Beautiful home, lovely draperies, five vehicles, and I'm yelling at my wife every night because
of the stress, the treadmill, and the unrest that was in my life.
God woke me up.
I want to go into the heavenly kingdom with all of us together.
I want everyone, and I don't care what that costs me, I want to teach them about a God
that's always with you, that will never desert you, and I want you boys to know how to walk
with your God.
And I decided to give up the world for that, and I'm a rich man today.
Tonight I want to talk to you about a message that's in my fourth book, Come to the Quiet.
I don't know if you have it yet, but if God touches your heart with it, it's a message
that's very near and dear to my heart because all of us need this experience, brothers and
sisters.
And so I want to talk to you tonight about coming to the quiet.
There's a challenging statement in Hebrews chapter 4 verse 1, it says, let us therefore
fear.
Now when God tells us to fear about something, He's trying to get our attention, isn't
He?
And God says, let us therefore fear, lest they promise of entering into His rest.
Any of you should even seem to come short of it.
You know the devil is out to destroy our rest.
He doesn't want us to find the peace and rest that there is in Jesus Christ in all
places and at all times.
He's tried to steal my rest twice coming to this camp meeting.
Once it was when we came here flying here, we got to the airport and the flight was canceled.
It went down, couldn't get here.
And I'm standing there and the manager of Delta's looking at me and she says, what do
you want to do Mr. O'Neill?
We can fly in much later.
And I'm just saying, Lord, I don't want to go in later.
Can you touch this woman's heart?
And so she says, what would you like to do?
And I says, can you get me on a different airline?
They don't like to do that because they lose all their revenues.
So they booked me on a different airline.
Instead of flying through Salt Lake to get in here in the Sacramento, we flew up to Seattle.
And when we're sitting in Seattle, a lady comes walking over, sits down in front of
me, says, you're an author, aren't you?
And I says, well, yes.
She says, you wrote Escape to God, didn't you?
And I says, well, the Lord did, but my name's on the book.
And she says, I have been trying to find that book and I can't find it.
Do you have one with you?
And my wife starts going through her briefcase and yes, she did.
She says, do you have another one?
Well, yes, we do.
Do you have any other books?
She ended up getting six books.
The devil got a black eye.
He wanted to steal my rest by not getting us here and the Lord rerouted us.
Isn't God good?
And there's a tendency in that whole process to feel sorry for ourselves, but we don't
have to feel sorry for ourselves.
God is always and ultimately in charge of everything.
I know when Christian came to me, Christian that's running the video camera here, he
had set up four video cameras here to make this very professional and the equipment went
down.
It's brand new equipment.
It went down.
The board that they monitor, all these four cameras went down and they can only monitor
with one camera.
He says, what do you want to do?
I says, it's all right, Christian.
It's God's video.
It's not mine.
If we only have one camera, it's God's video, not mine.
He's in charge of everything.
The devil always wants to steal our rest in little things and big things.
He's out to steal your rest, brothers and sisters.
He's after your heart because if you don't have peace and don't have rest, you're not
trusting in God, are you?
And God wants you ultimately to trust in Him no matter what happens.
He's in charge.
So twice already at these meetings, I've had to find my rest in Jesus.
I said, excuse me, I'm going back up to my room and I just knelt down and said, Lord,
it's all right.
You're ultimately in charge.
You know, two painters, two artists were given a commission to paint their conception of
rest.
The first artist painted a picture of a mountain lake.
And on that mountain lake was a little log cabin with a little dock coming off, a little
smoke coming out.
When I first saw that picture, I said, yeah, I like that.
I can go up there and I can get a rest and I can relax, you know?
And then the second artist painted a very interesting picture.
He painted a picture of a waterfall coming down, a rushing torrent waterfall coming down
and at the end of the waterfall, a birch tree was leaning over and on the end of one of
those branches on the birch tree right over that torrent, a foaming water was a robin's
nest with the mother sitting peacefully at rest right over the torrent.
And I sat and I looked at those two pictures and at first my heart went out for the first
one because I said, yes, that's what I want.
But God was saying to me, that's dependent on a setting, Jim.
Is your rest dependent upon a setting?
Can you only get rest if you go to South Pacific Island, lay in a hammock and have your wife
feed your grapes and sip lemonade?
Or maybe the husband feeds the wife, right?
Whatever your conception of the rest is, is that the only way?
Because that's dependent upon a setting.
The first one really represents stagnation.
The second one represents true rest that no matter what is going on around you, God says
you can have my rest.
Which one do you want?
The second one.
Yeah, that's what I want.
The first one is attractive from a worldly standpoint, isn't it?
It's readily available if you've got the funds to do it.
But the second one was what Christ had when he came to this world.
And he wants to give it to each and every one of us.
You know, Christ's life outwardly was one of the most troubled lives that ever lived.
Tempest and tumult was his lot.
Trials and tribulations every time he turned around.
They hounded him.
They beat on him until his worn body was laid to rest in the grave.
But his inner life was a sea of glass at all times.
My great calm was never taken away from my Jesus.
At any moment you might have found him at rest.
You remember the story where Jesus had to get some extra rest from all the preaching
he was doing and he set out on a lake on a sail with his disciples and this great storm
comes up?
I mean, so much that the waves were overtaking the boat.
You have to remember that these disciples were professional fishermen.
They were accustomed to storms and big waves and hard times.
And so they started fighting the storm and they were paddling, they were bailing themselves
out and they finally came to the point that they were fearing their lives.
What was Jesus doing?
What was my Jesus doing?
He's at rest.
He's at rest.
And the disciples are so fearful they come up to Jesus and they say to Jesus in Matthew
8.25, you know, save us or we are going to perish.
They were afraid.
They were scared.
And then I read the words of Jesus that still astound me as I stand before you.
Jesus said to them, why are you fearful?
What?
Did you catch that?
I mean, here these men are in a storm that's going to take them down and they're dead men
and they've got wives and they've got children.
And Jesus says, why are you fearful?
That sounds like a stupid question, doesn't it?
What is God saying to those men?
Because Jesus wasn't playing a game and then He says this, oh ye of little faith, don't
you know that your life is in my hands and is in the Father's hand?
Are you trusting your whole salvation and your ability to paddle and your ability to
buck it up and your skills as fishermen and sailors?
Is that where your trust is or is your trust ultimately in me and my God?
Yeah.
It's quite a thought, isn't it?
Where is our trust?
Are we really Christians?
Are we experiencing this rest that is promised to each and every one of us?
Where are you in this process?
In your storm, in your trial, in the crisis that you're going through, because every place
I go in the world today, people are in a crisis.
There are different crises, but people all over are in all different kinds of crises
right now.
And I believe that process when I talk to people is to teach them how to have spiritual
rest in Jesus.
And God's allowing these things.
He's not causing them, but He's allowing them to come into our life to draw us to Him, that
we might find that ultimate peace and rest in God only.
Are you like the disciples following after Jesus, but experiencing no rest and no peace?
Do you believe that the Lord shall fight for you and you can hold your peace?
That's in Exodus 14, 14, you know.
It's quite a statement.
It says the Lord shall, shall, He's going to, God is with you, you can't earn this,
you can't merit this.
God says I will fight for you and ye shall what?
Hold your peace, rest in me.
It's quite a statement.
I call upon God quite often in my storms, because the storms come into my life.
I face disappointments and hard times and trials, and God reminds me quite often I'm
your God.
I'm going to fight for you.
I'm here with you.
I'm present.
Now are you going to trust in me?
Sometimes I've got to get on my knees and find that rest again.
Isaiah 26, 3 says, Thou shalt keep them in what?
Perfect peace.
Whose mind is?
State on thee.
Your mind is not to be on the storm or the trial or the crisis that you're on.
Your mind is to be state on God and God only, because we are to trust in Him.
God was with the disciples in the storm, but where were the disciples' minds?
Were they state on God or on the storm?
Where are your minds tonight?
Because a lot of you have come here with trials and difficulties.
The devil has taunted you, given you a hard time.
Where is your mind focused on?
Because this world is not fair, and what the world does to you or to your children or to
whatever is going on in your family or in life is not fair.
And it's not about being fair.
It's about finding rest in Jesus.
It wasn't fair that my Jesus had to come to this world and be put on a cross for me.
It's not about being fair.
What's happening to you is not fair.
It's not right, but that's not what it's about.
The world is waiting to see Christians that are rested in Jesus no matter what's happening
to them.
That's what God's calling us to.
This is what coming to the quiet is all about.
Sometimes the Lord calms the storms as He did for the disciples, but sometimes He lets
the storm rage and calms His child as He did Daniel in the lions den.
God didn't remove that child, did He?
But Daniel had perfect peace, didn't they?
How would you feel if you were going to be thrown down into a pit with those sharp jaws?
Would you be at rest?
Would you know that your God's with you?
Daniel didn't know what was going to happen, but God's presence went with Daniel, and when
God's presence is with you, the lions can't touch you.
The lions recognized God's presence and shut their mouths, and Daniel just trusted that
whatever God would do would be there.
There's a storm that's headed towards us, and it's not going to be calm, brothers and
sisters.
This world is getting pretty ugly that we live in, isn't it?
It's getting uglier all the time, and it's picking up momentum.
A dear friend of mine was realizing the storm that I was going through with my wife in the
ministry, and she came to me about five minutes before our sermon one day, just about ready
to go up in the pulpit, and she says, Jim, I was all praying, and the Lord showed me
that you were in the midst of a tornado, and as long as you stood in the eye of the tornado
and looked up and focused on Jesus, you're all right, but as soon as you turned one to
the left or you went to the right, you were sucked into the storm, or if you went out
ahead of God or you lagged behind God, you got sucked in the storm, but Jim, as long
as you stood there in the eye of the tornado and you looked heavenward, you were all right.
Five minutes before I go in the pulpit, I've never lost that thought because I've been
in that storm for two years now.
It's just getting to be a way of life, you know that?
And I'm finding rest in the eye of the tornado.
I used to pray, Lord, take the tornado away.
That's what I used to pray.
Now I just say thank you for keeping me in it because my rest is not dependent upon sunshine
and silver slippers.
It's not dependent upon a hammock on a South Pacific island.
It's dependent upon my God, and if I keep my focus on my God and I keep my connection
with my God in place through the choice that he's given me, they can do anything to me
and they can't steal my rest.
That's what God wants every one of us to have.
He wants you to experience this.
No matter what's happening to your grandchildren or your children or your marriage or your
health or your life, God says you can have this.
Jesus is saying to all of us, I can keep you in the eye of the storm.
Not just Jim Holmberger.
He's saying this to you, brothers and sisters.
He's speaking to you right now.
You can hear him speaking to you, can't you?
He's saying, I can.
Will you give it to me?
Will you turn that storm over to me?
You see, rest is not a holy feeling that comes over us in a church.
Rest is the repose of the heart said deep in God no matter what.
The Christian life from start to finish is based upon this principle of utter dependence
and rest in Jesus Christ.
That's why he's called not only our Lord, but our what?
Savior.
Yes.
To rest is simply to rest our whole weight in God.
I mean our whole load, our entire selves, our entire future, everything upon God.
There was two men that were going to go into the wilderness and do some canoe exploration
and they had to go through a number of lakes and a number of portages to get to those lakes.
One man was carrying a canoe on top and he had a pack on his back.
The other man had a huge pack on his back.
And as they got to the lake, the man that had the canoe on came to the lake and he sets
the canoe over into the lake and then he takes his pack off and he lays it in the bottom
of the canoe and he gets in his canoe.
And the man that was coming with him, his companion, gets in the canoe with his pack
on and sits down and his friend says, take the pack off.
He says, oh I don't think the canoe can hold me in the pack too.
Are you with me?
Which one are you?
Do you think God can't hold your problems?
You know we're all weighted down with headaches and problems, aren't we?
So you think God can only hold you or can he handle your load too?
God's saying to you, let the pack off.
Put it in the bottom of the canoe.
I'm strong enough to hold it all.
God and His great mercy will allow us to be tried in the areas that worry us the most.
That which holds us in bondage to ourselves, that might be your reputation.
It might be your comfortable lifestyle.
It might be the fear of man and what man can do to you or what man says to you or how he
can destroy your future or your employment.
It might be the acceptance of others or finances.
It might be your health or your occupation.
God wants all those things that worry us and control us and keep us from having a heart
completely at rest in Him to be laid in the canoe, brothers and sisters, laid on Jesus.
He's got big shoulders.
In Abraham's case, Isaac had taken a place in Abraham's heart that was reserved only
for God, only for God.
And God asked him to give his beloved son to him.
It's because God didn't want Isaac, God wanted Abraham.
Yeah.
God did not want Isaac.
He wanted all of Abraham and He wants all of you, brothers and sisters.
Is there anything in your life that occupies your thoughts all the time, that's constantly
going through your mind?
Is there any fear?
Is there any worry?
Is there any concern?
Is there anything that dominates and controls your decision-making process?
Maybe it's the acceptance of others, the expectations of others.
If there is, God will allow us to be tested and tried in that very area that's constantly
going around and around and around in your thoughts and your worries and your emotions.
You see, if there is, God is going to test you there.
He wants your gold purified of all dross.
And that's why He allows me to be tested.
There's still dross in Jim Honeberger.
Does that disappoint you?
Are you going to throw me out?
If you find a speck of dross in me or a lump of dross in me, are you going to throw Jim
Honeberger out?
No.
Pray for Jim Honeberger that in his refining process that the dross is burned out and the
gold is much brighter.
We're all going through it, brothers and sisters.
We all have quirks.
We all have imbalances.
Let us not throw each other out for our quirks and our imbalances.
Let us support each other in the furnace of fire that we're going through to have the
dross burned out.
That's what a Christian brother does to another.
A Christian brother, a brother is someone that's always there for you.
He may not agree with you.
He may not see things with you, but he's there for you as you go through your trial.
And we're all in these trials, aren't we?
Every one of us.
I know I am.
God's taken me deeper in burning my dross out.
The last couple of years have been the hardest years in my life.
The last two years that I've been through have been the hardest two years of my life.
I've been attacked from what I call frenemies.
You know what a frenemy is?
Did anybody here have any frenemies?
Have you ever heard that term before?
Frenemies?
I think I invented it.
It's someone that's a friend to your face and they're an enemy to your back.
And that hurts.
You know, if the world attacks you, that's one thing.
But when someone that's been a friend of yours, or supposed friend, begins to attack you personally
or your family or your message or your ministry or your books or your health, that is dross
burning, brothers and sisters, because there's something in us that want to defend ourselves.
We want to be seen in the right light.
We want to be right.
And God says, you don't need to do that, Jim.
Lay it down.
I've given you a work to do and it isn't to attack your frenemies.
It's to grow in grace and do my work and leave the frenemies to me because I love the frenemies.
I'm working on your frenemies' hearts.
I've died for your frenemies.
Now, don't attack your frenemies.
Not easy, is it?
