WHO are YOU After the Storm?

Who are you in the storm? And who are you after? You've prayed that prayer. You know the one I'm talking about. The foxhole prayer. You know that thing about if you get me out of this, if I survive this, I'll do this or that. Lord, I'll never do this or that again. Been there, done it. I'll accept responsibility. You've prayed that prayer. I don't honestly know anybody that hasn't. The foxhole prayer. You know what I'm saying? You meant every word of it. God, get me through this and I'll change everything. Not just some things, everything. Way overboard, you know. Not just the one thing. God, I'll give up the addiction. I'll I'll give up the predilection to that thing that I know I shouldn't do. The habit. The hurt, the hangup. This thing that I'm in right now, that if it pops off, I'm in deep trouble. Best I can tell my life is ruined. Somebody else's life is ruined. About time you cared, right? God get me through this, and I'll and I will change everything. And he did. He got you through it. He got you through it. And the second the pressure lifted, the problem went away, you got a reprieve. You know, and it happened quietly. You didn't even notice it leaving the room. It happens just so quietly. Pharaoh prayed that exact prayer three times in this chapter. Three times he meant it in the moment. Three times the morning after, he was right back to being exactly who he was before the storm ever showed up. In chat, someone just said, one of our beloved regular listeners, which I'll tell you what, I don't take any of you for granted. God bless you. Just said too much to count, me too. Me too. I say it and I mean it. God has been better to me than I ever deserved. Three times Pharaoh, the morning after, remember, his people are, you know, these plagues are horrific. He was right back to being exactly who he was before the storm. He he was he was who he was. The seconds before any of the plagues ever showed up. Exodus or Shemot nine. Chapter nine, it's a mirror. Good morning. Good morning, good morning, good morning. I love how sweet and polite our live chat is. I've been guests on many other shows, and the live chat is definitely not like ours. Exodus 9 is a mirror, and most of us we won't love what's looking back at us. Oh, shalom and welcome to True Word Faith for Life. I'm Dr. Sean. This is True Word Faith for Life with Dr. Sean and SHAWN. And uh if you're on the YouTube channel and you haven't subscribed, I'd love it if you did. Click on like, thumbs up, and all notifications on the little bell. This is day 62, and some of you have been with us from the beginning, live from the beginning. And then some, hey Russ, how you doing? Good to see you. Some of you have been with us from the beginning and and been every single episode live. Amazing. Some of you can only listen on playback, and um, there's nothing wrong with that. You know, you might be at work already, or or you know, there there's one uh there's one guy that listens faithfully, and he every morning he catches a plane, a small, you know, commuter jet, catches a plane very early in the morning, lands, goes to his job. It's not really a job, it's a big-time career, but and then he uh goes into his office, he does his things, his secretary lines up everything or has everything lined up, and then he listens. You know, while he's doing other things. He calls it a meditative state, but he said sometimes the meditation is broken either by laughter or tears. And that's kind of how my book is True Word, Faith for Life. It's I say right in the beginning, I say, look, you know, don't blame me. If you drink coffee and you and you uh you know do a spit take and because you're laughing um when you didn't expect it, I I tell you, don't drink anything while you're reading it. I mean, drink, but drink turn your face away, drink, and then go back. Swallow. Don't, you know, because you sometimes you will spit. And it's right in there. And they think I'm kidding. People have sent me pictures of their books with Sprite or coffee or tea or whatever, spit all over it because they bust out laughing. And then there are some that say, hey, I cried. Bunch of my tears hit this page. It's a real book. It's it's there's nothing fancy about it. Yeah. Maybe get a copy for somebody. And you get it at TruewordfaithforLife.com store. Oh, pretty easy. You can get it in any bookstore. You can order it online on any place, but where we do the best is when you order it direct. Um, because the rest of them give us a dollar. Hello, Linda. Hello to you all, Robbie and and Russ and and uh Dragonfly Three Wings and Nicole and To Be Continued 25, which is an excellent, excellent YouTube uh channel. It's really, really something special. Good morning to you all. Linda, I can't thank you and Susan enough. My gosh, that one knocked me over. I won't read what you all wrote, but and what you did, but I'll never ever forget it. And it has already helped immensely. Tammy, hello Tammy, good to see you. Good morning. Yeah, so get a copy for somebody who's been white knuckling their way through life. Maybe they're white knuckling their way through a storm without ever asking, well, why does this keep coming back around? That's that's a good book for them. So today's question, I mean it's a real question. What are you like the morning after the storm? What are you like the morning after the storm? Let's go in. Why not? We're here. Three plagues. Three plagues right here, each heavier than the last. First, every animal in