Roger Marsh: Welcome to Family Talk, the broadcast division of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. I'm Roger Marsh. And today, we're going to hear the conclusion of a special two-part presentation given by Christian comedian Ken Davis. Ken is sharing about the joy we receive from God's Good News. But before we begin today, I want to share that we have a matching grant in place for the month of December for those who choose to support us financially. What that means for you is that any amount you donate to the JDFI today, that gift will be instantly doubled. You can give a gift online at drjamesdobson.org, or you can make a contribution over the phone when you call 877-732-6825. We are here only because of your faithful financial partnership and your prayers, so thank you in advance for your support and for joining with us today. Again, the number to call is 877-732-6825. And now, let's listen to part two of this classic presentation from Ken Davis right here on Family Talk.
Ken Davis: I remember going to a church camp. And you see, when you don't understand the value that God places upon your life, and when you live with the desperate attempt to prove your worth by some other means, then unfortunately what we will often be willing to do is step on the carcass of someone else in order to lift ourselves up a little higher. If you don't believe that, ask any young person sitting in this audience who attends a high school. It's one of the cruelest environments on the face of the earth. I know, I went there, I lived there. And so when I got out of that environment and was in a new environment where I wasn't put down, where people didn't know about me, where I wasn't teased, I found someone to tease. And this little boy who had a physical impairment and mental disability, and he would walk across the campgrounds and I would follow behind him and mock the way he was walking and I would lisp the way he lisped.
And a little circle of friends laughed, they thought that was so funny. And I felt accepted by those people. Then I was unaware of the heart and soul of this little person that I was torturing. I was doing the very same thing that had been done to me, but as long as I was on top, that's all it seemed to matter. I would never have remembered this boy except for one thing. The last day of camp, we were standing around in a circle with our little suitcases, the money we got back from canteen in a little envelope, and our bedrolls were there waiting for the buses to come. And I heard this young man coming, his name was Bernie. I heard him coming from way off in the camp somewhere.
And he was yelling this, "Good news. Good news." And immediately my mind began to turn. I started to think, "What can I say that will mock this little boy? What can I say that will make my friends laugh one more time and remember me as the funniest guy at camp?" But before I could think of anything, little Bernie broke into our circle there. And with fire dancing in his eyes, he looked from one of us to the other and shouted, "Good news. Good news." He said, "Jesus loves me. Jesus loves me." I didn't know what to say. And before I could think of anything, he burst from the little circle and you could hear him going all over camp going, "Good news, good news. Jesus loves me." I'm going to tell you something. In that moment, Bernie, regardless of his IQ, understood what some geniuses have never figured out.
He understood that he had nothing to prove, that Jesus loved him just the way he was. There are some folks in the highest echelons of business today who work so hard they hardly ever see their families, who work so hard that their marriage is at risk, who try to accumulate enough stuff so that someone will say, "Hey, he has value, he has worth. Look, he does have worth." And he doesn't understand, that person, what Bernie understands, that it could all be gone tomorrow and he would still be as valuable as he can possibly be in the eyes of God. I have good news today, folks, you've got nothing to prove. And anytime you turn to a neighbor or a friend or a business associate or a schoolmate and you say, "I need to live up to their expectations," that expectation is falling far short of what God's ideal for you is.
You want to get all of the gusto you want to get out of life? Live with nothing to prove. Let me tell you something. You don't only... Seeing the new people are going, "Uh oh." Let me tell you something. Let me try to tell you something. You don't only not need to prove your worth to each other, listen to this now, but you don't need to prove your worth to God. So many folks grow up in the church trying to be good enough so that God will love them. Grow up in evangelical churches where it is taught from the time you enter the door by grace are you saved through faith and not of works. It isn't works that does it, and we're taught that. And then we keep trying to be good enough so that God will love us, good enough so that He'll send His blessings. Good enough so that He'll accept us and bestow worth upon us.
