Behind the Bucking Chutes
Sometimes we represent sponsors or our own interests better than we give Jesus
By Scott Hilgendorff / Cowboys of the Cross
When a cowboy or bull rider reaches a level where he gets a corporate sponsorship, he works for that sponsor. When we own our own business, we want employees that represent us to the public well and we think twice about how we speak to someone. We take our commitment to our sponsor seriously and we care that he or she or the business is well-represented.
Really, it’s a terrible comparison to how we should represent Jesus and why we should take his instructions to us from the Bible seriously. The sponsorship or business ownership example doesn’t come close to the importance of following Jesus but it at least gets us looking in the right direction.
2 Corinthians 5:20-21 We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. 21 God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
To be the righteousness of God means that when we are truly saved through our faith in Jesus and our request for forgiveness through our repentance of sin, that despite our faults, mistakes, failures and sin, God now sees us as perfect, right before Him.
Once we’re saved, we become ambassadors of Jesus, something far more important than representing a brand paying your fees at the PBR and NFR. Jesus paid the penalty for your sin and gave you eternal life. Now we have a chance to both show others how Jesus has changed our lives by making us right with God and to tell them how to receive the same.
We also need to hold tightly to grace because as we try to live like Jesus, God knows we’re going to fail. One of the main points of receiving His grace is not so we can intentionally make mistakes and go on living the way we want to, but because He knows we’re going to blow it. Sometimes it’s privately or seen only by our closest family and friends and sometimes it’s in traffic with our “God is my copilot” bumper sticker there for everyone to see. Sometimes it’s in how we’re speaking to an employee in the lumber store because they ordered the wrong product for you and your job is going to be delayed as your Philippians 4:13 tattoo is showing on your t-shirted arm.
We’re going to blow it.
But are we living like we believe God’s word is true? Are we living like we believe what Jesus did on the cross for each and every one of us is the real deal and that our salvation is real? Do we take him seriously when he commands us to go into the world and tell others about him and teach them now to walk in his ways?
We can’t walk in His ways if he don’t open God’s word in the Bible, pursue the teaching that’s out there or even take time to talk to Him in prayer.
1 John 2:4-6 Whoever says “I know him” but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, 5 but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him: 6 whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.
A lot of us would tell someone we’re a Christian if asked what our ‘religion’ is, but without a life-changing, saving faith in Jesus Christ, it’s the same as what John is saying here, we aren’t really Christians. We may not even understand or realize it. We don’t know we’re lying because we’re lying to ourselves and think we’re going to Heaven. We can’t judge whether someone is saved or not but we can certainly wonder based on how someone chooses to live. If we say we believe in Jesus we should live like we do and want to follow his commandments.
The fact many of us identify as Christians but don’t should rock a lot of us to our core. We take it with so little seriousness that when the day comes that we stand before God and are denied the kingdom of Heaven, there is no excuse. Right here, right now, if you’re reading this and don’t know if you’re saved or not, one sign is whether or not how you live your life lines up with what John is saying. John walked with Jesus. I think we should take his words seriously even if it was 2,000 years ago.
Temporary happiness can come from a buckle, eternal joy comes from God
By Scott Hilgendorff / Cowboys of the Cross
It’s pretty common in the culture around us that people pursue what makes them happy. Half the advertisements on tv are showing people being made happy driving expensive trucks or using the latest phone upgrades.
We tell ourselves to chase our dreams or that we only have one life to live, so we should do whatever we need to make us happy.
We should cut loose the people who make us unhappy. We should surround ourselves with people who help us make our dreams come true.
It isn’t that God wants us to be unhappy, but these are lies that take our focus off of Him.
Matthew 6:19-21 Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, 20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Verse 21 in particular makes it clear that what we chase reveals what we value the most—the pursuit of worldly happiness that is temporary and easily taken from us or destroyed, or the hope of eternal joy in Heaven.
It’s okay to have goals. How we work to achieve them can be done in a way that points people to Jesus and brings God glory. But when our happiness depends on winning a buckle at a rodeo finals or qualifying for the PBR and we don’t achieve that goal, it can be devastating for some of us.