Egypt dies. And I love animals. I love all of these animals. Horses, donkeys, camels, herds, flocks, all of it. Israel's livestock, same land, same sky, untouched. Now, I mean, picture this. I used to ride a motorcycle, rode one for I think 22 years. Hundreds of thousands of miles on a motorcycle. Kid you not. I would ride ridiculous, super hot, rode uh several times down at nine degrees. Uh my my benchmark became 15 degrees. Below 15, couldn't do it. I could do it, but it'd be stupid. Anyway, I I remember several times riding, uh, especially, you know, way out west, where the expanses are super long, and it's raining on, I mean, it's pouring on one side of the road. Generally, where I was riding, and on the other side of the road, nothing. I mean, literally the side of the road, bone dry. Wild. That's kind of how this is. I mean, all of Israel's livestock, they're on the same land, same sky above. Untouched. Completely untouched. Oh, Russ, okay. You say the volume is too low. Um, gosh, we're cranked up into the red. Uh, let's see what we can do here. We'll go there. Now we're we're solidly in the red. I hope that uh hope you can hear it now. I don't know if there's a function on your phone you can turn up, but suffice it to say. You can't get rid of the sin until you get rid of the root of it and remove it completely. A change is required. Amen. Amen. Russ, I hope that this is better for you. Uh but we're we're solidly in the red, so hopefully I'm not blowing everybody's ears out. So I I want you to have that image because it's important before we go forward. You have to, you have to really, you have to really see what this is what what's really going on here. You have to get in, you have to get that image of one side of the road, terror. The other side of the road, peace. Pharaoh sends people to check. I mean, it's it's um is this real? Have the have the Israelites actually not lost anything? Is this not affecting them? So he literally sends people to check, and they come back, they go, yep, it's true. Not one animal lost, and his heart hardens anyway. That's us. Thank you all for the sound check. Appreciate it. Hopefully, uh Russ, I hope that you can you can hear it now. But maybe hit that volume on your, if you're listening on a phone, if you're listening on a computer, typically on your keyboard, there's a volume thing, but there's also a slider out there. Might hit that. Let me know if that works out. I appreciate you listening and hanging on and let me know and letting me know that you can't hear it. You we've all been in this place, right? Where I mean, maybe we all have it. Maybe it's just me. And I don't say that flippantly. Maybe, maybe you have lived a better life than me, but I got I got spared. Or I was facing impending doom or somebody I loved or cared about anyway, somebody that mattered. And my heart was still hard. Second, Moses throws soot from a furnace into the air. And I hate this for the suffering that people endure, but he throws the soot from the furnace in the air, and boils break out on every Egyptian, man and beast. The same magicians who matched Aaron's staff back in chapter 7, if you remember that, they can't even stand in front of Moses now. They're covered in their own sores. God hardens Pharaoh's heart. You know what, Susan? That is an excellent suggestion. Thank you so much, by the way. And I can't thank you enough for this. Both for what you put in it, which still I can't believe, and and for what you wrote on it. And I don't know who wrote it. Somebody did. It's signed by both of you, but I'll just tell you this. Brought me to tears. Still does. And it was put to use immediately. Good lands, I love you people. Yeah, earbuds. Great suggestion. So God hardens Pharaoh's heart. That's an interesting statement. We'll we'll we'll unpack that in a little bit. Third, the hail. And this time God warns Egypt before it fails. It falls. God warns them. He goes, hail's coming. Get undercover. Whoever listens, lives. Whoever doesn't, doesn't. And you know the Lord isn't playing around. Because remember, that big old boat and Noah. And the eight people. You know he don't play. He gave a warning. Remember, he gave 120 years of warning while Noah was building the boat. And people didn't listen. Get undercover. Whoever lives lives, and whoever doesn't, doesn't. Some of Pharaoh's own officials believe it and they bring their households in. The rest leave everyone. They just don't care. They leave everybody out in the field. And the hail comes down, mixed with fire. And look, we can read this and say, wow, people are stupid. These people are stupid. I can't believe these people are stupid. They had all these warnings. And look, they're still, still not listening. We get all those warnings. I've gotten all those warnings. I still didn't listen. And that's how we are. 500 people saw Yeshua transcend to heaven. They saw him resurrected. They knew he died, and they saw him transcend to heaven. And only about 120, 125 followed him and became followers of the way. The rest, all by the wayside. They saw it happen. They also saw miracles. Raising people from death to life. The hail comes down mixed with fire. Nothing, nothing that Egypt has ever seen. Flattening every crop. Every crop that was still standing, it's gone now. And right in the middle of it, hail still falling, Pharaoh calls for Moses and says the words. I'm wrong. My people are wrong. Plead for me. I'll let you go. God whispers to us in our pleasures and shouts to us in our pain. We