It's easier to preach it than to live it.
I can tell you that.
They've tried to destroy us, tear us down and divide us.
I've had to give that to God though.
I've had to go to my knees and say, Lord, it's yours.
It's not my business.
You love these people.
Bless these people.
Bring them to you.
Bring them to the throne of grace.
Make it easy on them, not hard.
God will fight for your friends.
I've had to keep my eye looking up through the eye of that storm.
And boy, let me tell you, I am tempted.
I don't know if it's the full blood of German in me.
I'm tempted to get in the fight.
I don't know why.
Is it the German in me?
How many Germans are in that?
Oh, heaven help this place.
That many?
How many full blooded Germans?
My mother was wolfgrab.
I mean, I just like to get into it sometimes.
And God says, Jim, you don't need any more Hitler in you.
You need more Luther in you.
Are you with me?
God's trying to get the Hitler out of Jim Hohenberger and put more Luther in me.
So pray for me, would you, as God works with me.
But God, through this process, is setting Jim Hohenberger free.
Can you say, praise God?
I mean, through this process, he's setting me free.
They meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.
So I can say, praise God for my frenemies, because God is setting me free.
And that's wonderful.
I like to hug him and kiss him.
Or maybe I want to kiss the guys.
I'm serious, brothers and sisters.
I'm becoming free in my storm.
You know what a freedom that is?
God wants you free in the midst of your storm.
God wants us to rest everything in him, to come to the quiet.
Don't pray that the storm has taken away that stagnation like that first painter did, isn't
it?
But pray that you have that peace like that robin does on the end of that little branch
over all that forming torrent.
Pray that that's you.
That's real power.
That really speaks to me in my heart.
This is what Joseph found.
You remember what Joseph went through?
And we talk about a storm.
I don't know, but when I read the story of Joseph and he was sold out by his 11 brothers
into what?
Slavery.
And in those days, that was it.
When a slave came in, they worked him to the death and that was it.
And on his trip from that pit that they took him on and sold, they sold him out by their
own brothers.
That just makes me sick.
This man had to find rest on his way to Potiphar's house.
And then he became the best slave that there ever was in Egypt and he was rewarded by that
by turning everything over in Potiphar's house and then what happened?
What did he get for his reward?
This man stood for God and he was put in jail.
I'm sure he must have been tempted to give up and the throne of Talos say, what's the
use in this?
This God isn't with me, but God says I'm with you.
No matter what goes on, you can have rest, Joseph.
And so now Joseph is in jail and he finds what?
Total peace in God.
It was his training ground.
And when Joseph could go through that situation, now God brought him to the throne of Egypt.
What a God.
But what a training process.
And God's training a lot of you.
He's trying to hone my character too.
Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you, not as the world giveth I to you.
Let not your heart, is your heart troubled tonight?
What have you been thinking on for the last 24 hours?
For the last week if I could get into your mind and I could have it projected on a screen
behind me, what have you been thinking about?
What have you been worrying about?
What have you been fretting about?
What have you been moaning about?
It says what?
Don't let your heart be troubled.
Now then let it be afraid.
Come to me.
Joseph didn't let this trouble him.
Howard, would you have been troubled if you were sold into slavery?
Boy, what a test.
And this is what God is saying Christians are to have.
If Christians would have this, we would be the talk of the world.
People would flock to our church and say, what do you have?
I want it.
But we don't have it.
We're like the world.
We're at just as much unrest as the world is and we're trying to convert the world.
The world's coming in saying, you're just as bad as off as we are.
You don't have rest.
You don't have peace.
You've got your own trials.
You've got your own divorces.
Your children are leaving you.
You're moaning and groaning and the world's not impressed with Christianity and I don't
blame them.
We need a few more Josephs I would say.
And that's to be you brother and you and you and every one of you and me.
Not just preaching it brothers and sisters, but living it.
A real life experience.
The devil has said this.
The devil has said no.
No you're not going to find this rest.
I'm going to keep you from this quiet.
And God wants you to have your home.
God wants your home to become a refuge of quiet and rest and peace.
God wants your home to be that and he wants your heart to have that ultimate rest and
quiet and the devil says you're not going to find it.
And to keep you from doing this, the world has increased the amount of labor and work
required each week.
Thus stealing our time and keeping us on a treadmill that's going faster and faster and
faster.
How many on that treadmill here?
It's crazy isn't it?
Can I give you an example from my own life in 1976 back in Wisconsin.
I entered into the owning an insurance agency and sold auto insurance, homeowner's insurance,
health insurance, business insurance and life insurance.
When I entered in in 1976 just on the life insurance side, that was the most profitable
side.
If you sold a quarter million dollars of life insurance you got a trip.
It's called the All American Trip.
That was a big deal.
And then about four years after I was in the business, then instead of a quarter million
you had to sell a half a million.
And when I left the insurance business in 1984 and moved up to the mountains where I
was, it was one million dollars you had to sell in order to do the same thing.
And the amount of labor to accomplish things every, every year was going up.
And the company representative would come into your office and sit down and say this
is what you did in auto, home, health, life last year.
Now what are you going to do next year?
And they want more.
More production, more production, more production, more production.
Never once did they ever talk to me about the quality of my life.
Never once were they ever concerned about my marriage.
Never once were they ever concerned about my family.
It was more for corporate America.
Produce more, put out more, accomplish more, run on the treadmill, go, go, go.
That was their motto.
Their only concern was production.
That's the philosophy of corporate America.
It was the same as Pharaoh in Egypt with God's people.
He increased the amount of the bricks that had to be produced.
And then he took away the straw and he said do more with less.
And the world now as they're downsizing these corporations, the people that are remaining,
the Pharaohs are saying do more with less or you're out too.
Are you on that treadmill?
And it's serious.
Their philosophy is this.
You are expendable.
You are as the Egyptian slaves.
You are expendable.
I had a man come to me two weeks ago.
He was going through a divorce and a child custody suit.
And he said he went to his employer and he sat down with the owner of the company and
the owner of the company says forget it, just throw yourself into your occupation.
A lot of other people have lost their wives and children.
It's no big deal.
Go to your occupation.
This man by Mike is sitting in front of me because I know his employer.
I know his employer.
And he's saying Jim, what is going on?
I says it's no different than Pharaoh.
You're expendable.
It doesn't matter how hard they work or how hard they push you.
You're expendable.
You're like a part and we'll use you until you wear out.
Then we're going to get what?
A new part.
And each profession goes through it.
When I was checking out to come here on the flight that was canceled, the lady that I
was talking to, she says you know my husband at Delta lost his job at 9-11 when that occurred
in September.
And he says he's been looking for employment so he went into the real estate business and
joined one of the large names in real estate.
She says my husband's 50 years old.
He's been successful all his life.
Now he is required by that real estate company to record what he does every half an hour
from 6 a.m. until 10 p.m.
And I says you know what my sheet would look like?
6 a.m. cuddling with my wife.
6.30 praying to my Lord.
You know 7.30 at night cuddling with my wife.
Eight o'clock kissing my wife.
8.30 having family.
I mean this is crazy.
Is the world going to run your life?
Does that company really own this man from 6 a.m. until 10 p.m.?
You got to put down that you go potty three times a day?
I mean this is crazy and this is happening.
Corporate America is saying we own you, you're on our treadmill and you're going to listen
to it.
How many of you are experiencing that?
I mean it's going on.
It's real.
And this is crazy.
The devil is saying I'm going to steal your rest and I'm going to steal your peace.
The bottom line is you are here to support the system.
You are part of a mass production line.
Just play your part and keep your mouth shut.
My wife and I recognized this 20 years ago and we decided that we would challenge the
system and we'd use a little common sense with God's principles.
And God's principles are eternal brothers and sisters.
That's why God's word is here.
By the way I have this open to my favorite Psalm.
You know what it is?
Psalm 91.
He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide in the shadow of the
Almighty.
We said no.
God's eternal principles are the blueprint for living, not corporate America.
Twenty years ago we said we'll be albino squirrels.
You know what that means?
We had an albino squirrel living behind our house in Cheyenne, Wisconsin.
Beautiful thing.
Have you ever seen an albino squirrel?
They're just beautiful white, pink eyes, pink nose, just a beautiful little creature.
When every day when that albino squirrel would come to the feeder, its own siblings and its
own parents would have nothing to do with it.
It would be chased away because it was different.
So twenty years ago Sal and I said we're going to be different.
We're not going to go the way the rest of the world's going.
We're not going to go the way the rest of the Christian churches are going to go.
We're going to be that albino squirrels.
We recognized that we fell short of Hebrews 4.1.
Let us fear unless we enter into this rest.
We didn't have this rest in our life.
Just as you all know, you fall short of it too.
You see Satan and the system had crowded out that which we needed by that which we did
not need and falsely called its success.
We got ahead materially but we were behind spiritually.
People were proud of us because we had all the toys.
I had five vehicles.
Would you tell me what anybody needs with five vehicles?
Come on, anybody out here with five vehicles?
Anybody have more than five vehicles?
Franklin, how many do you have?
Franklin, Franklin, how many do you have?
Six.
What, six?
Are you serious?
Can you drive six vehicles at once?
No.
What does a man need with six pieces of iron?
You're his wife, Kathy.
Would you tell me what he needs with six pieces of iron?
I need six.
She doesn't know either.
I didn't know what I needed.
How many of you guys got five, three, four, five vehicles?
I mean it's crazy.
When I was raised, come on tell me if I'm wrong, I'm 55 years old, all right?
When I was raised we had one car garages.
One car garages, period.
If somebody had a second vehicle he was considered what?
Unfortunate.
Franklin doesn't mind me picking up, do you Franklin?
No, okay.
He'll get me later I guess.
We had a bigger house with more conveniences but we had less time, no quiet and no rest.
You should have seen our house.
It was a beautiful 3,000 square foot, all logs, cedar home, all draped up with a beautiful
draperies.
My wife had all the curio cabinets.
We had the best Ethan Allen furniture you ever saw but we had no peace and no rest.
I'd come home at night because I was stressed out making the money to pay this mortgage.
My wife would say, so what kind of day did you have at work?
I said, anybody call?
Yes.
I said, who?
Mr. Smith, what do you want?
I don't know.
Why don't you know?
I didn't ask him, why didn't you ask him?
Beautiful home, lovely draperies, five vehicles and I'm yelling at my wife every night because
of the stress, the treadmill and the unrest that was in my life.
Was I a rich man or a poor man?
Yeah.
Have you bought into the system, brothers and sisters?
We had acquired college degrees but we had less common sense.
How do you like that?
You know, if I was going to take over the colleges of America today, you know what I
would require?
I'd require that there be a course taught in common sense and I would not be able to
find anybody to teach it.
And I'm serious.
I'm serious.
We multiplied our possessions but reduced our inner values.
When we had a rummage sale to move out to where we want, you talk about multiplying our
possessions, in our one rummage sale we made over $10,000 on our junk.
Now that's ridiculous but our inner values were lacking, brothers and sisters.
I did not treat my wife like a queen.
I mean the manner that I treat my wife, I almost want to cry when I stand before you.
That was a girl in my dreams.
That was the little Sally that I drew little hearts on, you know, in college and put little
arrows through and tell her I love you the rest of my life.
I'll tell you the way I treated her after I got out of college, I'm sad.
God woke me up.
How are you guys treating your wives?
That tells me whether you're a Christian or not.
Don't come to me and quote to me your scriptures and tell me you know the word of God and then
go home and treat your wife like dirt.
That's hypocrisy.
A man is not a Christian because he knows God's word.
A man is a Christian because he treats his wife like a queen.
A man is a Christian because he lives the word, not doesn't know it.
They didn't hate Jesus Christ because he knew the truth.
They hated Jesus Christ because he lived the truth.
What a difference.
And God wants to, the devil wants to keep you from that experience brothers and sisters.
We'd watch TV too much but read our Bibles too seldom.
We'd stay up too late then get up too tired to connect with God.
Yeah.
That was our life.
We learned how to make a living but we didn't have a life.
We had higher incomes but lower standards.
We had more acquaintances but fewer friends.
I'm shocked at the shallowness of friendships today.
I had a man call me two weeks ago from back home that I've known for years and he says,
Jim, do you know that so and so has got a divorce?
And I said, no.
He says, what troubles me is I've been meeting with this man.
He's my best friend.
I've been meeting with him for 30 years every day at a restaurant.
And I saw his divorce in the newspaper.
I called his wife.
She says, we've been divorced a year.
A year.
I said, what do you guys talk about?
Golf?
Football?
The man's his best friend.
He sees him five days a week and did not even, could not even detect this man was going through
a divorce.
Forget if the man told, didn't tell him about it or not.
You should be able to know if there's something wrong with your friend.
I had friendships like that.
Shallow acquaintances.
That's sad.
We were long on quantity and short on quality and God woke us up.
We said everything else will be expendable.
We are going to be albino squirrels.
And I don't know if God is calling you to be an albino squirrel at night, but we've
got to change some patterns in our life, brothers and sisters.
Seriously.
We've got to change some patterns.
So we decided we'd go counterculture.
We'd go against what corporate America said.
We went against how we were raised as a family and we went against what the Christian churches
were doing.
This is God called people out of Egypt.
He said to Jim and Sally, he says, come yourselves apart and rest a while in a quiet place.
To us that quiet place became the wilderness setting in Montana where we presently reside.
Now we're not calling you to the wilderness.
That's not our place.
We are calling you to a wilderness experience though, resting in God.
Everybody can have that, whether you're living in the city or you're out in the wilderness.
God wants you to find this experience.
For you, it might simply be trimming your present schedule in order to redeem your time.
What does God think of your overpressed schedules?
I mean honestly, are you in control of your life?
If you say you're a Christian, that means you are under the control of God.
God's in charge of that.
If you took your present schedule for the last 30 days and you brought it to God, just
like Nicodemus had an interview with God at night, and you set it down before God, what
would God say about your schedule?
Would he say you're in charge?
Would he say corporate America's running you or you're following my program?
No are you a Christian or aren't you?
Because a Christian follows God no matter what.
So for you it might be trimming your schedule.
It might be a change of occupation or less commitment to your present occupation.
I had a man come up to me that was a surgeon.
He said, Jim you don't understand.
I just have to work six days a week.
I said, you do?
Why?
How much money do you make?
He said, well you're getting a little personal.
I said, how much money do you make?
He says, about a half a million dollars an hour a year.
I said, you think you could live on a quarter million?
I just gain you three days a week.
Some of you people laugh, but that's real isn't it?
That is real.
There is a decision that you're going to have to make.
If you're going to give yourself to God and your wife and your children, there's going
to be a cost.
Whatever you like to have that problem with, half a million dollars a year, know you want.
Know you want because there's a price tag that comes with it.
It might be a smaller home and getting out in debt and getting the country.
Has God asked you to have that 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 square foot home?