Sometimes I find the oldest and most familiar verses in the Bible to be the most comforting. "For God so loved of the world that He gave His only-begotten son that whosoever believes on Him should not perish but have eternal life." The son of God came down here to live and to die for you just the way you are. Say, "How could He love me?" Some of you're sitting here today, "How could He love me? You don't know what I've done." I don't, He does. And He loves you anyway. You've got nothing to prove. Believe in His love, accept the salvation that He has offered for you. Accept the grace and forgiveness that He gives to you and get on with your life so you can live with the kind of gusto He created you to live with. The second principle is this. You want to get all the gusto you can get out of life? Live with nothing to hide.
You can't run a good marathon looking over your shoulder. You can't live a good life if you've got stuff in the closet. The Bible says that if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us of our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. There's two points I want to drive home here. Number one is this. There's two directions you could go. You could say, "Okay, then I'm just going to do anything I want. I will erase the whole moral thing from my life." If you do that, you will destroy your life. You won't even come close to the potential for which God created you. Someone said this and I believe that it's one of the most powerful little statements I've ever heard. "He who is enslaved to the compass has the freedom of the sea." You can't go anywhere, you can't do anything unless there are some guidelines in your life. And God did not set the guidelines He set in Scripture to destroy our lives. He set them there to save our lives.
I'm a pilot. Last year, I crashed my airplane in September. It was a perfectly clear day. I had been hunting. Some of you don't hunt, bear with me. I got a big elk, I butchered it, I put all the meat in the back of the airplane, and flew from the mountains down to the airport that I always use. And somehow, when the wheels touched the ground, I lost complete control of the airplane and it just cartwheeled down the runway and ended up with one wing folded up over the top, landing gear completely broken off. And I was unhurt. I stepped out of the airplane, the emergency equipment, the fire trucks are coming up. And up comes a big car that says, "FAA." You know what that spells? Trouble. You are in big trouble. The plane is sitting there, elk's in the back. And this FAA guy comes up and goes, "Are you okay?"
And I unfortunately fell back on this gift God has given me. I said, "I'm fine, but I think you should check my passenger." Oh, I paid dearly for that. I just want to say, government folks don't have a sense of humor. When I learned to fly, they told me there were rules you had to obey in order to fly. And one of the rules was you never go into a cloud. If you go into a cloud, they say you lose your equilibrium. You can't tell whether you're upside down or right side up. I don't know your name, but look at me. I'm right side up. Am I not right side up? And if you were to come up here and turn me upside down, I would know that I was upside down. I approached the whole thing with a whole attitude of saying, "This is ridiculous. Why would they want to have restrictions like this?"
I used to dream about flying into clouds. I got my pilot's license, I rented an airplane, and went cloud hunting. First day. I rebelled against the rules. I said, "This is stupid." Now, I wondered a little bit, so I was careful. I found a little tiny cloud first. And I backed off and I went into the cloud and came out the other side. And it was kind of neat because everything disappears momentarily. And then I came out the other side and it was like someone turned the lights on again. Oh, it was absolutely wonderful. So then I found a big cloud and I went close to the big cloud. And I didn't want to just risk everything right away, so I just stuck my wing into the big cloud and I pulled it out and it was right side up. It didn't turn around. So I backed off about a mile and a half and got a run at this big, huge cloud.
And I went in there and it was the most amazing thing I have ever experienced in my life. My stomach came up and said to my throat, "How you doing? Glad to know you." It was the most sensations I had never experienced in my entire life. And then while that was happening, I looked over and I had some pencils and a book laying on the right seat. And the pencil in the book just came up and just, they stayed there. They weren't touching anything. I remember seeing the pencil turned slowly like that. And then suddenly it snapped to the ceiling like it had been drawn by a magnet. And I looked up to see the pencil on the ceiling. And you know what I thought? I thought, "That's why they don't want us in here." They don't want us to have any fun. This is the coolest thing that ever happened. That thing snapped to the ceiling, stuck on the ceiling. And that instant my airplane came out of the cloud. And sometimes I tell you stories that aren't even close to true, but this is a true story. That thing was upside down.
