So I wanna challenge you, start off each morning
saying, God, fire me up.
God, light a fire within me.
Make me a worshiper and a warrior.
God, would you light a fire as I read your word?
Paul in writing his son in the faith, Timothy,
in his last will and testament before he's killed in Rome,
he writes in 2 Timothy 1.7,
for God has not given us a spirit of fear,
but of power and of love and of a sound mind.
This is the lionhearted man.
This is the man that's fully alive.
This is the man who has released the lion within
and is walking in the things of God.
He's full of power, love, and a sound mind.
In the palace of his heart,
that holy place is growing more passionately
in love with Jesus.
And so this is the lionhearted.
When your heart has a palace of the new heart living within,
and we're not walking in fear anymore,
and that's huge to break the power of fear through courage,
the courage of power, love, and a sound mind.
So demons guard this palace,
and we have to every day make a decision
that we're gonna go after our lionhearted potential.
We're gonna break through that.
And so demons of lust and self-gratification,
self-deception and shame
is often what we come into the kingdom of God with.
We carry that from the old life.
We carry that from our old experiences
where we weren't working with God.
We're not walking with God.
So I wanna talk about the blood qualities.
I'm using that term blood
because as I mentioned in the earlier episode,
this is the effort, this is the agony,
this is the fight that's involved
in following God, going after him.
And so we have this battle going on,
and we fight, I'm gonna say this,
we fight fire with fire, we fight blood with blood.
And so it's a war, man.
And each one of you men are in a war.
It's a spiritual war to take you out.
And that's why Jesus said,
the enemy comes to steal, kill, and destroy,
but I came to give you life
and life that's more abundantly.
And he put those two together as one,
it's not one sentence, but it's like one thought
that there is a enemy who's gonna steal, kill,
and destroy everything that you have.
Or you can go after life, life abundantly.
So you can't get life abundant
unless you're willing to take on the enemy.
So that's the war that we're in.
So what are the blood qualities?
I think of three.
I think of three qualities of a lion-hearted man.
And this is not easy, you guys, it's actually really hard.
And it takes effort every single day, but it's worth it.
If you're gonna be successful at anything,
if you're gonna be effective in anything in your life,
it's gonna take a real effort on your part
and willpower and God's power
working together in partnership.
So the first I would say is blood fire.
This is a fire in your belly, it's a fire in your heart.
Fired up because you love God.
Fired up because you're loving God
with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
So there's a fire.
Well, fire burns things.
And so that's why I like to use the word fire here
because fire comes from the heart
and God has this man's heart.
And I think it begins with getting up in the morning
and getting fire from God by spending time in his word.
I can't tell you how many pastors I know,
how many leaders I know who do not even regularly
spend time in seeking God through what we call around here
PB&J, prayer, Bible, and journal.
They just go right into their study
or they go right into their Bible reading
for maybe a talk they're gonna give
or because they feel like they have to,
but they're not really getting on fire.
So I wanna challenge you,
start off each morning saying, God, fire me up.
God, light a fire within me.
Make me a worshiper and a warrior.
God, would you light a fire as I read your word?
And then work your way through the scriptures.
I mean, read a chapter at a time,
maybe more than one chapter, but maybe take a book.
Like right now, I'm in a time of fasting and prayer
as I'm giving this message, day 19 of 21 day fast.
and I've been going through the book of Daniel.
So I've been digging into Daniel for various reasons
and why God led me to Daniel.
But God will lead you.
And so you have a book of the Bible,
you work your way through it.
Then you have your journal right there.
And you write in your journal
what God's speaking to you about.
My journal during this time of fasting and prayer
is full of my prayers that I know,
I know God's gonna answer.
I know God's gonna answer each one of those prayers.
Some of them are for the church, some are for the community
and some are for my family, different members of our family
that I'm praying.
And there's something about fasting and prayer
that releases the fire of God in a whole nother intensity,
whole nother level.
So you need bloody fire.
You need blood fire in your life.
You gotta ask for it.
You gotta ask God to light that fire again in your life.
As a matter of fact, I would argue
that there's sometimes sin and strongholds in your life
that need to be burned out.
Not even just always decided,
I'm not gonna do that anymore.
I mean, that should be a part of it, a decision.
But you have to burn them out.
And what I mean by that is that there's fires of passion
that are not good.
There's fires of lust that are not good.
Well, how are you gonna get rid of fire?
We hit fire with fire.
So you take a stronger flame to put out the smaller flame.
So like we do campfires around our house.
We have a big fire pit in the back
and I have this propane tank with a hose
that comes out of it.
And then I light that thing with a spark
and it's a flamethrower.
