A Spiritual Perspective Can Transform Your Life | Tony Evans Highlight

Dr. Tony Evans emphasizes the role of men in casting vision for their families and communities, urging us to start where we are and use what we have to fulfill God’s purpose for our lives.

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Dr. Tony Evans is the founder and senior pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, founder and president of The Urban Alternative and author of over 100 books, booklets and Bible studies. The first African American to earn a doctorate of theology from Dallas Theological Seminary, he has been named one of the 12 Most Effective Preachers in the English-Speaking World by Baylor University. Dr. Evans holds the honor of writing and publishing the first full-Bible commentary and study Bible by an African American. His radio broadcast, The Alternative with Dr. Tony Evans, can be heard on over 1,400 radio outlets daily and in more than 130 countries. Dr. Evans’ sermons are also streamed and downloaded over 20,000,000 times annually.

See, it’s the job of the Holy Spirit to tell you what he wants to do with you, what he wants you to move, the new thoughts he wants you to have, the vision he wants you to cast, the movement he wants you to make.
My sermon can’t tell you that. That’s once a week.
You need a relationship with the Holy Spirit so that he can speak to you directly.
God has given you something that he wants to grab and use for his glory and the good of others.
Where are you now in your life?
What is your situation that god wants you to be faithful to him in where you are right now.
Yeah. I know you praying for this, this and this, and keep praying for that, that, and that.
But what are you doing here, here, and now?
If there is no movement where you are, then what you’re saying is I don’t trust god here.
I’m only gonna trust him when I go there.
Shamgar, we find him on a farm.
One of the great tragedies far too often in the life of men is procrastination.
Serve the creator in the days of your youth. Don’t wait till you get old.
One of the things that far too many of us as men lack is vision.
Vision means looking further than you can see.
If all you see is what you see, you do not see all there is to be seen.
God specifically created men to express vision. When he created Adam, he says, Adam, here’s the garden.
Now I want you to take this raw material, and I want you to cultivate it, and I want you to develop it.
And I want you to turn it into something beyond what you started with.
A lot of times, men are asking their wives to follow a park bus.
Or Paka.
Because there has been no vision given for where god wants us to go.
It is the responsibility of the man to set forth vision.
The Bible says in, uh, Joel chapter 2 verse 28. Repeated again in acts chapter 2 verse 17.
It says, your sons shall have your younger sons shall have vision, and the old men will dream dreams.
Doesn’t bring the women into that. He says, the women shall prophesy.
But he says, it will be the men who will have visions and it will be the older men who will dream dreams.
So every man in here is supposed to be a vision caster and a dream maker.
So even though you may not have much right now, you should be sitting in front of your family to discussing with them, the vision god gives you for where he’s taking you, your family, your kids, where we are taking us, the community, the church, you’re supposed to be a vision cast.
And why? Because without a vision, people perish.
The reason why many men are having trouble with their wives as they’ve never given their wives a vision for where the family’s going.
So since she doesn’t have your vision to follow, she creates her own.
Then you get mad that she’s going in her own way when you’ve not given her a dream to go your way.
So it is the man’s role to cast a vision This is where we are.
I don’t like things as they are, so I’m going to seek god to give me a vision for what he wants to do to take it from where it is to where he wants it to be.
Shamgar was dissatisfied He’s a farmer, but he sees that he can’t travel down the main highway now.
The main highways are blocked. And so he takes an oxgord Yes. An oxgord.
Wait a minute. And I score, that’s for farming. That’s what you do.
You you prod the animal along so you can keep holding the plow.
You dig up the roots and the, the brushes that are in the way.
But because he’s a man of vision, it dawns on him.
I can use this ox gold. It’s pronounced ox gold.
I can use this ox gold for more than farming.
It says that he slew 600 Philestine with the ox gold.
He has 1 arch gold, and this 1 arch gold gets rid of 600 problems.
How many problems are in your life, in your world, in your job, on your career, how many problems are in your home, in your family?
You say there are dozens dozens of them He had 600. Yes. Yes. Yes. It is. He had one tool.
Yes. But because he knew how to use the one tool, the right way on the divine influence it was able to get the job done.
When god is ready to move, he don’t need a bunch of stuff, but he needs to own the stuff.
Sometimes, god will ask you to demonstrate your faith by asking you to do something opposite to your logic.
Because what’s getting a lot of us in trouble is our human understanding, our human logic.
This is the way we raise. This is what they taught me in school. This is what I’m used to.
This is what I think. This is how I feel.
And god said totally something else, and we never get around to the something else So we never see what our oxycod is.
If god could ever get ahold of, the ox gold in your life.