Have any of you ever visited the Waldenzing Valley up in Italy where God's people stood
for the Lord for 1,200 years?
If you could see the homes that they lived in, little square rock huts with barely even
windows, they were about 12 feet by about 20 feet.
We think we've got to live the way we live.
God may be saying to you to get your quiet and rest and get your mortgage down, to regain
your time, to pour it into your wife and your children, you may have to downsize.
Not just your occupation, you may have to downsize your home.
There's nothing wrong with that.
I live in a 960 square foot log home.
Nobody feels sorry for me.
I don't feel sorry.
I'm happy.
I'm contented.
God may be saying to you, you've got to make some changes.
It might mean cutting back on your overcommitment and the expectations of others or your overstimulated
lives or it may be all of these things.
Whatever it is, it means your home must become a place of quiet, rest and refuge for you.
Your home, where you're living now, not waiting until you get out someplace, but where you're
living now must become that quiet place.
You must find a refuge from the plague of evil that's destroying almost every marriage
and family in America today, even the Christians.
Your home must be a refuge from the insanity of living a life as everyone else's on the
giant treadmill, overcommitment, overstimulated, overstressed.
People come up to me and say, I can't hear God talking to me.
I've read your first book, Escape to God, and you talk about listening to God and letting
God guide you.
I can never hear God.
And I say, how fast are you going on the treadmill?
Some people say, well, I'm going five miles an hour.
Other people tell me they're going 10 miles an hour.
One man told me, I'm on two treadmills going at the same time.
I said, I couldn't hear God either.
All I could do is hang on.
Yeah.
Who are you?
Now, don't come in and tell me you're on three treadmills.
God wants to guide your life.
He wants to be with you.
Are you letting Him?
Are you going to let Him?
At all costs, gentlemen and ladies, we must make our home a refuge from the raging storm
all about us.
It's consuming us, it's destroying our marriages and stealing our youth, and this is a challenge
and a formidable one.
We had a lady visiting our home about six months ago, and she was there for about three
days.
And she was quite a successful lady.
We were able to talk about a lot of things.
I'll never forget the night that she left.
She walked off our back porch, and as she's walking down the porch, she stopped, and she
just started crying.
And she says, I don't want to leave the peace of this home.
And she wasn't just talking about a wilderness setting.
When she came into our home, she sensed the presence of God in that home, and she experienced
it for three continuous days.
And she just started weeping.
She says, I don't want to leave the quietness and the rest and the peace that I found here.
Friends, this must be made a priority of your life, a priority.
You must put this first.
The second point, Psalms 91 verse 2, it says, I will save the Lord.
He is my refuge.
God is my fortress.
My God and Him will I trust.
You see, your home provides a setting for your heart to find ultimate rest and quiet
in God, because someday you may be taken off into the jail like Joseph, and you may not
have a home of quiet refuge.
But now your home provides a setting for you to find this in God.
That's what your home is supposed to be.
When your children come home, when the spouse comes home, you are to find that quiet refuge
in God.
That is, be still and know that I'm your God.
And when you go home, you should be able to go home and be still and know that He's God.
That is to be your experience, because God is our ultimate refuge.
It is in Him that true quiet and rest is obtained.
This became our priority 20 years ago in our life.
Our home became a refuge so that our heart could find lasting refuge in God.
And today we have both of those, brothers and sisters.
When I go home, it's restful.
My God is there.
I can sense His presence, and it's not stolen in the midst of my home.
It allows me to go deeper with God.
Your home is supposed to be that.
Seldom do you gain one without gaining the other.
That's why the devil has turned your home in the Grand Central Station.
That's why the devil has you on the treadmill.
That's why your phone has become a central dispatch, throwing everybody out as independent
atoms in different directions.
He knows that if your base camp is out of order, your heart work will languish.
And so the devil is out to destroy your base camp and keep it out of order.
Finding the spiritual rest in Jesus must become the priority of our lives.
Jeremiah said, well, in 29 verse 13, he says, you shall seek me and find me when you search
for me with everything.
I mean, it doesn't say part of your heart.
It doesn't say a little effort.
It doesn't say effort once a week.
It says all your heart.
Go for it.
God is good.
He's everything.
The world is nothing.
Solomon, if I can paraphrase Solomon, he said it this way.
All is vanity, but oneness with God.
Everything.
I gave him my five vehicles, Franklin, and my 3,000 square foot home so I could find
what?
Oneness with God.
I'm at rest in my storm.
I'm at rest.
I never thought I could have this kind of rest going through the turmoil that we've
gone through.
My God's good.
My God, you know what value that is?
If you could sell that in the open market, they'd pay billions of dollars.
Billionaires would try to buy it from you, but it's free.
It's free, but it costs you everything.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It costs you everything.
Absolutely everything.
You see, when Solomon set his heart on the greatness of his kingdom, on the number of
his wives, on his influence with surrounding nations, on his wealth and status, he lost
it all.
Every bit of it.
The wisest man that ever lived, the man that said all is vanity, but oneness with God,
he lost it all for temporarily.
He had to come back to it.
If you haven't found this oneness with God, whereby you sense his presence daily, and
you're moved by his spirit continually, and you live by his words always, I suggest you
re-prioritize your life now.
That's why you've come to these meetings.
That's what this message of come to the quiet is about.
Isaiah 30, 15 says, in returning, in returning to your God, in returning and resting in him,
shall you be saved.
In quietness and confidence shall be your strength.
You see, God is calling all of us to return to the rest that is rightfully ours in Jesus
Christ.
Jesus' home life was a life of rest.
Do you know why Jesus' life for 30 years was quiet, peaceful?
Not much is said about Jesus' first 30 years, because that's what you're supposed to find.
We all talk about Jesus' three and a half years of active labor, don't we?
Where he was out there, he was in trial and persecuted, he was pushed around, they were
on his case constantly, but to set him up, to qualify him, to put him in the right position,
he had a home life that was at rest for 30 quiet years, so that he could finally carry
out his duty.
God is calling us to do that same.
We are to look at Jesus, for example, not any man.
When I looked at Jesus 30 quiet years, I said, I want a home life like that.
I want to qualify my life for whatever God has for me.
So 20 years ago, and we're not the example, Jesus is the example, we went to the wilderness
of Montana.
And I'm not calling you to the wilderness of Montana, I'm calling you to a wilderness
experience in your life, but we went to where we could see the Rocky Mountains, where we
could look out on nothing that was manmade.
It's beautiful, brothers and sisters.
I can look out and see the hand of God right in front of my house, constantly.
We got a creek running through the property with a gravity flow spring.
And what I really like is we became friends with the animals.
We have pet deer, and when we go outside, when my wife goes outside now, about a dozen
deer come running out of the woods to her.
We don't have these animals caged up or harnessed or anything.
It's beautiful watching my wife go out the front door, and she calls to her friends,
and the deer come running to her.
She can have bucks out there with great big racks on them.
She can have the doles.
She can have the fawns, and these deer come to us.
You know what that's like?
We got a pet bear.
Pet bear.
The name was Lonesome.
And he comes.
I get up in the morning, he's laying on the back doorstep.
Yeah.
That's a little bit of heaven.
When one of the squirrel mothers died and left three orphaned squirrels, my sons took
in those three squirrels.
Have you ever lived in a house with three squirrels?
I mean, but it's a little bit of heaven.
They'd feed them little eye droppers, and they became our great friends, and we released
them.
When a bunny rabbit we found in the woods, we took it into the house.
We have the moose and the elk come in our backyard.
When I go home, it's restful.
That's why I wanted the scene of nature behind me.
God's nature.
Why does everybody for a vacation go where?
Do they go to the city?
Or do they go to Glacier Park and Yosemite and Yellowstone and the great places of nature?
Yeah.
Because there's something that's waiting for you.
We went there 50 miles from power and telephone.
We learned to live a simple life.
Just a simple quiet life where our family just comes together.
Each one of us found a walk with God there.
And we healed there, we grew there, and we came to know each other.
You know what it's like to know each other?
I mean to really know your wife, really know your husband, really know your children, to
play with each other.
Family to us became a way of life.
Did you catch that?
Family became a way of life, and we found a way of integrating God into the midst of
our family.
That was our focus.
As we were leaving here, I asked my wife, she got a Mother's Day.
You know Mother's Day is Sunday, right?
My mother got, Sally got a Mother's Day card from one of her sons.
And I kind of like what he wrote in this, and I know it wasn't Mother's Day yet.
And this son, Andrew, he's 24 years old now.
He's got a wife.
And by the way, I'm going to be grandpa.
You know that?
Have you heard that?
You know what it's like?
They got an ultrasound the other day.
You know at first, well I'll just say, it's going to be a boy.
It's going to be, I'm going to be grandpa.
I've got an opportunity now, not just to have raised two boys to know God and walk with
God, now I've got an opportunity to take those little ones and start over again with my children
and tell them about my God and tell them the stories of what God's done in my life.
Tell them how God got me out of all my troubles.
It's time to have little kids.
I can take them out canoeing.
I can take them out walking and say, can I tell you about my God?
His name is going to be Landon James.
Landon James is going to find out all about God, not just from his father and his mother,
but from his grandpa.
Here's what Andrew wrote to his mother.
We went there for a reason.
One of the reasons was not just to work together and play together, but to learn to love each
other.
My wife read this.
Her eyes got red, didn't they honey?
She cried.
Here's a mother, it's just simple, but he writes and of course you got all the commercial
writing which is nice and I appreciate that, but this is what it means.
This is what I want to read.
I want to go right by the front part.
This is good.
They buy it with a purposeful.
I want to get down to this.
His wife wrote in here and he wrote in here.
This is her 24-year-old little baby.
Thank you so much for being such, I suppose I should have my glasses, shouldn't I?
Thank you so, oh you want to read this honey?
Come here, come here, you read this.
You cry, huh?
I like this.
Can I use your glasses?
You want me to?
I'll read it otherwise if you want.
I can't read your glasses.
Let me read it then.
All right, read or read that.
Stand close.
Do you like my wife?
No problem.
This is good.
Do you like my wife?
This is my queen.
I like her.
She's a...
Mother, thank you so much for being such a dedicated mother.
There is a lot you could have done to do instead of putting up with a difficult child.
And he was.
I'm just going to be honest with you.
My mother says I hope you get one just like yourself.
I got two of them.
And these were not easy boys.
I mean they gave us a hard run for our money, didn't they?
Couple times my wife says I give up.
I'm done.
I'm finished.
Someone else can raise my kids better than I.
Couple times she just threw in the towel and I said well we're going to die trying, honey.
But it finally came around.
It really did.
So if you're a frustrated mother, if you get... I've seen some kids come out of the womb
and they're just lovely kids.
What can I do for you?
I'm not a mommy, no mommy.
Whatever I can do.
Other kids come out questioned right from the start.
We got two of them.
This is one of them.
Your commitment to your children should have gone down in the book of World Records.
This special day is set aside to tell all mothers, but especially those who have been
the best of mothers, which you definitely have been.
I love you and look forward to what the future brings.
Love, Andrew.
Thank you.
Yeah.
And she was a dedicated mother to brothers and sisters.
I mean I watched my wife.
She's got two boys that really love her today.
When a lot of mothers, the kids are just gone in the world.
And we went there for a purpose.
And God wants to call you to a purpose too.
He really does.
He wants you to experience children that really love you, that are really by your side, that
really care.
And we're experiencing that.
We don't have any regrets.
We've changed some things, but we have no regrets, do we?
No regrets.
My other son, Matthew, we stopped at his office on the way here and he gave Sally her Mother's
Day card.
And I couldn't help getting into it right away.
And he drew something in there that I want to make our family crest.
I wish I would have brought that along.
But he drew, see we got six in our family now with a grandchild on the way.
But he drew, he put a heart here and a heart intertwined with that and he put Jim and Sally.
And then to the side of it he had two other hearts coming out that were intertwined saying
Matthew and Andrew, those are our two children's names.
And then he had two more hearts saying their wives' names, Angela and Sarah.
And it was just a beautiful crest that he interwoven.
And I said, doesn't that express it?
Because all six of us, our hearts are interwoven.
I have no regrets for the last 20 years.
And pretty soon, Landon James is going to be there.
And I hope I get a little girl too, a little granddaughter.
And I want to stand before the heavenly kingdom someday brothers and sisters.
And I want to say look at my God as I stand before the throne of grace and say you did
it all for me.
Because I followed you, here's my wife.
And holding her hand is Matthew.
And holding his hand is Andrew and their wives and our grandchildren.
I want to go into the heavenly kingdom with all of us together.
I want everyone, and I don't care what that costs me.
I don't care if I've got to give up my five vehicles.
I don't care if I've got to give up a 3,000 square foot home.
I don't care what it takes, what it costs me.
I want my family together and I know it takes time.
It takes time to sit down with my boys every night from 6.30 to 8 o'clock and to discuss
their little worries and their problems.
It takes time to take their hand during the day and walk with them and kneel with them
and pray with them.
I don't want to just send them to college.
I want to take them to the throne of grace.
I want to teach them about a God that's always with you that will never desert you.
And I want you boys to know how to walk with your God.
And I decided to give up the world for that and I'm a rich man today.
And that's what it means to come to the quiet brothers and sisters.
God is calling you to make those commitments.
God wants your home to be a refuge for Him.
He wants that quiet and peace in your home so that your hearts can ultimately experience
this and what you've got to do is re-prioritize what's most important to you.
Twenty years ago we wrote our priority list.
We re-prioritized.
It was God, it was our marriage, it was our family and then occupation.
And we've never veered from that in twenty years.
And it's paid off.
It's paid off.
We had to re-prioritize our life and then we had to schedule into that our priorities.
We made a schedule and we said we are going to follow this no matter what.
And we scheduled in family.
Family became a way of life for us.
And then we said no to all the rest.
You know what people told us?
You're crazy.
You're nuts.
You've gone berserk.
No, we're not crazy and we're not nuts.
They're crazy.
They're nuts.
You take a look at the condition of the world and the church and tell them, you tell me
what you see.
I see a world that's crying to see real Christians living it.
I see the Christian people that are crying to find a real Christian experience.
Because their marriages and their divorces are just the same as the world.
We're not crazy brothers and sisters.
It works.
It's God's principles.
And I want to see it come into your life.
I want you to begin to experience that.
You either run your life or life runs you.
We decided 20 years ago what we were going to do and by God's grace you can do the
same.
Would you kneel with me in prayer?
Father, there is a place of quiet rest and is near to your heart.
Every one of us have access to it Lord, but there's so many stumbling blocks and pitfalls
along the way.
The devil wants to steal from each and every one of us.
I don't know what you're saying to my brothers and sisters, but I know you're saying come.
Come to me.
Let go of everything else.
Give me your heart.
I've got peace.
I've got rest for you.
Give the rest up.
It's not worth it.
Whatever it costs you, lay it down.
God's the only security in this dark world.
He's the only peace.
He's the only rest.