say, why do bad things happen? Why does all this stuff happen? Look, I don't know the answer to that. I don't. You say, well, you're a theologian. I mean, I could give you some theologian sort of answers. Some very academic answers that sound really good. I can just tell you, I still don't know. I don't know how to answer that. I mean, I do. But I don't. Look, the Moses prays and the hail stops and thunder goes silent. And the moment the sky clears, the text doesn't soften it, by the way. Pharaoh sinned again and hardened his heart. And he is in his officials with him. So wait a second. He just prayed this prayer. I sinned, I was wrong. My people were wrong. Pray to your God. Help us out here. And then the moment the sky cleared, the moment the problem left, the moment the pressure lifted, the moment the destruction was abated. Not just him, but his officials, the people also. Please, please help us. Three Hebrew words that get used for Pharaoh's hardening across the whole sequence. And they matter. It's important to know. Ancient Near Eastern language, culture, and context, it matters. Otherwise you won't understand it. Shazak. To grow stubborn. Chashah, to grow harsh. Chabed, to grow heavy. The Hebrew word for glory. Isn't that interesting? The weight that should have belonged to God's glory had piled up instead of instead into the the weight of one man's pride. The weight should have belonged to God's glory. But it didn't. It piled up instead into the weight of one man's pride. Pharaoh. Until even the boils on his own skin couldn't shift it. Glory misdirected. It doesn't disappear. It just turns into a different kind of weight. It's the kind that crushes instead of lifts. Watch the pattern. Because it's the pattern to watch. It's the pattern to watch for in yourself. The pressure comes, Pharaoh confesses. Pressure lifts, Pharaoh hardens. Every single time. Like clockwork. Like something running on a timer. He doesn't even know how he doesn't even know he's set. Doesn't know how it happens. He wasn't actually talking to God in that moment. He was negotiating with the pain. We do that. I know some listening are in intractable pain. I live that every moment of every day. It's a horrific pain. I thank God that I've had the training that I've had to be able to navigate it. I'm not asking for your sympathy. I'm just explaining to you. What I learned to do, what I was trained to do, is don't negotiate with the pain. Well, please, it's gonna be, it's gonna not hurt this bad in five minutes. That's how we do. I'm not mocking. This is how we do. Horrific pain, mind-bending pain. Pain that changes your sight. And you make deals. And you think, oh man, in five minutes, in 30 seconds, it's gotta be less, or I'm just gonna fold. Nicole is absolutely. Right. I'll put it on the screen. Our response to God's warnings not only affect us but those around us. It has a ripple effect. I mean that's true. Negotiating with the pain. Those two things feel identical from the inside. Right? This is what they feel. They feel just alike. That negotiating with pain I learned, you know, in training and and I guess in my younger life. I did not have a fluffy childhood. So you learn, you learn to negotiate a little bit, you learn to manage. You learn to not cave. Those two things feel the same. In that moment, they feel the same from the inside. And that's exactly what makes this chapter so uncomfortable. Listen, look, people will say, Oh, I don't even read the Old Testament. You can tell the pages don't even move when they open their Bible, it's just the New Testament is their own thing. And if they write in their Bible, they've only written in the New Testament. I'm not throwing shade here. It's just, I mean, you you're we're day 62 in Exodus 9. And I'm hoping that you see how important this is. Scripture refuses to let us pretend that they're the same just because they sound the same coming out of someone's mouth. There's a difference. There's a difference between sorrow that just wants the hell to stop. It just wants the pain to stop. The sorrow that just wants the pain, the trouble, the disaster, the unrelenting pain just to stop. There's a difference between that and sorrow that turns toward God once it does to Yeshua. One's relief, the other's repentance. This chapter hands you both in the same man, in the same hour, so the gap between them cannot be missed by anybody paying attention. If you read it and you're paying attention, you can't miss it. But I want you to notice what God does in response. He doesn't argue with Pharaoh's confession in the moment. He lets the hail stop, exactly as promised. God honors the words even while he already knows. He already knew what Pharaoh would do. He already knows what we'll do. God honors the words even while already knowing the heart behind them hasn't actually moved. It hasn't actually repented, it hasn't actually changed. Nice words. Pharaoh said some really nice words, but eh. That's patience refusing to give up even on a confession this thin. We've given some thin confessions in our lives, have we not? This is where it stops being about Pharaoh. How many of us have meant it? That foxhole prayer completely. I mean, we meant it. In the moment, in the waiting room. God, please save my kid. God, please save my spouse. God, please save the person I love so much, I can't envision them being gone. Please don't let, you know, the diagnosis, please don't let it be. Anything that's going to end a life of someone I love. You're in the car