What he has handed you that he wants to use for something bigger than just your little small world because you’re dissatisfied with the confusion.
You’re dissatisfied with the crime. You’re dissatisfied with the chaos. You’re dissatisfied with the terrorism.
But now you want to take what god has given you handed back to him.
All David had was a stone. That’s all he had.
Who is this uncircumcised Philistine that would taunt the armies of the living god?
He just had a stone and a sling shot but he also had one thing.
He says, you come to me with all that equipment, Goliath.
I come to you in the name of the lord.
So let’s see what he does with this stone when I let it go.
Holy Ghost took the stone, drew it into Goliath’s head, he chopped off Goliath’s head and said, hey, y’all.
In other words, All he needed was what he had.
It just had to get sanctified by god.
So that it could now do something bigger than it could ever do on its own.
So the question on the floor now is How do you how do you defeat 600?
When it’s only you. Yeah. And all you have is an arch code. Yeah.
I mean, how do you how do you do that?
Well, you don’t do it all at one time.
It’s 600 coming at you at one time. K.
They had cut off all the roads, all the highways.
Which means they weren’t all in one place at one time. Yeah.
See, they’re spread out among the different highways.
So he had a bunch of gangs he had to deal with.
So he may have 25 here and 50 here, but he looked at his ox code and said, Yeah.
This could be a Tomahawk missile.
It’s sharp on one side, fat on the other side, and I know how to use it.
Because I’ve been following with this thing for years. God has given you something.
Every man has an axe code You may not even know what it is now, but if you are a man and you are a Christian, in fact, if you are a Christian at all, woman or man, but especially as a man, you have an axe goat.
God has given you something that he wants to grab and use for his glory and the good of others.
Right. I want you to have a bigger vision. You must start where you are.
You must use what you have. Uh, what was shenga’s secret?
What was the key that shifted his life so that he became a judge and one man saved the whole nation.
Yeah. Says he saved Israel. One man with an ox goad. What was his secret?
Well, you have to understand how you got to be a judge.
Let me show you the first judge, chapter 3 verse 10.
The spirit of the lord came upon him, and he judged Israel.
That is you know how you became a judge? God took over your life.
That’s how you became a judge.
The spirit of the lord came, and the spirit of the lord grabbed the the man and now empowered him to do stuff out of the ordinary.
He wants us to cultivate such a deep dynamic relationship with him all the time so that he owns your thoughts, own your decisions, own your feelings, owns your perspective so that he can overrule you because he owns you.
We told my one man gets rid of 600 Philistines and he saves a whole nation, get ready to fall apart.
Hear me now.
If Jesus Christ comes back tomorrow, We don’t have to worry about what’s happening in our nation.
But if he doesn’t come back for another 200 years, you better worry about what’s happening in our nation.
And god needs some men with some spiritual oxguards who will step up to the spiritual plate who will make a relationship with him, the number one driving force in their lives, who will operate underneath his rule so that he can sanctify the the oxycodone and do things that will blow your mind as he starts slaying things that are trying to get rid of you.
Means he’s gotta give you a vision. Yeah.
That means you gotta be close enough to hear his voice.
See, if you have a long distance relationship with god or smoke, Sunday morning only, if you if that’s your relationship with god, you’re not gonna hear him.
See, it’s the job of the Holy Spirit to tell you what he wants to do with you, what your ox gold is, what he wants you to move, the new thought he wants you to have, the vision he wants you to cast, the movie he wants you to make.
My sermon can’t tell you that. That’s once a week. You need a relationship with the Holy Spirit.
So that he can speak to you directly. You say, but how does he speak?
Well, let me explain how the holy spirit speaks.
When you’re in close proximity to him because he whispers so he doesn’t scream. He whispers.
And because he whispers, you gotta be in close proximity.
When you’re in close proximity, what he does is the Bible says in 1st Corinthians too, he brings the thoughts of god and he puts them in your mind.
So he brings god’s thoughts, and he registers them in your head so that now you begin to think god’s thoughts after him.
So when you begin to pray and you talk to god, you begin to speak things that your mind is thinking, but your mind is now thinking thoughts that the Holy Spirit has now put in your brain so that when you talk to god about what the Holy Spirit is put in your brain, the reason God has to answer it is he told you to think it in the first place, which made you say it when you prayed.
So he wants to hook you up in an intimate relationship so that you see what eyes have not seen here, what ears have not heard, and experience the Bible says in 1st Corinthians to what you never thought about historically.
God wants to give you new ideas as a man.
New brainstorm new initiatives, new ways to use old talents like the ox go.
He’s got all this stuff he wants to do, but he’s speaking head of respect.
So that’s why you wanna make time for god.
You wanna make time for god because he because that’s making time for you.
That’s giving him the right to give you new thoughts and visions