be Idols.  Because of bullet point 1, a dream as an idol will NEVER, EVER, work.  It might be a short term victory … but it will NEVER, EVER, work.
  3.  You Are Called To Lead In Humility.  This could mean early mornings and late nights.  It could mean giving up your first choice.  It could mean that you are frustrated, or tired, or exasperated.
  4.  There Will Always Be A Fight In Front Of You.  This doesn’t make you a fighter in the physical sense, but it means that you are always a fighter in the spiritual sense, in the character sense, in the repentance sense.  And, most of all, you are always a fighter in the chase after God sense.
  5.  Things Are Not Always What They Seem.  The very execution stations that Haman set up (Esther 7:10) were the very things he died on … 
  6.  Persevere, Worship, And Give Everything To God.  His plan is better than yours.  And your plan is not even a close second.  This takes faith.

I am not sure how to end this.

So maybe I will end this by encouraging you to read the “end of the Joseph” story.  It is an incredible story of redemption, faith, and family.

And, while his dream comes to fruition, it was not at all where he took it in his lust to brag.

Thank you Jesus that you love us where we are and in the midst of where we are going.

You, Jesus, and You alone, 

Hold the keys to eternal life.

In The Name of the Father and the 

Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Know anyone who might like these?  Encourage them to jump on to 2minutewarning.blog and hit the FOLLOW button!!!

Coach J

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453 The Open Door

What a Word God put on my heart on Friday.  

God is for us.

I know that this is a simple phrase, but with God it is an amazing thing.

Revelation 3 8 … See, I have placed before you an open door that no one can shut. I know that you have little strength, yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.

God knows our deeds.  But He has given us an offer.  “Whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.”  The message that is trying to take over is that Jesus allows us to think and do whatever we want.  Nothing could be a bigger lie.

The Truth is:  God offers us a way out from our sin by Loving Him, by being Born Again, by Surrendering to Him.

The devil doesn’t want us to do that so he has gone open season on standards.  While we will never meet the standard I will say this:  Everyone I know who ATTACKS Standards and the way people think has not surrendered to God.  They would know better.  He is the Lion from the Tribe of Judah and He is the one who tore up the temple.

And so I go back to the above verse.  He knows our deeds.  Even so, He has placed before us an Open Door that no one can shut.  You should choose to walk through it.  And when you do, you get three things.

  1.  He Knows You.  Revelation 3 8 I know your deeds. Even though you are broken and full of hideous sin—He accepts you.  The one who KNOWS YOU BEST is the one who LOVES YOU MOST.
  2.  He Calls You To Overcome.  Revelation 3 21 To him who overcomes, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne.  He isn’t asking us to overcome, He is COMMANDING us to overcome.  Stand up, Be accountable, and walk out the call.
  3.  You are a son or a daughter.  Galatians 3 7 So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir.  This is the greatest deal that you will ever get.  BECAUSE Jesus died and paid for your sin, you get to be a son or daughter of the King.  All the rights.  All the privileges.  All the blessings.  You will never get a better deal than this.

God has placed before you:

An open door  …  And no one can shut it.

Stand up and walk through it.

In The Name of the Father and the 

Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Know anyone who might like these?  Encourage them to jump on to 2minutewarning.blog and hit the FOLLOW button!!!

Coach J

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451 Recover What The Enemy Has Stolen

1 Samuel 30 6 David was greatly distressed because the men were talking of stoning him; each one was bitter in spirit because of his sons and daughters. But David found strength in the LORD his God.

It didn’t take David very long to lose the support of people.  The very people that he had rescued were turning on him discussing executing him!  This, to me, is unfathomable and yet it makes perfect sense.  People want all of it.  We are never satisfied with what we have … we always want more.  And, we probably don’t see it until we have been on the side where David sat in this verse.

Thank God … this is not the end of David’s story, or ours.

Our God is on an eternal quest to Recover What The Enemy Has Stolen.

And He has done so from the beginning, and on our behalf.

But how can this be done?  How can you make a covenant when someone continually and consistently breaks it?

God knows.

In Genesis 15, God makes a covenant with a sleeping Abram.  And why not?  You can not “cut a covenant” when the person that you cut it with can not and will not meet up to his end of the bargain.  So God cut a blood covenant with man through the only One strong enough to keep it.

God cut His blood covenant with man through Jesus.

And Jesus lived up to His end of the deal by dying on His end of the deal.

By His blood we are healed.

By His life we have life.

By His resurrection we can have eternal life.

By His perfection we can be sons … and daughters.