Give up everything else and find that rest in God.
May God help us find it.
It's our prayer in Jesus' name.
Amen.
brothers and sisters.
But if you want it, it's in here.
It's in the book presently.
Before I start the message tonight, which I call We Are Family, I just thought I'd share
something with you.
You know, I don't love my wife.
You know that?
Now you may find that hard to understand, but I don't love her.
I'm in love with her.
Do you know the difference, gentlemen?
I mean when she walks in the room, I take notice.
And if I can do anything for her, you thought I pursued her when I was courting her.
You ought to see me pursue her now.
I mean your love for your wife can grow even more, and she's in love with me.
And I don't just mean physically, gentlemen.
I mean emotionally.
I mean spiritually.
I mean personally.
She's the love of my life.
The other day on my desk, a couple weeks ago, she just had this sitting, and she says, it's
got a little stamp on here.
It says, cute stuff.
Love you.
Hug you.
And I said, this is the best husband for 2004, and I thought, this is going to be interesting.
And so I opened it, and it's got a cute little bear on here with his hands out, you know,
cute little cuddly bear.
And it says, bet you could use a hug.
I could always use one.
And so then I opened it up here, and she's got her own little personal writing in here.
Over on this side, she's got this cute little dog with this little flower in his mouth,
this cute little thing, you know, like saying, I love you, saying, here I am for you.
Do you need some practice hugging?
Here I am.
Do you need some snuggle time?
Here I am.
Do you need someone to read to you?
Here I am.
And she just loves me.
And that's what we're going to talk about tonight.
How you bring that.
We've been married 32 years, by the way, and we're 55 years old, and we have a love relationship
that's going on like nobody else has.
And that can be you, brothers.
You want to pass this?
You want to see it?
You want to pass it around?
Just make sure I get it back, all right?
No one take it home and give it to their wives, all right?
It comes to whoever ends up with this, this comes back to me.
Thank you.
And I just want to start with that because what we are sharing with you as real brothers
and sisters, we don't share anything with you that we are not experiencing ourselves.
This can be your life.
This can be your life.
I want this to be your life.
God wants this to be your life.
God wants you not to go to heaven to experience heaven.
God wants you to experience heaven on earth.
You don't have to die and go to heaven.
You can have a little bit of heaven here.
And that's my desire for each and every one of you.
That's why I do this work.
I do this work to help you find what others have found.
And that's why we put on these meetings.
And so I'm going to start the meeting tonight from the last statement in the Old Testament.
It's quite a statement in the Old Testament.
It's found in Malachi.
It says, he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children.
Where does God begin?
God goes to a man and says, I want your heart.
I want to turn your heart to your children.
I want you to fall in love with your children.
I want you to live for your children.
I want you to make your family and your children the priority of your life.
Will you do it, gentlemen?
It's called the Malachi movement.
God's saying to you, before I return, I'm going to turn your gentleman's hearts to your
children's.
Then their hearts are going to be turned to your hearts.
And that's the way it works.
God says in the last days, families are going to be together.
They're going to be tight.
There's going to be a oneness in the family.
There's going to be a togetherness that you can experience that's real.
I have that in my family.
I'm experiencing that.
My boys are 24 and 26.
I want you to experience it in your family.
But 20 years ago, before Sal and I moved to the mountains of Montana to put this in order,
we recognized that this was not in our family at that time.
Our children were age four and six at the time.
And as we looked at society and the Christian churches, we did not like what we saw.
And I'm being honest with you.
Children and parents seem to be forming separate lives while living under the same roof.
Is that you?
Are you living separate lives while actually under the same roof?
Parents were not overly in love with each other or close with their children.
I couldn't believe what I saw.
And I expected to see that in the world.
I did not expect that to see that in the Christian churches, but we did.
Many were divorcing.
The ones that were not divorcing, they were dejected, depressed, or they looked defeated
in their marriages and their families.
I said, is this God's church?
Is this the Christian church of today?
And most children were turning out slothful, worldly, foolish, and unprepared for life.
And I'm not downing these children.
These children are only a product of our societies and families today.
I want to take all those children home with me, and I want to love them up.
But I can't do that, so you've got to do it, brothers and sisters.
And saddest of all, these children, and it breaks my heart to say this, were unprepared
for the heavenly kingdom.
Our youth today are not ready to go in the kingdom of heaven.
They are totally unprepared.
Society has gone amok, and the church is right behind it.
And the church feels good because it isn't quite as bad as the world.
But brothers and sisters, the world is sliding down, and the church is sliding down behind
the world.
And then the world slides down a little bit further.
You know what the church does?
Slides it down a little bit further.
It just stays a little bit better than the world.
But if you go back 20 years and compare the church of today, it's worse than the world
was back 20 years ago.
We're sliding right with it.
We're going right down with it.
But we say we're a little bit better than it.
I mean, let's wake up.
Let's take a look at what's honestly happening.
Well, scariest of all was that the same slow, insidious process was happening in my home,
and was happening in my marriage, and was happening in my family.
I wasn't just critically looking at the world and the church.
I took a look back in the mirror at our family, and I saw the same process going on with Jim
and Sally.
And so we decided to take drastic steps.
We decided we would reprioritize our entire life.
I mean everything.
Reprioritize all of it.
Now, we are not the example.
What I'm going to share with you tonight is not the example.
There is one example, though, isn't there?
And that's our Lord Jesus Christ.
And we're here to point you to Him.
We're not here to point you to us.
Don't follow us.
We're following Him.
If we can do anything, we're trying to say, hey, follow Him.
Get out of the way.
Don't look at us.
But I speak from personal experience a lot.
And so if you can gain something from my personal experience, then God maybe can be glorified.
Okay?
Revelation says that they overcame by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony.
And so I want to give to you our testimony of how we became a family.
I was scared to death when I went out into the wilderness.
A lot of people thought this was going to be a picnic.
I didn't have the slightest idea how I was going to carry this thing out.
There weren't any books available.
There weren't any tapes.
There weren't any families out there talking about it.
I did not know what we were going to do.
But when we got to the wilderness, I had had so much stress from the relocation and so
much stress from the life that I was living in, I came down with double pneumonia.
I could barely get off of the couch and walk to the bathroom without just gasping for air.
I was down for about three months.
And during that three months being laid down, I found myself on the couch most all day long.
And one evening I was just laying on the couch and my youngest son, Andrew, crawled up behind
the couch.
And you know how little boys, they just like to have some fun, don't they?
They just want to play a little bit.
And so he crawls up behind the couch and he gets on the top of the couch, you know, and
I'm just laying there and I just played like I didn't see him.
And then he faked like he fell on me.
And when he fell on me, I started tickling his little ribs, you know.
You could hear him squealing and peeling and laughing and giggling, you know, and he'd
roll off.
Well, his brother sees this and so he climbs up behind the couch and so I just play like
I'm sleeping.
You know how the game goes, don't you?
And then he would roll down on the couch, you know, on top of me.
And if you go in the Rocky Mountains, you can still hear the echoes of those boys and
it's bouncing around the mountains yet.
You go up there and try it.
And you know that the boys never knew that their father could be so much fun.
And I'm sitting here.
All I've got to do is concentrate on how we're going to become a family.
And God right now is telling me, Jim, all things work together for good for those that
love the Lord.
And I'm saying my sickness, my illness was a tool that God used to begin to show me how
to have innocent play and fun with my boys.
My boys never knew I could be such a great playmate.
Isn't that something?
Are you, gentlemen, are you being called to do the same thing?
Does He have a purpose in your life here tonight for you to do with your children?
They may not be four and six.
They may be 40 years old.
They may be 14 years old.
It doesn't matter.
The principles will work regardless of what their age is.
Well, that was the beginning of Malachi 4.6.
And for weeks we would play what we called couch tickle.
And our hearts started bonding together.
It was just that simple.
No TV.
Still don't own no TV.
We haven't had a TV for 20 years.
No videos.
No amusement parks.
No sports.
No toys.
Just innocent play.
And my boys absolutely thrived on it.
Well, I recovered from the stress and the push and the treadmill.
You know, the pneumonia was only a symptom of the real problem I had.
It wasn't the real problem.
And as I sat there and I recovered, I vowed as I saw my boys come to life that I'd never
seen them come to life before after four to six years of living with them.
I vowed right then and there, Lord, I will give my boys family time every night the rest
of my life from 6.30 until 8 o'clock.
I vowed before God because I saw the life come out of them.
It was just that simple.
It wasn't any more complicated.
Well, Couch Tickle turned into Couch Tag.
We had two couches.
And now I had some energy in me.
And so we had this little game where the person that was it would stand between the two couches.
And we'd have to get to the other couch without being tagged.
And the boys loved this silly little game.
And we played every night for an hour and a half.
Mother would join in, you know, and we'd be jumping from couch to back to couch.
And somebody was it and they would have to take over.
And we had a blast.
It was fun.
Nothing that we bought at ShopCo or Wal-Mart.
We didn't go to Disneyland.
We didn't watch anything.
We just played Couch Tag now.
You know, I started to be a kid again.
You know what that's like?
When you go from a businessman, a successful businessman, and you learn how to be a kid
and laugh again, it was wonderful for me and for them.
It freed us from freed me from the overstress of life.
It freed me to actually enjoy my family.
And I am shocked when I see so few men that don't know how to enjoy their family.
It's freed me to finally be a real companion to my boys.
Now I was becoming a rich man.
Before I had monetary riches, now I had heart richness.
My heart was starting to fill for my children.
I was freed to enter into the sweetness and innocence of childhood.
They had a great time.
I found out that all they ever wanted was what?
Me.
It's all my boys ever wanted.
Every day, me.
I was shocked at what such a great time they had.
And I have had a chance to implement this in other places that I've gone.
Sal and I were visiting another state, and the husband and wife were visiting the house,
and they had a couple of boys, and they were all playing.
There was about a seven-year-old girl, and she was out playing on her trampoline.
And she was just playing by herself.
And I said, honey, I'm going to go out and just play with her a little bit.
I kind of miss my boys.
So I went on the trampoline.
She kind of saw me, and I got up on the trampoline.
She was kind of like, shock.
What's an adult doing on this trampoline?
And I started bouncing around with her, and I'd hold her little hands, and we'd bounce
around together.
And then I faked like I fell down.
And she was bouncing all around me.
So I'd reach out for her ankle and grab it and pull her down by me.
She'd try to crawl away.
And she'd bounce around me, and I'd pull her ankle again, and she'd fall down by me,
and she'd try to crawl away.
And her and I played that game for about an hour.
And then the father came out and says, will you two come in for family worship?
And so when we came in for family worship, this little girl, you know where she wanted
to sit?
Remember, I met her for one hour now.
I've only been with her one hour, and she wanted to sit right by my side.
And she didn't want to sit right by my side.
She was under my wing, brothers and sisters.
This little girl was under my wing in one hour.
I had her heart.
One hour.
I've always wanted a daughter, you know.
And you know where she sat the next morning when we had a morning meal together?
She moved her chair where?
Right next to my chair.
Why?
Why in one hour was I to obtain her heart that quickly?
Possibly even more than her father had.
Gentlemen, do you have daughters?
Get them under your wings, will you?
I don't care how old they are, get your daughters under your wings.
They need that time.
I guaranteed that father when I left, I said, if you will play with this little girl three
nights a week, that's all.
Just give her three nights a week.
That gal will be by your side when she's 17 and 18 years old.
She'll bring all her difficulties to you.
She'll tell you everything.
My boys still do.
Still call me.
I still have family time.
Oh, they don't drive up in the wilderness to see me where I'm in.
They're an hour and a half away.
But they call me on the phone.
Father, can we talk?
They're 26 and 24.
They still want their culture time, if you will.
No TVs, no videos or toys, just being together with them.
It's that simple to become a family.
Well we decided then that we should add some family worship together.
And I didn't know what to do.
I was embarrassed to pray with my children.
You know that, Kathy, you said in your sermon, you were embarrassed.
I was embarrassed.
And I was the elder of the church.
And I was a successful businessman.
And now I've got to lead this little flock in prayer.
I didn't know what to do.
I had to take them to God.
So we started with the little Bible story books.
And we'd sit the boys in our lap, Sal and I.
We'd sing a song.
We took out the hymnal.
We'd sing a song together.
We kneeled down and we'd have prayer.
And I'd sit the boys in my lap and I would read them a story and we'd stop in every paragraph
and we'd let them ask their little questions.
And they just want to ask all kinds of questions.
And pretty soon every night, instead of lecturing them, we're reading them and we're explaining
to them the Bible stories.
And they just came alive.
They're enjoying this.
They're with mother and father.
And then we would end with a song.
We'd kneel down again for prayer.
And then we'd tuck them in bed.
And did they love that?
I can still remember they'd wear these little snuggie pajamas.
Have you ever seen them where they got the little hands and the feet?
They were kind of little blue outfits.
And boy, they just loved to be tucked in the bed.
Oh, mother, don't kiss me all over the face.
But they were saying what?
Come on, mother, do it.
We're big boys.
We're going to act like we don't want to, but do it.
I caught my son Andrew.
We were at one of the family camp meetings.
I caught my son Andrew at one of the family camp meetings and he was sitting right next
to my wife.
You know what he's doing?
He's in his 20s.
You know what he's doing?
Holding her hand.
Are you with me?
How many boys at age 22, and it's not because he's a wimp, brothers and sisters.
It's because he's a man.
The world has painted a false portrait of manhood today.
He's holding her hand.
Yeah.
It really touched my heart.
Just having a simple family worship is a wonderful way to end the evening.
Yet the impact upon their lives was profound as I watched these little things coming together.
There was a bond that was deepening in our family that was incredible.
Absolutely incredible.
Our motto became, don't pray with them if you haven't played with them.
That's why when we come here and we have family freeze tag, you know why we have family freeze
tag?
Because I'm not going to go before all these youth and preach to them if I haven't played
with them.
It's very important that you play with your youth.
And family freeze, did you enjoy it, youth?
I mean it's a blessing.
Grandma, look at this big boy here.
He enjoyed it too, didn't you?
I enjoy it, and the little kids just enjoy getting out there.
Why?
Because we're one and we're together.
It's a oneness that all can enjoy.
You don't have to be able to run fast and maneuver fast, you know.
You can just walk if you're adults and you can't maneuver fast, but the kids, let them
run around, let them play.
I want to play with the youth.
I want balance is what I'm looking for.
And I began to see that I cannot pray with my children unless I played with them.
Now I've earned the right to pray with them, and they want to know my God because I know
them and they know their father.
And it's not complicated.
That's why every family can't meet.
If you ask the youth, a lot of the youth come because they just want to play family free
stay.
Balance, do you have it in your family?
Have you found it?
And so my wife added pick up sticks and marbles.
How many of you played marbles recently?
Just simple pick up sticks and marbles.
We'd start playing at night.
We got such a custom of this.
About a year ago it was, I think, honey, we had two people come and join us.