And I called upon every bit of my training and released the control wheel and yelled, "Mother." Somehow, the plane righted itself. And I went back and I landed and I got out. And I went into the little place where they sign up and I signed up for instrument flight rules. The instrument flight rule books are about that thick, and there must be seven or eight of them filled with rule after rule after rule. And do you know once I learned those rules and how to follow them, do you know what happened? I can fly anywhere I want. I can go into the clouds. I can fly 300 miles and when I pop out of the clouds, the runway I want to land on is going to be right there. He who is enslaved to the compass has the freedom of the seas. The pilot who says, "I'm going to fly by the seat of my pants," is a dead pilot. You fly by the rules. You believe the instruments.
And that's why God has put these things in place for us. And when we get in trouble and when we crash, God doesn't come to destroy us. He doesn't come to put us in jail. He comes to rescue us and to put us on the right path. Let me tell you something, when Christ could no longer carry the cross, they put it upon someone else's back. And they took Him up to that place, that place of the skull. And there, this man who never did anything wrong was nailed to the cross. And they picked it up and they dropped it in the hole. And He died there. And I don't believe it was just the nails that killed Him. I believe that what killed Him was what I did yesterday and the day before and the day before that. What killed Him was He took upon His own soul, upon His own body, the guilt for every sin that's ever been committed by every person sitting in this auditorium and outside of this auditorium and in the entire world.
You think of the worst, most heinous crime, Christ took the guilt and blamed for that upon His own soul. And as He hung there between Heaven and earth, every fiber of His flesh, every drop of His blood cried out, "Good news, good news." You've got nothing to hide. He took upon His own soul, upon His own body, the shame and the guilt that was intended for us so that we could run free, so that we could move toward what He created us to be, so that we could know the freedom He intended when He first created us. You want to be everything God created you to be, then live with nothing to prove and live with nothing to hide. Don't allow Satan to point his finger at you and cripple you with guilt because Jesus died on the cross to take your sin away, to take your guilt away. And if we could just trust him and get rid of that guilt, psychiatrists tell us we could empty our hospital beds.
Good news, you got nothing to hide. The final principle is this. You want to get all the gusto you can get out of life? Live with nothing to lose. Isn't it funny what we hang onto? What if God said to you today, what if He came to you today and said, "Follow me. I'm going to show you what I intended when you were born. Come with me." Would you be like me? My tendency would be, wait, my house. The story is told of a man who was driving his Mercedes and crashed it, rolled it, and it went down a ravine and burned at the bottom of the ravine. And in the process he was thrown clear, but his right arm was ripped completely from his body. And he stood looking into the ravine. When the police got there, he was weeping, "My Mercedes. I had $50,000 worth of options on my Mercedes." Well, he wasn't gesturing with that hand because it was gone. It was this hand he was gesturing.
And the police said, "You idiot, you need to come with us. You've been hurt." He said, "But I spent $50,000. I loved that car." And the police said, "Mister, your arm is gone." And he said, "Oh, no," and looked down for the first time. He said, "My Rolex, where's my Rolex?" And we laugh, and we laugh. But when you live with something to lose, when you hang on to what can never be yours forever, you lose the ability to be everything God created you to be. That's what made the Apostle Paul so amazing. There was nothing they could do to stop him. You stop preaching, we'll beat you up. Paul's attitude was, I count it a privilege to suffer for this Christ. In our country, we don't want to suffer for anything. We will avoid suffering at any cost. I count it a privilege to suffer for this Christ. Well, how confounded were his enemies, then?