after the diagnosis, in the middle of the fight that nearly ended your marriage. This time I have sinned. I'll change everything. I promise. Just get me through this. And we pray it fervently. And then the results come back clear, right? The tests come back clear. Hey, you're good. It's just this thing. This is easy to fix, no worries. Or the marriage settles. Or somehow or another the bill gets paid. And the urgency just leaves the room without anybody deciding it should. It didn't, it didn't stop mattering. It just stopped feeling urgent the moment the hail stopped falling. We didn't renounce the promise. We just quietly stopped keeping it. Be careful with your Lord, I promise. We just stopped keeping it. No big grand announcement. You know, the way you kind of forget about your New Year's resolution by February 1st. You don't announce it. You don't announce that you're done with it. You don't announce that you're finished trying. You don't announce that you're giving up on this or that that you said you would. That's not malice. It's just what an unguarded heart does on its own. Left to drift back toward whatever it was doing before the crisis. Whatever the crisis was before that crisis interrupted it, drifted right back to it. Which is exactly why it has to be named instead of assumed away. Naming is the only thing that breaks the cycle Pharaoh never broke. I say it a lot, and we're we're going through this thing, walking the story of God. You've noticed some things repeated. You gotta name it. Cannot change what you don't acknowledge. Here's the only test that tells you the truth. What does your ordinary prayer life look like on an ordinary Tuesday, an ordinary Wednesday? There's nothing on fire. There's no major trouble in your life. Things are good. There's nothing forcing your hand. You're not in the foxhole. The bullets aren't flying. The problem isn't happening. The disaster isn't impending. It's the Tuesday or like today if you're listening live Wednesday. It's not the foxhole, it's just this day of the week. That's where the real answer lives. How's your prayer life then? Because you know what? Anybody can sound sincere when the hail is just falling on their head. The Wednesday doesn't have hail falling. The Wednesday only has whatever's actually true about your heart. That's what's true about your heart. How do you talk with God when there's not a crisis? If your relationship with God needs a crisis to stay warm, if your relationship with God needs a crisis to feel real, that's worth sitting with honestly today. Before the storm does the sitting for you. People you love are gonna die. People you love are gonna get sick. People you love are gonna be in car crashes. People you love are gonna be victimized by something. They're innocent. You may, you may end up facing terrible, terrible things. And you will. Look again at the boils. Egypt's most powerful men, the ones who'd matched God's signs before, the ones who'd thrown down staffs that turned into serpents. Now they're covered in sores, and they can't escape. They can't heal, and they can't even hide behind a robe. Centuries later, a prophet would write of a coming servant, despised, afflicted, and by his wounds we would be healed. Yeshua carried his own body in his own body. The affliction Egypt's magicians they couldn't carry in theirs. They were buried under a judgment that no way out, no power left to fight it. He bore one too, willingly, on purpose, so we wouldn't have to carry ours. That's the difference between the boils and the cross. The boils were judgment with nowhere to go. The cross was judgment that went somewhere on purpose. On to someone who never deserved it, never earned it, someone who chose it, so it would never have to land on you. The same God who warned Egypt before the hail, before it ever fell, he's warning you now, before your next storm. It's not to punish you, but to give you somewhere to stand. Pharaoh treated every warning as just one more thing to survive until the next one came. Crisis management. Yeshua, Jesus, is asking you to treat this one differently as an invitation to actually stay, not just to get through, but to stay. Look, if you want to obey concretely, and and most of your notes to me, they and I appreciate every one of them, whether direct or through, true wordfaithforlife.com slash contact or the little voice thing. I've gotten a few of the voice messages, and they're powerful. You only have two minutes. Everything is free. We pay so you don't have to. If you want to concrete people say to me in their notes, you know, well, how do I live this out? What do these things I'm learning, you know, you're saying these things, and I'm learning these things, and I'm reading through the Bible in a way I never have before, but I don't know what to do with it. Here's what to do with it. First, go back to the last storm you prayed your way through. When the hail was falling. When the boils were there. And and be honest with what you promised God right in the middle of all that. Write it down. Keep a journal. Write it down. If you have to. Most of us never actually look at the promise again once the storm passes. I say write it down, and I don't say that in a cavalier way. I'll tell you why. There's a Holderness family, they do comedy on social media. So it's generally a husband and wife, but sometimes the kids are involved. They're very handsome, and she's very pretty, and they're they're they're actually older than they look, uh, but still young, substantially