One was a physician, a woman physician, OBGYN.
Another one was a successful businessman.
And they were visiting in our house and we had to go to a special meeting.
It was rather intense that day and very difficult.
We all came back rather stressed out.
And we're sitting around our couch and my wife says, and there's just the four of us,
my wife says, we're going to play marbles.
And this OBGYN doctor looks at me like, don't lower my dignity, Jim.
Take care of your wife here, would you?
And my other friend that's a successful businessman, he's going like, Jim, will you call your wife
off?
I says, bring them out, Sally.
It'll be good for all of us.
So here I got this doctor, this MD, and this businessman.
My wife is putting this little circle on her carpet and she's giving everybody a shooter
and we get the marbles out.
And you should have seen the tension leave.
It was incredible.
I mean, they started having fun.
Adults having fun.
So at our family camp meeting last year, this physician, she says, can I tell them about
what we do for family time?
So her whole presentation that she had was playing marbles and pick-up sticks.
The point I want to get to is what we did is we went off and we had every family, we
had marbles and pick-up sticks for every family.
And we put it in a gymnasium and as I walked through the gymnasium, I was astounded to
watch the families that did not know how to play together.
I walked around, I had to sit down, and I'm not belittling people.
I'm just going to be honest with you.
This isn't for the purpose of belittling, but it's for the purpose of enlightening our
minds.
I walked around, I had to sit down with families and help the men play marbles and pick-up
sticks they didn't know what to do.
They were just sitting there looking at their children.
How about you?
Is that you?
That can't be brothers and sisters.
We cannot go to our children.
Do you notice that this word is elevated here?
Do you know why this is elevated?
Because the word of God should always be higher than our own thinking, shouldn't it?
What's going on in your head tonight?
The reason this is elevated must be higher than our own common sense.
What's God saying to you tonight, gentlemen?
Is He calling for your hearts?
Is He asking you to do things?
He asked me to do things, simple things, but these things changed my family and they'll
change your family.
Well spring came and my son Andrew loves the bike and so the snow was starting to melt,
but he wanted to take his bike and he wanted to go up over these snow banks and just kind
of like a jump off.
So I said, go ahead Andrew.
Andrew gets his momentum up and he's going for the snow bank.
I didn't think it was hard enough, but he said it was.
His wheel stuck right in the snow bank and he just went flying off in the snow.
He's laying in the snow rolling like this, come on father, do it.
Why not?
Looks like fun.
So I got up the old momentum.
I'm headed for that snow bank and I hit it straight on and it just stopped dead and I
go flying through the air.
I landed in the snow and he says, let's do it again.
All right, let's go.
So we get out the bikes and we're ramming these bikes into the snow banks.
Now maybe this isn't chiropractorically sound or whatever, I don't know, but it's a lot
of fun.
And so we graduated from marbles and pick-up sticks to crash into the snow banks and then
we got a ball out when all the snow got off and just a little ball, nothing competitive,
but we just started kicking the ball around.
You know, and I was a little bit better at it than the boys, so the boys would jump on
it and run with the ball.
I just chase them around and every night you could see us out there.
Honestly, when you come to our open house this July, you know our open house, anybody
can come and visit us this July, 26th and 31st.
Our home is open to anybody.
Come and camp up there.
You can go to our internet site and hey, you'll still hear my boys squeals and laughs, there's
bouncing off the mountains.
It's still echoing around out there.
I can stand in my lawn and I can remember those events because I've raised my boys and
I have no regrets, gentlemen.
No regrets.
They're going into the kingdom with their father and now I'm going to be a grandpa,
you know.
Yeah, I'm going to be a little boy.
Name is going to be Landon James.
Now I'm going to be able to take my little Landon James and be able to tell him, oh my
God.
Yeah.
What a privilege.
This goes beyond anything that the world has to offer.
Disneyland cannot give you this.
Videos cannot give you this.
Games at Shopko Walmart cannot even touch what we found just in the simplicity of kicking
a ball and riding our bikes and playing couch tag and tickle.
That's where it began.
I began to see something bonding between me and my boys that was powerful.
I had found what I went there for and it was starting to work.
It was just that simple.
But it takes time, it takes commitment, and it takes consistency.
And if you'll put these into your family, you will see the results in your family.
Now you may vary the activities according to their ages, but you'll get the same results.
Guess what my boys want to do for this Christmas?
Now they're both married, have their own homes in their own country, have their own in the
countries and they have their own businesses.
And guess what they want to do for Christmas?
Father, we want to come up to your place because we want to bring our inner tubes and slide
down the hills behind the house.
So here we all are on Christmas and we don on our winter clothing, we take our inner
tubes and our sleds and we're just having a blast on Christmas.
So we spent Christmas on inner tubes sliding down the hills.
We had a blast, sometimes we get two or three people on an inner tube together.
I mean it was just fun.
We went back in and sang some Christmas carols and gave some gifts to each other, but the
real gift that we had was that we all really love each other and we enjoy each other and
we are a family.
Yeah, we're experiencing it.
Well, as summer came, that first summer, my boys needed some projects to do and now they're
turning in to be five and seven years old and they come to me one day and they say,
Father, you know how little boys are, don't you?
Father, we want to chop down a tree.
Chop down a tree?
I mean you're five and seven years old, you're not big enough to hold an axe.
Chop down a tree, you know how little boys are, they get these big ideas like that.
Why not?
I'll go and pick out a tree and I'll give them a little hatchet, you know?
And so I gave them all their instructions.
I picked out this 25 foot tall lodge pole pine and about six inches in diameter, but
it had been dead for about a dozen years.
It was hard as a rock.
They could chisel away at this thing for days.
I thought, you know, we'll get a lot of work out.
So I gave them their instructions and when I handed them that axe, I wish you could see
their eyes.
I can see their eyes that stand before you right now.
It was like, oh boy, they held that, they thought they were Paul Bunyan, you know?
And they hacked away at that tree for two days, two days, entertainment.
I cut out of that tree.
And then the day of the big fall came and they came, you know, and timber, you know,
they were shouting and this mighty pine fell to its resting place, you know?
And these guys are standing on top of this pine tree and they feel like men.
Five and seven years old boy, we chopped down a tree with father.
That's big stuff, you know that?
At least the five and seven year olds, but it was big stuff to me.
When I saw my boys standing there yelling out timber and they'd accomplished something.
And I thought to myself, and honestly I can still remember standing there watching them,
I thought, I wonder if they'll still be with me when they're 25 and 27.
And I don't have to wonder that anymore.
They're still with me because I gained their hearts.
Now it cost me something, gentlemen, but it didn't cost me anything.
I gave up nothing and I got everything.
I want it to happen to you.
I want to see it happen with your boys.
God wants to see it happen with your boys.
So the next thing they want to do is what do boys want to do when they're living on
the wilderness?
They want to build a log fort.
I thought, well this ought to be good for the whole summer and it was.
They harvest their trees, they chop these trees down.
They're five and seven years old.
They notch these things and they built their first log fort.
Three months of labor.
They were never born.
I didn't have to worry about associations and neighborhood kids.
I didn't have to worry about the worldly influence.
I mean these boys had activity.
They had directions for their lives.
We didn't need amusement parks or computer games, televisions or videos.
Everything a boy needs is in the country.
Everything a boy needs is there.
This could be set of girls.
Now if I would have had two girls, we'd probably build some play houses instead of forts.
We'd probably brought their dollies out instead of whatever else.
It varied according to what gender you have in your house and the ages you have, but it
works for all.
The key is they had their parents' time and attention and that's all boys and girls want.
It's just that simple.
You know for years I had viewed myself as a successful businessman and in the world's
eyes I was a successful businessman.
And I viewed myself as the elder and the spiritual leader of my church and I viewed myself as
a socialite, but now I was becoming a father, a companion to my children.
And I can tell you that nothing that I did as a businessman or an elder or a socialite
ever touched me in the way when I became a father to my children.
Something happens inside that I cannot explain to you, but it's one of the greatest things
in the world to experience and to maintain.
It is worth absolutely everything.
From there we started building sandboxes.
We pulled big trees out of the wilderness and we built sandboxes.
We went to a pit and we dug the sand and we came in and put the sand together.
We played trucks together.
Matthew built a jungle gym set out of logs that he cut down and we gathered firewood
together.
We built bird houses together and deer feeders.
And then one day Andrew says to me, Mother and Father, you need a swing so you can sit
and talk and look at the mountains.
And Andrew at a very young age, you can still see that swing.
It's still in the same place.
It was his own design.
We have swing time every day now, don't we honey?
From 12 to 12.30 we go on that swing and that's my wife's time.
I don't just give time to my boys, but I give it to my wife every day because she loves
to talk.
I mean she just loves to do do do do do do do.
Just it's your time.
Go ahead honey.
Let's chat.
And Andrew built me that first swing and we have swing time every day as a husband and
wife.
So we did projects together.
That turned into work benches in our garage.
If you come in our garage, you'll see a 20 foot long work bench and I never put one nail
in it or cut one board.
The boys built it.
And then my wife comes out there and I finally got the work bench in my dreams.
I mean and my wife comes out, which drawer is mine?
Which cupboard can I have?
I said honey, get out of my garage.
Go in the house.
She said no, I gotta have one.
So my boys built me a saw, a chainsaw bench.
Then she wanted to take over that.
So the boy says hey mother, we'll build you some cupboards.
And there's a great big double set of double cupboards that go all the way to the ceilings
that the boys, so she didn't have to be jealous of my work bench.
And so we did projects together.
We did the rock work around all our house.
If you look at the pictures of our house, we went out, we picked out every one of those
rocks out of the river.
We fished those rocks out of the river.
We hand picked them, took them home, laid them out, and as a family we built one side
of the house first was rock work.
Then each boy did one side by himself and I did one side by myself.
We are a family.
We work together.
We play together.
We pray together.
We excluded the world and said we are gonna make family a way of life.
And guess what?
It works.
It works brothers and sisters.
And it will work for you.
Recently my son said to me, Matthew, he says, you know we're still his hero.
He's 26 years old.
He was talking to me just about a week or two ago and he says, mother and father, I
never understood what I had when I was at home.
But when I got out in the world at 18 and he opened up his first business and he's 26
years old now, he says, do you know mother and father?
You are one in a million.
He says, you know what you gave us?
He says, when I see other youth and other children and other families and he deals with
families all day long, he says, you are one in a million mom and dad.
You gave us everything.
They're appreciative of it.
I mean that just made my butts pop off my shirt.
We love being a family and I never knew that just being a family was the greatest joy in
the world, gentlemen.
And it really is.
We added to it hide and seek, kick the can.
And then one day we started reading stories of great men that had lived together.
We'd read stories of men like Luther and Wesley and Huss and Jerome, people that had been
persecuted for their faith.
And at night time you'd find us around the fire and we'd just be snuggled up in our little
blankets reading stories and discussing these men.
And that's what we did to come together as a family.
Later on we added canoeing and caving, tubing, cross country skiing.
The boys one day were out in the wilderness and we ran into a beaver pond.
And there's a lot of old trees laying around.
They said, father, let's build a raft.
We've always wanted to build a raft.
I said, what are we going to do?
We don't have any rope, we don't have any nails.
Well we'll just place the logs on top of each other and we'll balance ourselves out there.
Why not?
The worst you can do is get wet.
And suddenly we built this crazy raft.
We got some pictures of it.
And you should have went on it exploring with us.
I mean the logs would shift and they'd move, you know, and you had to balance.
Boys love it.
I mean, and the excitement of falling into the beaver pond and coming nose to nose with
Mr. Beaver is great.
Yeah.
We loved it.
We grew there.
We bonded there.
We fell in love with each other.
We found out that what a family could be is everything in this world that God wants it
to be.
And He wants your family to experience this.
People would ask us and they would say, what are you doing up in the mountains, Jim?
And I'd say, what you need to be doing down the valleys.
What you need to be doing down the valley.
A friend recently said to me, I've got to make my home more pleasant so I don't drive
my children out of it.
And her children are teenagers now.
And she knows she's driving her children out of her house.
A lot of you people may say the world is pulling my children.
But I wonder, is it the world that's pulling them or is it you that's driving them to
the world?
What's the Spirit saying to you?
Because you haven't come here tonight to hear me speak.
You've come here to say, what is God saying to you tonight?
And gentlemen, what is God saying to you tonight?
And ladies, what is He saying to you?
You see, your home is what you make it.
It's more important than making money.
It's more important than your personal interests and your hobbies.
It's more important than saving the world in evangelism.
Because if you cannot evangelize your family, you cannot evangelize the world.
And gentlemen, you've got a burden for the world.
And if it's not working with your wife or your children, drop the idea of the world
and you better make it work at home.
Once it works at home, you've got a model to take the world.
If it doesn't work at home, you've got nothing to say.
You better back off and make it work there first.
That's what Jesus did.
Thirty quiet years in His home, it worked.
And He showed us it can work in the home for thirty years.
That's the model, not Jim Honeberger.
Then He went out and evangelized the world.
Once He showed us what to do in the home, and that's what we're saying here tonight.
If you want the greatest evangelism tool in the world, it's families that are bonded together,
families that live together, families that are tight.
When people come in from the world and they see your family, they're going to say, I want
what they've got.
Your doctrines are not going to hold them.
Your church is not going to hold them.
But when you are walking with your God and your children are walking with your God and
your marriages together, they're going to say, I want what you've got.
Now if that works, I'll buy into all the rest.
That's evangelism.
So we added, when my boys became a little bit older, we added in special father-son
outings.
This doesn't have to be father-son outings.
This can be mother-daughter outings.
This could be father-daughter outings.
This could be mother-son outings.
You make it what your family needs, but the first father-son outing, I'll never forget
it.
I still have the picture in my head.
I said to the boys, I'm going to take your backpack.
I'd never been backpacking in my life.
They'd never been backpacking in my life.
We had only the cheapest gear that there was, big, bulky sleeping bags.
I'll never forget.
I packed my boys up.
Their packs were so full that their sleeping bags were dragging on the ground.
I had a 12-mile hike into the mountains.
These guys were crying, and they're complaining, and they're moaning, and they're groaning.
This is supposed to be a great time.
We get in there, and I didn't know what I should do to pick out a site.
I picked out a site and had too many rocks in the middle.
I slept in the middle with two of these angle worms.
Have any of you ever slept with your children?
You know what I'm talking about?
They had enough to drive you nuts.
I could not sleep that night, because these guys are squirming on each side.
I'm laying on these rocks.
I don't have a pad.
I can't get a comfortable spot.
Then I bought a cheapy tent.
I didn't know anything about seam sealing or what to do.
It was a two-man tent.
We got three of us in it.
Then I finally started falling asleep, and I started hearing what no camper ever wants
to hear.
Are you with me?
Get ahead of me.
Pitter, patter, pat.
No, no, no, Lord, not now.
Pitter, patter, pat.
Pitter, patter, pat.