They had a little meeting. We can't give him privileges. What are we going to do? One of them said, "Let's kill him." So they came back and said, "You stop preaching or we'll kill you." And Paul's philosophy about that was, for me to live is Christ. And if I die, I get promoted. And they got together in a little group and said, "Well, we can't promote him. What are we going to do?" They killed him. They killed the Apostle Paul thinking that they had just accomplished the best. They had stopped him in his tracks. But what they didn't see was what happened next. What they didn't see was when Paul ran to his father, and for the first time experienced a body without pain or hurt and saw God in all of His glory. Paul recognized he had nothing to lose.
I knew a young man one time who had bone cancer. He was dying of bone cancer. Had no hair, he was 22-years-old. Had a sweet wife and they'd given him a short time to live. We were sitting at lunch one day and he leaned across the table and he says, "What's wrong with you?" He said, "Why are you so sad?" He said, "Is it because I'm dying?" He said, "You think this is contagious?" He pointed to his bald head. I said, "I don't know if it's contagious." Sitting in the restaurant, he rubbed that bald head with both hands, and then leaped across the table and rubbed his hands on me and said, "It is contagious." People in the restaurant are looking at us. It's like we're crazy. He said, "It's because I'm dying, isn't it? That's why you act weird around me."
And he leaned across the table and he said the words that inspired this message. He said, "Ken, we're both dying." He said, "The only difference between you and me is that I have pretty good idea when I'm going to die." And then he leaned across one more time and he said these words that I will never forget them. He said, "And anyway, Ken, we got nothing to lose." 22-years-old. And he fought for life. He didn't just give up. But he also knew that if God chose to take him, that he was going to a better place and he had nothing to lose. And so you know what he did? Instead of going in a corner and whimpering and crying, he ministered until the day he died. Three women walked along a road, the air was thick with dust. They could barely see. They did not converse. Occasionally, they would stop and one would break into tears. They were on a mission, a horrible mission. They were about to touch and feel and smell the worst evidence a human can have, that evidence that a friend has died, is gone forever.
It was their friend Jesus. And they turned the corner as they got close to the graveyard, and a light began to glow. It was brighter than anything they'd ever seen before. And suddenly, the light penetrated the fog-like mist. And there they saw an angel sitting on the stone and the stone had been rolled away. And they were deathly afraid. And the angel said, "Why are you afraid?" He said, "Why do you seek the living among the dead? Why do you seek the gusto that God intended for your life where there is none?" Then he said these words, "The one you seek is not here."
How many of you know what the next three words are? I want you to say them with me. He is risen. Now I want you to say them like you believe them. He is risen. There's a basketball game going on right now. People are cheering. They're standing to their feet and yelling. And a hundred years from now, it won't make one bit of difference. But I want you to say it like it's greater than any basketball game that ever came on the face of the earth. Let me hear you. He is risen. Good news, good news.
Roger Marsh: Well, what a magnificent explanation of how excited and joyful we could be for the Lord. That was the conclusion of a two-part presentation from speaker Ken Davis here on Family Talk. To listen to any part of this presentation that you might've missed, or if you'd like to share it with a friend or family member, just visit drjamesdobson.org/familytalk. That's drjamesdobson.org/familytalk. And if you enjoy our programs here on Family Talk, you will love receiving the 2023 Broadcast Collection. It's a five-disc CD set, or a digital download, that will make a great addition to your home library. It also makes a great gift for a friend or loved one as well. We'll be happy to send you a copy as our way of thanking you for your gift of any amount in support of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.
And speaking of donations, we still have a matching grant in place this month. Thanks to some very special friends of our ministry, every dollar you donate will be matched dollar for dollar. So you can give a gift online and receive our 2023 broadcast collection as well. Go to drjamesdobson.org/2023, or just give us a call and a member of our customer care team will be happy to take care of you. 877-732-6825. I'm Roger Marsh, and on behalf of Dr. Dobson and the rest of our team here at Family Talk, thank you so much for listening. We hope that you have a festive and safe weekend leading up to Christmas Day, and may God continue to richly bless you and your family.
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