For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.  (John 3:16)

The enemy will always try to steal from us.  Sometimes he will win the battle.  Most of the time, he will lose.  And He can not win the war.  The battle belongs to the Lion of the Tribe of Judah.

And it is on Him that I stake my life.

He … is MORE than enough.

In The Name of the Father and the 

Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Know anyone who might like these?  Encourage them to jump on to 2minutewarning.blog and hit the FOLLOW button!!!

Coach J

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449 What Lies Within Us

The gospel is truly given to set us free.

And today, I found yet another reason as we sat and talked about mental health as a group of coaches.

Why are we seemingly dealing with this MORE today than at any time in history?  Why is it a bigger deal now than it was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago?  What can we do for these amazing kids that we get to coach?

As we sat and discussed, I simply had no answers.  But my reality is simple:  When I have NO answers it pushes me to turn to THE Answer.  And, He, is THE Answer.

As I reflected, I was drawn to what Paul said and so I looked it up and found it in Romans 7.

Romans 7  14 We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. 15 I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. 

17 As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. 18 I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

Paul was VERY, VERY intelligent.  A politician and a lawyer who discovered Jesus—Paul underwent a transformation of Biblical proportions.  And he wrote this God-inspired verse for us on this very day.

This verse is not an excuse for us to live at the lowest common denominator.

It isn’t an accusation to put us into a guilt-inspired tailspin.

And it isn’t a “Well, why would I try anything then if I can’t succeed at any of it?” verse.

Paul is letting us all know the reality of our situation:

  1.  We aren’t the center of the world or the universe
  2.  We aren’t the most important person at our company, or in our family, or on our team
  3.  We aren’t the superstar NFL player that crowds gather to see … and those NFL guys aren’t either.

We ARE broken, and we fall short, and we are full of things that make us broken.  It is PART of us.  And even in that state, we don’t even see most of the things that others could point out to us without hesitation.

We are broken and we fall short of the Glory of God.  Period.

And this can’t be fixed by self help guru, a pill, money, or an enormous amount of work.

It CAN ONLY BE FIXED by Jesus.

It CAN ONLY BE FIXED by our confession that we “don’t measure up”.

It CAN ONLY BE FIXED by a Father who loves us too much to leave us the way we are.

Thank You so much Jesus

When I arose today, I felt so much that was heavy in front of me

And I thought of that quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us”

If by “what lies within us” he meant Jesus–Amen.

And if he didn’t–I could not disagree with him more.

We are sitting ducks for Hell without Jesus Christ and what He did not the cross.

Gavel Down.  End of story.

In The Name of the Father and the 

Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Know anyone who might like these?  Encourage them to jump on to 2minutewarning.blog and hit the FOLLOW button!!!

Coach J

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448 How Can It Be?

Many might question Jesus choice for disciples.

But His choice to spread the gospel was even more radical.

Could Jesus have planned to have a demon possessed crazy (blog 447) and a town prostitute (this blog, 448) to take His good news to the world?

The fact that they did, the fact that the gospel even survived, and the fact that He predicted His death and resurrection say that it was much deeper than we could even surmise.

In the middle of daytime heat, in a place “inconvenient” to where the disciples might have chosen to go, Jesus began changing the world.

And his methods were radical.

As the disciples attempted to steer Him in the wrong direction, He told them:

John 4 32 But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.”

Our pursuit of Jesus often includes are thoughts as to what He is and who He is.

But who He is runs contrary to all that we sometimes think.

We think that His conversation with the woman at the well was necessary for Him to save “them”.  But what we can not fathom was that it was necessary to save us.

WE are the broken ones.  ALL of us.

John 4 39 Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. 41 And because of his words many more became believers.

The gospel of Jesus has the ability to enrage the rich, the privileged, the well-behaved, and the reliable.  And this is because in our very narrow vision of who we are, we believe that we are somehow worthy.

But the reality is that we are not worthy.

The reality is that He has made us worthy.

In reality, we are no different than the woman or even the crazy man from the graveyard.  

We are so in need of His everlasting grace.

Without it, we are sitting ducks for Hell.

Growing up, my beautiful daughter Jenna would listen to Lauren Daigle.  I grew to love her music because Jenna did.  And her words in this song could not be more true.

Thank You, Jesus.  How Can It Be?

In The Name of the Father and the 

Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Know anyone who might like these?  Encourage them to jump on to 2minutewarning.blog and hit the FOLLOW button!!!

Coach J

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447 Jesus Is Not Afraid

The battle between good and evil has been going on since the beginning of time.  And it should be of no surprise to us.