Pretty soon I found out what the people that didn't get on Noah's Ark felt.
I mean, there was a swimming pool in my tent, and you know where my boys went for safety?
In the middle.
I got these two little monkeys hanging all over me.
They were drowning, and I knew that my attitude right then would determine what their attitude
about backpacking would be the rest of their lives.
I knew I had to talk up being a man.
We're going to fight the wilderness.
We're bigger than the rain and the weather and whatever they can throw at us.
We'll get them, guys.
We'll have a good attitude.
All night long I preached to those boys with an attitude that I didn't have, but I knew
I needed to have.
We went home cold, wet, and muddy, but when they walked in the house they said, Mother,
we conquered the wilderness.
Yeah, tell me about it.
That's our first father-son outing.
That's where it began, and we still do them today.
Boys came to me this year, and they said to me, Father, we want to do an outing with all
of our families together.
We want to get the other in-laws and you, and we all want to do a family outing with
all of us together.
They're not excluding us from their lives.
They want us involved.
They wanted us in because we have become a real family, and it is whole.
The Bible says, train up your children in the way of the Lord, and they shall not depart
from it.
Gentlemen, these are foundational.
They are not optional.
Are you with me?
These are foundational, not optional.
As my boys grew and our family bonded, life is not just couch games and fun and outings
and family works and projects, but I knew I had to prepare my boys to run a business,
the most important business in the world, the family firm.
I told my boys, when you leave this home and you find a virtuous young lady that's meant
for you, I want you to know every bit about running a home.
They started making their beds.
They started doing the dishes.
They started sweeping the floors.
Then they graduated to making all the meals, preparing the meals.
At age 12, my boys were responsible for making the meal for an entire day, planning it and
making it.
They're the best cooks in the world.
They had to make the meals, do the ironing, do the gardening.
We decided you are going to manage the whole home.
You'll also learn all the skills of electricity, carpentry, rock work, taking care of a car,
things of that nature.
We threw our boys into managing their lives.
When they walk out of our home at age 18, there's nothing they don't know.
They were never bored because they always had productive things to do.
We put them 30 days on a project.
If they didn't master it, we give them another 30 days at it.
If they didn't master it, they get another 30 days at it.
When they left our home, their wives were one happy wife.
I'll tell you that.
These guys, and I wish you could say, I just asked Sarah the other day.
They just came up last weekend to our home.
Sarah's the one that's expecting my first grandchild.
I said, so tell me about your son, I mean my son, your husband.
She looked at me and I watched her eyes because I look in the eyes of the avenues of the soul.
I don't like any game plan.
I want to know.
You tell me the truth or not.
She says, father, he's a perfect husband.
And she meant it.
A lot of wives figure within three to six months, they want out of their marriages,
not these gals.
They love their husbands and their husbands love them.
You can only wonder what those grandchildren are going to be like when they get raised
with what they're going to be able to give them.
That's what we threw ourselves into.
We told our boys we wanted to learn how to do everything that there was.
When our men left our home, there was nothing left undone that they didn't know how to
do and that they weren't willing to do for their wives.
There was none of this men's work and wives' work.
This is our work.
And they had to be masters at all of it.
And so we built an attitude into them of being strong men today.
You can't find that in the colleges today.
You can send our men to Christian colleges and have them graduate as MDs or doctors or
attorneys, but you don't graduate them as men, as fathers, as husbands.
We're not training that.
And that's your job, brothers and sisters.
No college is ever going to teach them that.
You can give your children an education that's beyond all educations.
If they never get an education in the college and you've given them that, they are prepared
for the rest of their life.
That is the work that is to be done.
And when this church picks up that work, we'll finish the work in the world.
And if we don't pick up this work, we're not going to finish the work in the world.
And then we decided we had to enter into their dreams.
When my son Matthew was 16, that's my oldest boy, he came to me and he says, Father, I've
been reading Sam Campbell's books.
Have you ever read Sam Campbell's books?
In some of the books he talks about the sanctuary lake up in the critical wilderness area up
in Canada.
He says it's somewhere east of sunset and somewhere west of dawn.
That's the only clue you're given.
There are thousands of lakes.
Matthew says, I'm going to find it.
That says, Matthew, you've got Glacier Park in your back door.
Forget about the wilderness area up there.
Let's go.
He says, no, I want to find Sam Campbell's sanctuary lake.
I tried my best to talk him out of it for six months.
I can be pretty persuasive.
I've got no place.
And finally the Lord says, Jim, enter into your children's dreams with them.
Join into their dreams with them.
Be part of their dreams.
I said, OK, Lord.
I said, Matthew, you start figuring out.
You start making the phone calls.
You narrow it down.
And we'll go into critical as a family together.
I'll give you 10 days in September.
And as a family, we'll go find sanctuary lake.
So we end up there up in the critical together.
We're in the wilderness, thousands of lakes.
These boys start out, they've got their own canoe.
And these guys are paddling like this.
And Sal and Eric are kind of paddling behind them.
And they're way out ahead.
I says, honey, I'm going to stop this thing.
And they're like, boys, slow down.
So they pull off to the side.
I says, honey, when we get alongside their canoe, just grab on and hang on for life.
She says, why?
Because I says, I'm throwing all our equipment in their canoe as fast as I can.
If they got that much energy, they can carry all the equipment.
So we got along.
You like that, huh?
We got alongside.
I just threw it all in there.
I said, go for it, guys.
And we found the first lake, which was not sanctuary lake.
Five days later, 120 miles, and we entered into the river of 10,000 umps, I think Sam
Campbell calls it.
And I understand why you've got to go over six beaver dams.
And you get in this little, little trail.
And you're just umping your way up.
I mean, umping your way up.
And we finally went into the sanctuary.
And we found it, sanctuary lake, as a family.
I mean, if you could have seen my son's face, that meant everything to him.
You need to enter into your children's dreams.
I don't know what your children's dreams, especially when they become teenagers, they
have some dreams.
And you need to enter into their dreams and become one with them.
That's part of being a family.
That's a better way of life.
That's the way life is to be.
That's the way we are supposed to go.
Live out every phase of your life with your children.
That's what we've been trying to do.
This won't just happen.
You must make it happen.
It's a simple program, isn't it, brothers and sisters?
Not complicated.
It's not deep theology.
But it's simple and it works.
I'd like to share one last illustration with you if I can.
If you do this, you know what will happen after your children get married?
We were visiting our oldest son for a weekend.
And my other son, they live about five miles apart.
My two boys are best of friends.
They're in the same, they have separate businesses.
But they're best of friends, same type of businesses.
And their wives are best of friends.
They invite us down for the weekend.
We spent the whole weekend with them.
And we were there Friday, we were there Sabbath, we were there Sunday.
Sunday afternoon we got an hour and a half drive to go up in the wilderness yet.
We got to get some groceries.
And about 2, 2.30 I said to the boys, we got to get going.
And the boys went, oh father, don't leave.
Can't you stay the night yet?
I said, boys, I mean we've been here the whole weekend.
We went to go and the boys said, no, don't leave, we want you to stay.
And they couldn't talk me out of it.
And Matthew stands up and he says, father, will you just wait a minute, I've got to get
something out of the garage.
I said, sure, I'll get another five minutes.
So Matthew goes out in the garage.
Of course, I don't know what he's getting, but he's getting a coil rope.
He comes into the living room and he's got this rope behind his back.
And his brother sees it and he winks at his brother.
And these boys jump me and they hog-tie me.
They say, no father, we got you for another night, you're not leaving.
So if you raise your children this way, guess what they're going to do to you?
Yeah, they didn't want us to leave.
They love our company.
So much so that they'll risk hog-tieing their father to keep them there another night.
That was one of the highest compliments, honestly.
That innocent fun that they had with me was one of the highest compliments I think they
ever could have given me.
They want their father.
Our experiment of 20 years ago worked, brothers and sisters, and it will work for you if you
work it.
I've asked Rady to come up and close us in prayer.
Would you kneel with us, please?
Father in heaven, we do come to you in the name of Jesus.
And what we've heard tonight, I pray that you will put it on each father's heart and
on each mother's heart to enter into the work of saving our own children.
Lord, we can see tonight very plainly that this is the work.
Now work in us that willingness to give up whatever it is we have to give up.
And it will be, just like Jim has said, it will be nothing to give it up, to give to
our children what they really need.
They need to see the love of Jesus in us.
Help us to give to our families.
Help us not to leave this campground until we've made that commitment.
Help us to make the commitment, Lord, to give our all to our families.
For we pray and ask it in the name of Jesus.
Amen.
Amen.
Thank you.
and many of you brothers and sisters are in the heat of the battle, aren't you?
You're in crisis as right now in trials and difficulties.
I want you to know that my God is there for you.
God wants to set every one of you free.
Isn't that wonderful?
The gospel sets you free.
God wants you to teach your sons and your daughters that He's real.
He's there for you.
Yeah, you're going to have trials, but your God doesn't deserve to.
And the world is waiting to see real Christianity in your life, in your family.
You find that and you've got the greatest evangelism tool the world has ever seen, because
God is real and He doesn't deserve to.
Now tonight I want to talk about a message called In Thy Shadow.
It's a message that's very close to my heart.
And you can find it in the book Come to the Quiet.
There's a whole chapter on it.
It's very close to my heart because I'm going to share with you my journey of learning how
to stand in God's shadow.
That's quite something, isn't it?
If you think about standing in the shadow of God, the reason we went to the mountains
wasn't to flee from everybody.
The reason we went to the mountains and the wilderness 20 years ago was we wanted to learn
how to stand in God's shadow.
And we wanted to bring it into our family because I didn't know how to do that.
I had religion but not God.
I wanted an experience in God.
So I'm taking my thoughts tonight from Psalms 91.
That's what this is open to is Psalms 91.
It's my favorite chapter in all the Bible.
I love Psalms 91.
I pray that you'll come to love it too.
He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of
the Almighty.
Do you want to dwell in that secret place?
It's really not a mystery.
The devil wants it to be a mystery.
It's a secret place because not many people go there, but everybody can go there.
Doesn't cost you a cent.
You don't have to earn it.
It's there for you.
And you can stand under the shadow of God and you can let Him be your defender in your
defense.
And God promises to do that for you if you'll come to Him.
I can remember when I was a freshman in high school.
I was 15 years old and I was on the track team and the football team.
I really didn't know God at the time.
I was in a parochial school and the wrestling coach of that school took a disliking to me.
He was also my history teacher.
I was sitting in history class one day just minding my own business and he looked at me
and he says, Jim Holberger, shut up.
I had a problem when I was born.
I was born with a very high sense of justice.
I never said anything.
Not that I never said anything ever in school, but at that particular time I was not guilty.
And I said, Mr. McGinnis, I never said a word.
He said, I said, shut up.
I said, I never said a word and he came back.
He was a big man.
He picked me up and he took my head and he bounced it against the blackboard.
Bounced it and banged it.
I still have just a knob in the back of my head yet today from it.
I was 15 years old and after about the sixth bounce that was about all I could take and
I need him.
And he went to the ground and I ran for my life.
And I ran home.
And when I got home there was a call from the principal of the school, we're going
to disfellowship your son, Mr. Holberger.
My father went to me and he looked me right square in the eye.
One thing my father never liked was a liar.
I could do whatever it was but don't lie to me son.
And he looked me right in the eye and says, what happened?
And I told him, he says, is that the truth?
He said, yes.
He says, I'll be with you in the disfellowship.
And when we went there, there was this whole board of important men standing there.
And they said, no, we want you to tell your, give your story.
And I started telling the story the way it was and this Mr. McGinnis stands up and he
comes over and he grabs me by the shirt.
I am, you know, I'm a 15 year old kid and I was taught to respect my elders.
In those days and age, if you did something wrong and your daddy wasn't there, the other
daddy spanked you.
Boy, have we missed it today.
And this man grabs me like that.
My father who is 145 pounds, about 5'7", stands up and he comes walking over to this man and
he says, I would suggest you take your hand off of him.
And from that moment on, for the next hour, when I walked out of there, they fired the
principal of the school.
The coach apologized to me and I'm standing there, that's my dad.
That's my dad.
Give it to him, dad.
Let him have it, dad.
145 pounds of German, let him have it.
And I was standing in the shadow of my father.
I was invincible.
My dad's going to take on the whole school board.
I was proud of my dad, you know.
And he wasn't really understanding the principles that I understand today, but I was in the
shadow of my dad.
I was proud of my dad.
And my dad always says, I'll always be there for you, son.
I'll never leave you or forsake you.
And that's what God says to you, brothers and sisters.
I'll always be there for you, whether you're good or you're bad.
You can't earn my favor.
You can't earn my love.
I give it to you unconditionally.
And even though that isn't a proper illustration of the great love that my God has for me,
but that's what God says to me.
Jim, you can stand in my shadow any day.
Will you come there?
But I give you a free moral agency.
The problem with Jim Homer is he likes to wander off on his own.
He thinks he's big enough to stand on his own sometimes.
And then I kind of get beat up and I come back to God.
And when I went to the mountains, I wanted to learn how to stand in God's shadow because
it says in verse 2, He's my refuge.
He's my fortress.
He's my strength.
He's my God.
That's God.
And the problem with Christianity today is we don't know how to stand in God's shadow.
We don't know how to come out of our crisis and say, that's my God.
Stand there for me, God.
I'm not going to say a word.
They can beat up on me and I'm going to stand behind you.
And God says, are you going to let me?
Because He won't do it for you just automatically.
He gives you a free moral choice.
You have to do it by faith, brothers and sisters.
And so when I went to the mountains, I went there to find a journey of how to stand in
God's shadow no matter what happens.
You know, friends will betray you.
God never will.
Family can harass you.
The world can persecute you.
But you can still find quiet and rest in your God because He's always there for you.
A spouse may desert you.
Evil may spread evil about you, but God is always there for you.
He says it's my continuous gift to you, is my presence with you.
Will you stand in my shadow?
Yeah.
And so I didn't know how to do that.
I always thought God was some great being up on some great throne.
And every now and then He'd pull a curtain by and just see how Jim Humberger was doing.
That's not God.
He says, I'm going to send my comforter to be by your side at all times and all places.
And so when we moved to the wilderness of Montana 20 years ago, it's a beautiful valley,
by the way.
It's just lovely.
When you drive up the valley, you see the rocky mountains on the right-hand side and
the snow-covered peaks and the glaciers.
On the left-hand side are the gumdrop mountains of the Whitefish Range.
There's a beautiful river running right down the middle of it, you know, turquoise in color.
The streams that come off are crystal clear.
You can take a glass and you drink right out of the streams.
The air is the most pure, vitalizing air on earth.
Nothing contaminates it.
There's moose there.
There's elk there.
We went there to find rest and quiet in God.
And we went there to put our family together, as I talked to you about last night.
And after three years of living there, and we went through our trials in those three
years, but my money ran out.