So this flamethrower comes and I light the wood with that.
Well, let's just imagine
that there's just this little tiny little fire there.
It's not gonna ever heat up the place.
It's not gonna go anywhere.
But I come in with the bigger fire.
That bigger fire takes over that smaller fire.
So in your life, you need a ferocious flaming forest fire
of your heart for God to overwhelm those sinful fleshly
other fires in your life.
So first, have a blood fire eruption in your life.
Ask God for that.
Number two, blood purpose.
This is a man with a clear vision
or a clear purpose for his life.
This means you're using your job,
your marriage and your relationships toward a purpose.
There's a purpose to your life.
There's a purpose and a vision when you get up.
The scriptures say without a vision, the people perish.
Or another way that's in the Hebrew can be translated
as without a vision, the people are unrestrained.
So there's no guidance to our lives without a vision.
So it's discovering your purpose.
It's discovering your vision.
I believe you need a job that's within that vision.
You need a marriage within that vision.
You need relationships within that vision.
And so you have a purpose for this earth.
You're put on this earth for a purpose, men.
And one of the purposes is for you to be at a job
and in your destiny, the money that you're making
is under a clear purpose.
And I believe the greatest purpose is to seek first
the kingdom of God and his righteousness
and all these things shall be added unto you.
That's what Jesus said.
So we need meaning.
We need meaning and meaning guides our life
and meaning only comes from God.
And so to have a blood purpose means that you're going after
and asking God for what your vision is.
And I've been an archer different times in my life,
hunted elk and deer with a bow.
And when you're practicing,
you've got a clear focus on the target.
So you pull back that bow.
You got a peep that looks through to these small pins
that are on the compound bow.
You line that up and you fire your arrow.
Well, if you don't know how to line up the pins
with the peep for the target of your life,
you're just random, man.
You're just wandering around, not clear what you're doing.
So I want to challenge you to have a blood purpose.
Ask God to give you purpose and vision.
Find the bullseye.
What's the bullseye for your life?
It's huge that you get that.
And so you've got to seek God for that.
And God will show you.
I'll speak to you, but it starts with seeking first the kingdom of God.
So it's, again, it's prayer, Bible, journal.
It's getting into God.
It's getting into his word.
It's being with other bloodstained allies, other men in your life that can also guide
you, Christian men, to help you find your purpose.
So blood fire, blood purpose, and then lastly, and this kind of ties it all up is blood discipline.
Harness your fire, harness your vision through the ability to have delayed gratification
in your life.
And what I mean is to be able to wait on the gratification of even your purpose and the
fire that you have because it's power and love in concert with each other through discipline.
You're not, you're not supposed to be tame.
You're supposed to be wild.
You're supposed to be lion hearted.
Well that has to be harnessed, that has to be controlled, and that harnessing, that control
is called discipline in your life.
And you're not a gelding.
So a gelding is a castrated, emasculated horse.
God's called you to be a racehorse, and a racehorse is a disciplined horse that knows
the vision, knows the fire within, and can run the race that's set before them.
And so that's what you got to have, and if you're not a very disciplined person, you're
not going to go anywhere in your life.
So discipline comes through accountability, accountability, best accountability is to
yourself where you have intrinsic motivation, but some of you have grown up in an environment
where you never had to be disciplined.
So you may need extrinsic motivation.
In other words, having others speak into your life to help you be disciplined, to get
up early, spend time with the Lord, to show up to work early, to do your job, to lead
others.
In Hebrews, the writer of Hebrews says, therefore we also, since we're surrounded by so great
a cloud of witnesses, in other words there's other people in our lives that we're accountable
to, let us lay aside every weight and the sin which so easily ensnares us.
So what that means is the discipline it takes, the fire it takes to move away from sin in
our life, to not go where sin is, to renew our minds away from the sin that ensnares
us and pulls us down.
Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.
So God has set a race before you, men.
You got to run that with endurance.
It takes endurance.
It's not a sprint, it's a marathon.
Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.
So we don't look at ourselves, we don't look in the mirror and say, well, how am I doing?
As much as we look to Jesus and say, that's my model, that's my mentor, that's the one
I'm going after.
I'm going to keep my eyes on Jesus.
So that's how we have blood discipline in our lives.
So I challenge you, men, that this can be done by anyone.
And I think that a lot of times people who failed the most actually end up having the
most success because they decide to change, they want to quit.
And they don't quit.
They keep fighting back.
So I challenge you, men, to become a fiery, disciplined, caring, loving person through
controlling your emotions and going after that life, the life that you care about.
It's the life that you really want.
And it's the lion-hearted man.
It's the lion-hearted man.