I was captivated by the first movie of Wonder Woman as it paints the gospel picture so perfectly clearly.

The man, Jesus, takes the death of mankind on a poison loaded plane into the atmosphere.

The evil Ares who is the god of war, Satan, celebrates the demise of humanity.

The heroine Wonder Woman, God, faces off with Satan in a final battle.

The poison making woman, man, sits on the ground waiting for God to punish her.  But the heroine does not, instead focusing all of her attention on Ares, the god of war.

In their final showdown, Ares says:

“They do not deserve your protection.”

To which, Wonder Woman replies:

“It is not about deserve–it’s about what you believe.  And I believe in love.”

A compelling story that represents the gospel.  If you would like to watch it, here it is:

The horror story in Mark 5 is also right out of a movie.  

This demon possessed man came came from the graveyard.

Chains could not hold him, even if they shackled his hands and feet.

He cut himself with stones.

I am quite positive that everyone feared him greatly and stayed well away from that graveyard.

And I have to think that Jesus approached without, worry, fear, or even a second thought.  He was going to break a foothold and fight the most powerful force of evil the world has ever seen.

But the drama ends there.

This man sprinted to Jesus and was at His feet on two knees begging for help.

Jesus is not afraid of your sin.

He is not afraid of your tempting and evil thoughts.

And He is not afraid if you carried out some, or all, of them.

He isn’t afraid of a man who could break chains, or the evil in the graveyard, death, or the devil himself.  In the horror movie, He is the Savior, and He walks into the teeth of death to meet the most evil presence we could conjure.

Demons begged.

Pigs died.

A man was freed.

Read it in Mark 5.

Mark 5 18 As Jesus was getting into the boat, the man who had been demon-possessed begged to go with him. 19 Jesus did not let him, but said, “Go home to your family and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.” 20 So the man went away and began to tell in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him. And all the people were amazed.

The ten cities in Greece were saved because of a demon possessed crazy man’s testimony.  And it expanded out from there.

As you go into your weekend, I want to leave you with three thoughts:

1.  If you are going to the graveyard, take God with you.  He is good for opening caskets, driving out demons, raising the dead, and redeeming your broken life.

2.  The Physical, Mental, and Emotional are all controlled by the Spiritual.  And the Spiritual has a King that will not be sharing with anyone else (thank God).  Beware of anything that will challenge His reign on your spiritual health.  And remember, filling up your emotional, or your physical, or your mental needs will work for a while … but it won’t be long until you have come to the end of this pursuit and feel empty.  Fill up your Spiritual tank.  Daily.  With Jesus.

3.  Weigh The Cost.  We worry, with our faith, about how it looks, about what we fear, about how much it might cost us, and, certainly, about what it would do for us (what’s in this for ME?).  Let me just say:  You can’t afford NOT to do it.

So enjoy the weekend.

And if Jesus wants to go to the graveyard to face up with the scariest person you could imagine, go with Him.  He is not afraid.

In The Name of the Father and the 

Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Know anyone who might like these?  Encourage them to jump on to 2minutewarning.blog and hit the FOLLOW button!!!

Coach J

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446 Deny Yourself

Matthew 16 24 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 25 For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.

Right after telling Peter, “Get behind me Satan”, Jesus said these words.

And we must always remind ourselves of them.

It is not our job to tell God what we will do and where we will go and what will happen when we get there … It is His job to tell us.

Our lives are not forever.  They are temporary and quickly fading.  Our time is short and our days are numbered … and that’s the bad news.

Even worse news is what the enemy has in store for us as his days are numbered at an even higher degree.  God has not yet dealt with him, and he has ruined the lives of many.  As Jesus said to Peter:  “Satan wants to sift you as wheat … but I will pray for you.”  And so it is with us:  Satan wishes to STEAL, KILL, and DESTROY … no easy words to fathom.

But this is not about bad news … this is about returning to the castle.  It is about kneeling before the King.  It is about the Eutopia that we all seek to have but have not fully grasped.  It is about the Kingdom of God.

Jesus has our back.

He holds us in high regard.

He fights on our behalf.

And He has prepared a place for us … on earth and in heaven.

So:

Deny yourself.

Pick up your cross.

And follow Him.

Thy Kingdom Come (Jesus, You Are King)

Thy Will Be Done (Jesus, Your Way Is Better Than Mine)

On Earth As It Is In Heaven (Not Just Later, But NOW)

In The Name of the Father and the 

Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Know anyone who might like these?  Encourage them to jump on to 2minutewarning.blog and hit the FOLLOW button!!!

Coach J

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