We had 18,000 L.E.s left after we bought our little log cabin up there, and we decided
to live on $6,000 a year for three years.
Yeah.
And after that, my money ran out.
And the Lord led me to open up a wilderness real estate practice out of my house.
And I was excited about this because I didn't want to leave that valley.
My funds ran out.
I didn't want to go down in Sodom and Gomorrah anymore and raise my children.
I didn't want to go down in the valley.
I didn't want to go back to the city life.
I liked what I found in God there.
I found the real God there in the quiet of that wilderness setting.
However, after I opened that wilderness real estate practice up in that pristine valley,
war broke out in our valley.
The residents up there, there were 75 year-round residents.
They felt threatened.
They didn't like this.
They envisioned subdivisions coming in.
They thought paved roads would come up there.
They thought power lines would come up.
They thought development would come up.
They put a sign in the local store.
Just a, it's an old store.
It was built in 1890.
Just one little store there and one little pump for 60 miles.
That's all there is.
They put up a sign in there, keep Montana beautiful.
Shoot a realtor.
You laugh at that.
That was me.
That was me.
That's who they were talking.
When I'd walk in that store and I saw that sign, fear hit me.
I mean these residents up there began to hate me and they thought I was there to destroy
what they were there for.
This was ridiculous.
They had envisioned this beautiful wilderness valley being destroyed, but the problem is
that valley was 98% government land.
It consisted of US Forest Service on one side and Glacier Park on the other side and only
2% of that entire valley was private land.
Even if I developed 100% of the 2%, I hardly even touched it.
Those were not my goals.
But reason doesn't hold when passion rules.
These were environmentalists and their perspective of wilderness excluded every realtor that
would ever live.
They lashed out against you know who and they lashed out against me.
They began to tear down every sign that I ever put up.
And I put the signs up and they tear them down.
They began to write articles in the local newspaper called the Hungry Horse News against
the realtor.
They went to the Board of Realty at the State Capitol and they complained about me, tried
to have my license revoked.
I became the most dislike man in my valley.
The valley that I went to to find all the quiet and all the peace, I entered into the
greatest war of my life in that valley.
Rumors spread about me.
Gossip was going around about me.
All I planned on doing was if you owned that piece of property, I'd just sell it to another
person.
I didn't plan on developing the area.
In fact, when I quit the real estate and went into the ministry that I'm in now, there was
less private property available than before I went in.
I knew there was properties there that the government wanted to own.
I went after those properties and I took them to Glacier Park and you want to buy them,
they bought them.
I took them to the U.S. government, they bought them.
There was less, less development as a result of Jim Holmberger there than more.
When I'd sell a piece of property, there was private landowners on each side.
I'd go to each landowner and say, you want to add this property to your property.
I'd work out deals where these landowners would buy half of each of the property and
combine it into their own.
What they feared, I became actually the friend of the valley, not the enemy, but that is
not the way they perceived me.
The very valley I came to for rest and quiet caused me the most unrest and the greatest
stress of my life.
Anxiety like I never knew began to hone me.
So much for salvation by location.
If you think all you can do is go to a quiet place someplace and you're going to find this
sweet experience and just by location you're going to be made righteous, no one's made
righteous by location, brothers and sisters.
The environment you live in is a tool that aids you in the process.
It can help you, but there's only salvation in Jesus Christ.
Turmoil, attacks, envy against my family, jealousy, gossip, betrayals disrupted the
quiet rest that I'd found in those three years.
I had to sit there and wrestle with questions in my life now.
I was out of money.
Do I move to another valley?
Do I run?
Do I retreat?
Do I drop the real estate profession?
Do I pick up another profession?
Do I go down into the city again and find employment there?
I'm saying, Lord, speak to me.
Hear me, Lord.
I'm in trouble.
I'm in a war here.
Help me.
Everything I came there for was under attack.
The Lord said to me, Jim, the quiet I want you to find is not in the location but in
me.
And you have found it in the location, and I'm happy for you, but I'm going to take
you deeper now so you don't depend upon your location, but you depend upon me and me only.
Christ is the solution, brothers and sisters.
You can find what I found right in your location, right where you're at.
God's that available to each and every one of us.
That's where it begins.
Our quiet location had been a tool to aid us in discovering how to live in His shadow.
But now we must learn how to rest in the secret place of the Most High and abide in Jesus
Christ in the midst of the storm of opposition that was going against myself and my family.
We had to learn to stand in the shadow in hard times now, just not in easy times, allowing
Him to fight for us.
And God promises to do that for us, doesn't He?
Exodus 14, 14 says, the Lord shall fight for you, and you shall hold your peace.
And my mind went back to my high school days with my father.
Remember that little 145 pound German, you know?
And he stood up for me, and God says, I'm going to stand for you, Jim.
I'm going to be there for you.
I will stand for you.
Will you trust me now?
You trusted me in these three quiet years that you've had.
Now trust me as you go through this war in this valley.
I'll take you through it.
I learned to live in His shadow in relative peace and safety.
Now I must learn how to live in His shadow in the heat of the battle.
And many of you brothers and sisters are in the heat of the battle, aren't you?
You're in crisis right now in trials and difficulties.
I want you to know that my God is there for you.
He hasn't deserted.
He is as real to you as the air you breathe.
If you'll only enter into Him by faith, He is there.
He will speak to you, and He will fight for you.
Many of you have perhaps never had the opportunity to move to a beautiful wilderness setting
in a quaint log home like we have, but all of you need to find a wilderness experience,
a live in His shadow wherever your location is presently.
Quite often the very thing though we come to love and embrace the most gives us the
most grief and the most heartache.
The children you raise sometimes do what?
They go astray.
The friends you've embraced sometimes will betray you.
The career you pursued sometimes becomes the very thorn in your side.
The spouse you married sometimes finds another.
For Christ, it was the church that He raised up became the very instrument of His death.
For me, God wanted me to lose my fear of those who were planning my destruction.
How about you?
What's God calling upon you in your trial, in your difficulty, in your crisis right now?
I had to deal with three things in my life that were un-dealt with.
My identity and reputation was being destroyed, and Christ wanted me to find my identity and
my reputation in Him.
Not in what people thought of me, not in what people did to me, but that He wanted me to
find my identity and my entire reputation in Him.
He says, Jim, your reputation is not important, only your character.
Jesus' reputation was one of the worst that there ever was in His church, but His character
was pure and spotless.
I feared that my comfortableness, the comfortable living that I'd come to find for those three
years was going to be stolen from me.
I wanted the comfort of those three quiet years retained and continued on.
God says, Jim, your comfort has to be found in the Comforter, not in your income, not
in your quiet setting.
I feared what man could do for me.
God says, you must come to know, else should I, the all-sufficient one that'll stand for
you regardless of what any man, what any army, or what any world can do against you.
I will be there for you.
You don't have to fear if 10,000 come after you.
He brought my mind to Luther at the door of the diet.
When Luther was called, they had to diet at Worms.
Now Luther has to stand before 5,000 of the most important men of the world at his times.
Cardinals and bishops and kings and knights were all gathered together for this little
man that knew how to stand in the shadow of the Almighty.
They were afraid of Luther because they knew that Luther had a power that they did not
have.
What they did with Luther is they got him up out of the jail early in the morning.
They marched him all around town.
He humiliated him through crowds.
Then they brought him to the door of the diet, and they made him stand at the door of the
diet all day long.
He didn't go into the diet until eight o'clock at night.
They knew that if they could break his spirit, that they'd get him irritated and frustrated
he would lose his power.
But Luther stood outside the door in the shadow of the Almighty, and he rested all day long
just saying, my God, it's big enough.
Luther didn't trust in his books.
He didn't trust in his understanding.
He didn't trust in his talent or his wisdom.
Luther stood there in the shadow of the Almighty and says, my God, will fight for me when I
go in there.
He didn't know what he was going to say to those 5,000 people.
He just knew that if he stood under God's shadow, he would be all right.
And Luther stood, and the Reformation began because he knew how to stand in God.
That was his strength.
It wasn't his knowledge.
It wasn't his ability.
It wasn't his church, brothers and sisters.
It was his God.
He knew how to stand in the shadow of the Almighty.
That's what God calls all of us to.
And he's taken us through all our individual trials to teach us because someday every one
of us are going to have to stand like Luther stands.
And so he takes us through an experience.
And it's not an easy experience, brothers and sisters.
That's why we need each other.
We need to stop picking on each other.
We need to stop being junior Holy Spirits over each other.
And we need to say, I'm with you, brother.
God's taken dross out of you.
I'm by your side.
Your dross may be different than my dross, but I'm with you because God's doing a work
in you.
And I'm going to stand with you.
Even though I might disagree with you, and I might have a different perspective than
you do, I'm here for you.
I'm on the same journey.
I'm going to help you up the road.
That's the road that we're on.
That's what Luther had to do.
Now God wanted to set Jim Honeberger free.
I was not a free man.
Some of you would have done anything to have those three years that I had, but I still
was not a free man.
And God knew it.
And God had to go down in my heart and say, I'm going to free you up, Jim Honeberger.
Are you going to stand in my shadow?
Are you going to let me go through it with you?
So in the midst of my battles, he wanted me to have a free heart, totally dependent upon
him, totally resting in him.
Thoughts I feared the most would have to be dealt with.
What would these people say when I drive down in that store, and I drive down in that store,
and they'd have this sign out that says, keep my tab beautiful.
Shoot a realtor.
I mean, I can't tell you what happened to my heart.
I'd walk in, and all those people would just stop, and they wouldn't say a word, and they
just stare at me.
I had to learn to stand, not in the fear of man, not in the fear of their eyes, but my
God, I've done nothing wrong.
And I'd have these thoughts.
What will they think?
Are they going to accept me?
Will they believe the lies launched against me?
Where will I go if they drive me out?
How do I support my family?
I had two little boys at the time.
How do I put food in their mouths?
I feared their faces, but God says, I want to set you free, Jim.
And God wants to set you free as well.
Whether you have anything that worries you or fears you or you have anxieties, God wants
to free you from that.
If you're standing in His shadow, you can't have an anxiety, because your God's big enough.
Just like my father, take him on, Dad, the whole school board.
And he did.
Because he was my dad.
We got a heavenly father, too, that has those abilities.
God wants our hearts free from every bondage.
I feared that loss of my reputation.
I feared the loss of my comfortableness of my lifestyle.
I feared what man could do to me.
But coming to the choir goes beyond renouncing the external obstacles, and it also deals
with the internal hurdles that each of us have to deal with.
God knew the work He was eventually calling me to.
My reputation would be maligned.
When you become a minister of the gospel and you no longer fear the devil, and you bring
a message that changed people's lives, your name is going to be made mud out there.
And so God had to begin to prepare me ahead of time for the future work He would call
me to.
He knew that my ability to support my family in the work of the gospel would be totally
in His hands, and I had to learn it back then how to turn it over to Him.
He was preparing me for my future work.
I didn't know it.
He didn't tell me.
I just had to trust Him.
He had to prepare me for the fear of man, because if you're going to go on and you're
going to preach a message that's different than what the church preaches or Christianity
preaches, someone's going to get upset.
And men that fear men will not give a straight message.
They won't give a testimony.
They'll tickle your ears.
They won't go right to the heart.
And God had to remove from my heart the fear of what man could do for me, that God would
always take care of me.
He was preparing me, brothers and sisters, as He's trying to prepare you.
This isn't a story about Jim Holger.
This is your story.
You may not be quite on the same notch in the road that I am, but you're on the same
journey, and you're going to come to this spot on the road someday.
Believe me, you're going to come if you go the journey.
My heart had to stop being concerned about my reputation and my finances and the fear
of man.
My heart had to trust in God and God only.
One thing have I desired of the Lord, and that will I seek after, that I may dwell in
the Lord all the days of my life.
Psalms 27, 4.
So God wants us to find quiet and rest in Him only, not in our Isaacs, but in Him.
If our security and our hope and our joy are in our Isaacs, God will have to ask us to
take our Isaacs to the altar and offer them up.
And so God wanted me to unload those worries and trust myself solely in Him, in the El
Shaddai of the Bible.
An El Shaddai means the all-sufficient one.
So how do you do this?
When these worries, when these thoughts and these emotions are going around in your head,
and I don't know if it happens to you, but it must, they go around in my head again and
again and again.
Are you with me on this?
Again, a thousand times a day these thoughts come up to me.
God came to me and He says, Jim, this can't happen anymore.
You must put this away.
I want you to prepare a fire exit.
I said, a fire exit?
What are you talking about?
He says, Jim, when you were in grade school, they used to rehearse you on what way to go
if they had a fire in the school.
Have any of you been through these fire drills?
And they do that so that when a fire comes, you automatically know what to do.
It's a no-brainer.
You don't have to think.
You can just go to the fire exit and you're in safety.
God says, Jim, I want you to prepare a fire exit so whenever these thoughts come up, whenever
these emotions come into your life, you know what to do.
And I want your escape route to be me.
I want you to learn how to come to me and give those thoughts and give those emotions
over to me.
And so my fire exit became Psalm 62.5.
My soul wait thou only upon God, for my expectation is from Him.
My God is there.
I can expect God to do great things for me.
I don't have to fear man.
I don't have to worry about putting food on my table.
I don't have to fear about my reputation.
My expectation is from God.
He eventually will come through for Jim Honeberger.
He only is my rock and my salvation.
He's my defense.
They can't move me.
I can stand in His shadow.
You see, what you think you are, what you rehearse, you become.
What you behold, you are changed into.
So my fire exit became standing in God's shadow, rehearsing in my mind all the great things
that God had done for me, what He has shown me that He could do, and always bringing Him
up and never fearing ever again, never thinking about my finances, never worrying about what
people thought about me.
I would go over it in my mind again and again.
God is good.
God has brought me out.
God is with me.
And I would say it a thousand times over and over again.
And so I replaced these thoughts, these fears with hope and faith that God was big enough
to deal with this whole situation.
A lot of men come to me and they wrestle with the false portrait of womanhood that's
placed, plastered on billboards today and on magazines and at checkout counters.
And men are wrestling in their thoughts and they don't know what to do.
And I say, gentlemen, it's very simple.
You've got to have a fire exit before you go outside, before you go shopping.
You've got to know when the devil puts that false portrait of a woman in front of you,
you've got to know what you're going to do.
And they say to me, what do you do?
I say, it's very simple.
When the devil puts a portrait of a false woman out there, I say, I love my Sally.
She's beautiful.
She's all I need.
She satisfies me entirely.
She's all I've ever wanted and she satisfies me entirely.
I love my wife.
And the devil's power is broken because I don't believe his false portrait because I
rehearse it and I tell myself that.
And when I look at my Sally, when she comes in the room, I say, she's beautiful.
She's gorgeous.
She fills my needs.
She's my gal.
That's my gal.
That's my Sally.
I don't need to look at anybody and the devil doesn't have power over my brain because I
have a fire exit.