younger than me, and and the husband, uh, who is a lovely human being, um, has come out and said that he's early onset Alzheimer's. I say write it down because he, if he doesn't write things down quickly that matter, they'll be lost. I know this personally. Things that I thought that had some power or influence to it. And I said, you know, yeah, at some point I'll write it down. And I didn't. There were many times reading through scripture, I didn't write stuff down. Wow, that hit me. That made me think this or that. I didn't write it down. Write it down. Doesn't matter what your handwriting is like, doesn't matter what you'll have to have some fancy book or a fancy pen. Just write it down. Write down that storm. Most of us never actually look at the promise again once the storm passes, by the way. Number two, uh check whether you kept it. Not how you felt about the promise, not whether you meant it sincerely in the moment. What did you actually do once the pressure lifted? Write it down. In the weeks after, when nobody was checking and nothing was forcing you. Number three, if you didn't keep it, say so to God plainly today. On the ordinary Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday or Friday. Nothing's on fire. It's not urgent. That's the prayer that actually counts. The one with no hail forcing it out of you. I have for you today a challenge and a choice. What did you promise God the last time you were desperate? Did you keep it once you weren't desperate anymore? Be specific about how. Is your faith something that shows up only when something's burning down? Or is it something that it's just as real on a quiet, ordinary weekday with nothing at stake? Here's your choice in this chapter. Here is what this chapter, there's a choice that this chapter puts right in front of you. Keep being someone different in the storm than you are right after the storm. Or today, the calm day. Be where you finally mean it all the way through. I want you to pray with me. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, clear your mind. We're gonna st we're gonna converse with God. Heavenly Father, in the name of Yeshua, forgive us for the prayers we meant in the moment and forgot by morning. Thank you that you don't measure us only by our crisis prayers, that you're patient enough to wait for the steady ones, too. For everyone who just realized how much they sound like Pharaoh, give them the courage to mean it today, with nothing forcing their hand in Yeshua's name. Amen. Maybe the storm you've been negotiating with isn't a circumstance at all. Maybe it's the weight of your own life before God. You've been waiting for things to calm down before you finally deal with it. They won't calm down enough. They won't. Deal with this now. Stop putting it off. You may not get a chance to do this. And your eternity rests on the next few moments. Pray this with me. Yeshua, I need you. I believe you died for me, you rose from the grave. I surrender my life to you today. Please forgive me, fill me, lead me. I am yours. Amen. If you just prayed that and you meant it, welcome to the family. Go to true wordfaithforlife.com slash contact or just hit the contact button or the little thing on the side. Let us know. We want to walk with you from here. We have and do walk with countless people. We help them, we give them resources. We'll help you too. If this is your first time with us, and look, we if you're listening, you're like, what's happening here? We've been walking through scripture chronologically since Genesis. Start at day one. Go back, it's free. True Word, Faith for Life with Dr. Sean, S-H-A-W-N. You go to the YouTube channel, you click on that, boom. You can listen to that while you're staying current. It's designed to work that way. The hail stopped. The sky cleared, and Pharaoh's heart went right back to being heavy. You don't have to follow him there. You don't have to follow him there. The storm was never the test. The storm wasn't the test. We think it's the test. It's not the test. It's not the actual test. The test is what you do once it's quiet again. That is the test. Have you ever thought of that? Or maybe today's the day, the first time that that has resonated with you. And you think, wow, all this time I thought the storm was the test, but not the test. What you do once it's quiet again, that is the test. Mean it on Wednesday, mean it on Thursday, mean it on Friday, not just in the storm. Look, everybody knows somebody. They're all in during the crisis and they're all out the moment it passes. Send them this one. Tell them the real test isn't the storm, it's the morning after. I'm gonna pray a blessing over you. I'm gonna pray it first in Hebrew, I'll translate it. You say, why? Why do you do that? It's weird. Are you trying to be a Jew? No. But I'd be honored if I was born a Jew. Not for nothing, but our Lord is a Jew. Not was, is, and always will be, a Jew. The language of God. I do a whole podcast on why Hebrew. Why? Why Aramaic? It's the language of God. You ready? May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. Tomorrow morning, Lord willing, I'll be right here. Tomorrow morning will hit you in the face. It won't be long. But it can change your life if you let it. Tomorrow morning, 7 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, every Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, every Sunday, we summarize and deepen everything that we didn't have time to go into. Until then. Shalom Bishem Yeshua. Shalom Alaikum.