I know what I'm going to do when I go in the food store.
I know when the devil puts a billboard in front of me.
I know what I'm going to do.
I go right to it.
And the devil doesn't get me because I got a fire exit.
And my wife is the most beautiful woman in the world.
She's a true portrait of a real woman, not the devil's.
I don't have to buy into that stuff.
And so when I go home and my wife comes to the back door, guess what I do?
There she is.
She's beautiful.
She's mine.
I hug her and I kiss her and I love her.
But if I buy into that false portrait, what do I do when I go home?
If I buy into the false portrait of a woman and I go home and I see my wife, I go, hi,
I love you.
Have a nice day.
You think she's impressed?
You think she knows the difference?
Yeah.
Gentlemen, you've got to have a fire exit.
You've got to learn how to stand in God's power and His strength.
You've got to know what you're going to do when you go into temptation.
You can't rest on the fact that you'll do it when it comes up.
You've got to know ahead of time.
And so God says, Jim Homer, you develop a fire exit.
So these fears and these emotions of what these people are trying to do to you in this
valley won't destroy you and it won't take you under.
And I'll be with you.
And so I had a fire exit.
And guess what?
It works.
God's good.
And so when I would drive down the road and I would see up in this wilderness valley,
by the way, we're having an open house, you know, at our place.
We get hundreds of people say, can we come up and visit you?
Yeah, but no, I won't get rest that way.
So my wife says, let's have an open house.
And so July 26 to the 31st of this year, you're all invited up to our open house.
Bring your tents and your campers and park down the river in front of us.
Come and join us and then worship with us on Sabbath for a fellowship worship.
Come and see what God has done.
The devil tried to destroy us up there.
I'm going to talk about that tomorrow.
But you're welcome to come.
But when I drive down that wilderness valley and I see another one of my signs torn down,
I stop my car in front of that property and I get out and I kneel on that property and
say, you're the God of all flesh.
Nothing's too hard for you, God.
They tore my sign down.
I don't like this, but you bring the buyer, Lord.
You know where he is.
You don't need signs to sell this property.
You're a great God.
Bring the buyers.
And the buyers came and I wrote up offers and the people couldn't understand what's
going on.
How's this guy selling this property?
And so they'd write articles against me in the newspaper.
When I read those articles, I'd say, oh, Lord, don't worry about it.
They can assassinate my character.
It doesn't matter.
A woman by the name of Barbara came up to the valley and says, Jim, it's getting so
bad.
I don't even believe it about it, Johan, anymore.
The people I sold property to came into my little log cabin and they met my little boys
and they met my wife and I told them about my God and they started liking our family.
And pretty soon the people that were buying property outnumbered the people that were
harassing us and they were saying this isn't true.
And God was doing his defense.
It took about two or three years to stand in his shadow, but God's working for me.
And now the people that were up there working against me, they figure what's going on with
this guy.
He's become one of the most successful realtors in the whole state of Montana.
And they're trying to get rid of me and my success is going up.
They don't know what to do.
So they get together and they devise a plan that one of their group would become a realtor.
And they would put me out of business by one of them.
And so I heard this and fear hit my heart.
The old fear came and I thought, no Lord.
And the Lord says, who are you going to stand in Jim?
I says, what do you want me to do Lord?
And the Lord says, I want you to be proactive, not reactive.
You're reacting to them Jim.
Stand in my shadow.
Be proactive.
I says, what do you want me to do?
Go welcome her.
Welcome her.
Yeah, I want you to go down and knock on her door.
Give her a copy of every one of your listens and say, I'm going to pray that God uses you
to sell these properties.
You think this is funny, don't you?
Would you want to do that?
I didn't want to do it either, but God says, I want you to go.
I says, all right Lord.
Her name was Sharon.
So I went down and knocked on her door and she comes to the door and you should have
seen the look on her face.
Because she was anticipating flush with flush, wasn't she?
She was not anticipating coals of fire heaped upon her head.
I said, welcome to the valley.
You're going to be a realtor.
I hope you're the most successful one here.
In fact, I am going to help you be successful.
I want you to sell every one of my listings.
I have personally ran off photocopied copies of all my listings.
I'll take you out.
I'll walk you out.
I'll show you them.
I want you to sell every one of them.
And guess what?
My real estate business prospered.
More sales came in.
More business came in.
They can't figure out what's going on.
They figured this Jim Over is one smart cookie.
And I'm just a dumb German.
All I know to do is stand in God.
And they think I'm out-strategizing them.
And they're fighting against God.
You can't beat up God.
If you learn to stand in His shadow, you can't beat them.
And my job was to learn to stand in God's shadow.
These people can't figure it out.
And all I'm doing is just resting in God.
Isn't it a good program?
The Lord shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace.
Isn't God good?
Don't you love God?
I mean, He's quite a God.
You see, it's not in reciting Psalms 62, 5, and 6.
It's in entering into Psalms 65 and 6.
I have people say, I quote Scripture when a temptation comes, and I keep thinking on
the temptation when I'm quoting the Scripture.
It's not in the memorization of it.
It's in the entering in of it, brothers and sisters.
It's in the trusting of it and letting it come in and be part of you.
You got to stand in God, not just memorize what you should do.
That's when peace becomes yours.
And I used to wonder, how did Luther do that?
I'd like to be a Luther someday, and God was starting to make a Luther out of Jim Lombarder.
I'm German, too, you know.
You can either be a Hitler or a Luther.
I think I'd rather be a what?
Luther.
And so God's making a Luther out of Jim Lombarder in this quiet little valley.
The valley that I came to for the peace tried to destroy me.
Isn't that something?
But God says, if you let me take charge, I'll turn to tables.
But I had to give them two or three years to accomplish it, brothers and sisters.
It's quite a process.
You know when Joseph was put in as a slave to Potiphar, and then he went into jail, that
wasn't a two or three month term.
Years it took.
And Joseph had to stand in the shadow of the Almighty until God did the job that he could
do.
And God wants you to stand in His shadow.
That's what He's calling you to.
This goes beyond doctrine and goes beyond church fellowship.
It goes beyond your little boy scout deeds that you do in evangelists.
It deals with the heart of the gospel.
And God will make Luther's out of you if you let Him.
And that's what He's trying to do.
And that's what He brought me to the valley to be done in my heart.
And so, my battle was not to become a great realtor, but a man of faith.
My battle isn't to fight the enemy without, but to fight the enemy within.
And so with you, you've come here to be encouraged to pick up the real work, and that's what
we're here to do with you, to encourage you as all of us have united on this staff for
you to pick up the real work.
God wants to set every one of you free.
Isn't that wonderful?
The gospel sets you free.
Regardless of your circumstances, He's here for you.
He wants you to learn how to live in His shadow.
He wants you to learn how to enter in.
Now, the joy of my heart, the joy of a father's heart is his children.
That's God's joy is his children.
I brought my boys out there to learn to stand in His shadow.
Will they?
What happens when I let my boys out of my nest?
Maybe they could only be good boys because I was the strong man in the home.
But we taught those boys, at least we thought we taught those boys, the trust in their God,
regardless of the odds that came before them.
They saw their parents go through it, now will they?
My two boys married about two years ago, and my second boy, the youngest one, got married
in October.
Mrs. Fiancé, his wife, wanted an outdoor wedding.
She wanted to have a wedding in the fall with fall colors.
She wanted out in a meadow in North Carolina where she was raised, underneath Grandfather
Mountain, its most beautiful peak in North Carolina.
She told Andrew after he proposed to her, she says, I want our wedding October 20th.
I went to her father and I said, what kind of weather do they have October 20th?
We looked it up on the internet, no rain.
About the least amount of rain they ever get is in October.
I said, all right, we can do it.
We'll put up a big tent for our reception.
We'll set up all the chairs outside.
We'll put out a platform there.
We'll put the bride up there on the backdrop here.
They can look up at Grandfather Mountain.
They asked me to marry them, you know.
It's going to be beautiful.
God will be there for them.
People were praying for months for this wedding.
We came to the week before the wedding.
You've got to remember, I've taught my son now to stand when odds are against you, but
will he?
Because he's a man now.
I don't make his decisions for him.
My job as a parent is to hover over them when they're young, just like an inverted funnel.
But the older they get, the more decisions they get so that when they're a man, their
decisions are their decisions.
They're not mine.
I'll coach them.
I'll be there to give them advice.
But now you stand, young man.
It's your decision.
It's your call.
Your free moral agency.
The greatest gift that God gave Jim Holmberg was your free moral agent.
You decide.
The greatest gift I gave my boys is your men now at 18.
You decide.
I'll coach you.
I'll be there for you, but the final call is yours.
The week of the wedding, we had more rain in October than they ever had all year long.
It rained and rained and rained.
The ground was sloppy.
The ground was wet.
Andrew's saying, where's my God?
Will it be sunny on Sunday?
Or won't it?
We had one day that it didn't rain on Thursday.
Put up the huge tent Friday it rained.
Saturday, some sun came out.
Sunday morning, 90% forecast of rain.
We look it up on the internet, clouds for miles and miles.
We called the airport.
Do you see any blue sky coming?
Nothing for days.
All around us, thunder and dark clouds.
I met with my son at 10 o'clock in the morning.
Andrew looks at me.
He says, father, what do I do?
I says, let's meet at 11 and see what the weather does.
We met at 11.
He says, father, what should we do?
I says, let's meet at 12.
We met at 12.
We're waiting for God to do his thing.
Nothing's happening.
His bride to be's dream is going to be busted.
It's going to be a wet wedding.
A bride doesn't look very pretty with rain coming down her hair and the veil all wet.
We met at 12 with my son and two other people.
We stood in that field.
As we stood in the field, my son picked out for men to stand up for him.
He had one particular man he sold real estate to that was not a Christian, but loved my
son and his family and what he stood for.
He lost his son at an early age and he picked up my son and he saw him as his son.
He was not a Christian, but he was a friend of the family's.
Andrew said, can I have him stand up?
He's 54 years old, father, but I said, if he's your friend, let him stand up.
This man kind of thought our religion was a little different.
He's standing out watching us as we're in the field now.
We knelt down and we prayed to our God.
As we stood up, I told Andrew to make his decision.
He says, father, what should I do?
The two people that were with me said, go for it, Andrew.
Your God won't desert you.
Andrew looked at me and he says, father, what do I do?
I says, Andrew, he's your God.
I've taught you to go to him.
I've taught you to make the decisions.
I can't believe that your God would turn his back on you now.
This is the most glorious day of your life.
I'm not going to tell you what to do, but I believe God will be with you.
What are you going to do, son?
My son stood there and pawed like a horse in the ground.
He's looking down.
He doesn't want to disappoint his bride.
She's expecting him to make a decision.
She's wondering what he's going to do.
As we're standing in the field making this decision, my son's wife is driving her from
her unit to the field.
Sarah is saying to Angela in the car, what do you think Andrew decided on?
Sarah says, well, look at the windshield wipers.
What do you think he decided?
But Sarah said, what do you think Andrew decided?
Angela is saying to Sarah, what do you think he did?
It's raining outside.
It's misting.
90% rain.
It's thundering.
What do you think your husband-to-be has decided?
But Sarah says, what do you think?
Andrew decided.
She wanted to be married outside, but she says, I'll leave the final decision in your
hand.
And Sarah's saying, I wonder what my man-to-be will do, will say.
What will he decide?
My son's pawing on the ground.
He's looking at the ground.
He says, Father, go ahead.
Tell him to set up.
God won't desert me.
I shut out the instructions.
Set up outside.
People came to me and said, Jim, you're crazy.
There's old women here.
It's misting outside.
The seats are getting wet.
You can't set up outside.
It's raining.
What are you doing?
You've gone this thing too far.
We've heard you preach about your God, but now you've gone too far.
Jim, use some common sense.
My friends are telling me that.
Women are telling me that.
Men are telling me that.
I says, the decision's made.
My son said, set up.
And so Sarah comes driving down, and she sees the chair.
She says, set up.
She says, Andrew's going to have the wedding outside.
My future husband says, go ahead with it.
And so they marched me down the aisle, and I sat in front at 1.55.
The wedding's at 2 o'clock.
As I sat there, Franklin, and 2 o'clock hit my watch, I felt the sun hit my face.
You remember it?
I looked back at Franklin and went, my God is real.
And an opening came over that field, and the sun came out.
There was clouds all around us.
It was dark all around us.
It was thundering around us.
But the sun opened.
And as Sarah marched down the aisle, and I met them up in front, I looked at those couples.
They stood in that platform.
I said, Sarah, take a look at your first wedding present.
It comes from God.
He came through for you.
And I looked at my son, and I said, thank you for standing in your God.
It was my first comments that I whispered to him in the pulpit.
I said, your God will never turn on you.
You didn't turn on your God.
We married that couple that day, and I was the last one to walk back down the aisle.
And as I walked back down the aisle, this man that Andrew had stand up for him, one
of four men, he's standing there.
He's crying.
His name is Jim.
I said, Jim, you were touched by the wedding.
He says, no, I wasn't touched by the wedding.
I was touched by your son's faith.
I stood out there, and he says, I watched your son and you kneel down in the field.
I says, these people have gone too far.
God can't do this.
They've taken this God thing too far.
He says, it's never going to sunshine out here.
He says, when I watched the clouds open, he says, I want to tell you, I believe in your
son's God.
And you tell Andrew, his God came through for him, I believe today I saw him there.
Some of you were there, weren't you?
You saw God come through.
Now, God wants you to stand in the shadow, brothers and sisters, but what if my son would
have said, set up an attempt?
What would have happened, brothers and sisters?
Would the son have come out?
Would his friend have been converted?
No, but my son was taught how to stand in the shadow of the Almighty, and God wants
you gentlemen to teach your sons how to stand in the shadow of the Almighty.
God wants you to teach your sons and your daughters that he's real.
He's there for you.
Yeah, you're going to have trials.
Yes, they're going to throw you in your lions den.
Yes, they'll throw you in a fiery furnace, but your God doesn't desert you.
And the world is waiting to see real Christianity in your life and your family.
When they see it, then they'll want our church.
Then they'll want our doctrines, not before.
When you find that and you got the greatest evangelism tool the world has ever seen, because
God is real and he doesn't desert you.
Would you kneel with me in prayer?
Father, I remember that day in the field when I was privileged to marry my son and you came
through, but Lord, you don't want to just come through for my son.
God is a respecter of no persons.
And there's many people here tonight, Lord, that are wrestling.
Is God real?
Will he come through for me?
Lord, teach these people that you're next to him right now.
You're standing there.
Let these people stand in your shadow.
Let them conquer.
Let you conquer their fears from them, their anxieties, their problems.
People here have illnesses and problems and sicknesses and trials and they're being beaten
up, but they need to stand under your shadow.
You're there, Father.
You're real.
May they taste and see that you're good.
We ask now that you bless each and every one of us in Jesus' name.
Amen.