And cutting people loose who we think hold us back from our dreams isn’t as Biblical as surrounding ourselves with mature Christians who can help us grow more like Jesus while working to restore broken relationships and pointing others to Jesus.
God isn’t asking us to be miserable in our time here. He knows there are going to be plenty times where we face challenges and hardships. He gives us teaching and encouragement in the Bible to help us get through those difficult times.
And He created what we call the fruit of the Spirit which are attributes that grow inside of us that show us our salvation is real as we become more and more like Jesus.
Galatians 5:22-23 22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.
Joy, as one of those fruits, can still be a temporary feeling but it’s something that can get stronger in us each time we feel it and it is largely tied to seeing and interacting with the world through our understanding of who we are as Christians and what the Bible teaches us.
Joy is much deeper than happiness and while there will be times we feel sadness, joy can always be found when we turn our attention to God and all the good that waits for us in Heaven. Pursuing joy brings glory to God while pursuing happiness is all about ourselves.
Psalm 16:11 You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
A rodeo producer needs people with different skills, God gives us all different skills to use for Him
By Scott Hilgendorff / Cowboys of the Cross
Auctioneers, book keepers, back pen workers, truck drivers. Those are just a few of the people needed to get the cattle onto the sales arena floor and back out the door in someone’s stock trailer for a sales barn to be successful.
Judges, secretaries, back pen workers and truck drivers. Those are just a few of the people needed to get the stock loaded in the chutes and the rodeo off the ground for a successful event to be held.
To larger or smaller degrees, each person already has specialized skills or has to be trained to fill each roll but together, they all play a part in the event being able to come together.
We may not see how it all fits together, but for Christians, we all have a role to play in what we know as The Great Commission, where Jesus commanded us to tell others about him and to teach those who choose to believe and follow him.
1 Corinthians 12:12-20 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 13 For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.
14 For the body does not consist of one member but of many. 15 If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. 16 And if the ear should say, …18 But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. 19 If all were a single member, where would the body be? 20 As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.
This is just one of several sets of verses that show how we have different strengths and gifts. Those gifts together still make up the body of Christ, who we all are as believers, and how we all work together for God’s purpose.
Ephesians 2:10 For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
With a saving faith in Jesus through his death on the cross for us, we are then given work to do that God has prepared for us. We know the biggest part of that is to tell others about Jesus while also helping other believers to grow in our faith. Each of us has been given different strengths that God will then use as we go into the world to serve and minister to others in the places God places us.
Together, all our strengths and gifts work to accomplish the ‘good works’ that God has prepared for us to do as Paul mentions in Ephesians. Just like it takes a team to run a successful day at the sales barn, God uses us all together for His purpose.
Pointing to the sky glorifies God when we see Him in everything we do
By Scott HIlgendorff / Cowboys of the Cross
Without a Christian worldview, we’re going to struggle with how to glorify God in everything we do.
In a rodeo arena, you occasionally see a roughstock rider take a knee and point to God. Sometimes it’s only if he wins, sometimes it’s every situation that lets him get back on his feet. On the roping end, the cowboy will point to the sky after a good catch.
On the surface, these are ways the rodeo cowboy is giving glory to God but for many of us, aside from using “glory to God” as a hashtag on a social media post when something great has happened, those are the very few ways we openly give God glory.
Romans 11:36 For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.
This is just one of several verses that point us toward the importance of glorifying God through everything we do. In this instance, we are being reminded that nothing we do is accomplished without God.
A worldview comes from our background and the influences we have in our life that shape how we look at the world around us. A parent of young children might be influenced to look for danger all the time that could impact the children. A soldier looks at the world through his training. A horse trainer can find himself making decisions influenced by the cowboy and horse culture and the conservative politics that come with that.
For Christians, the first way we would should filter how we think about what is happening around us and the decisions that we make should be from our understanding of the Bible.
When we spend time learning what’s in the Bible, verses like this will begin to affect our worldview: Colossians 3:23-24 Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.
This verse shows what a Christian worldview toward work looks like. We’re supposed to think about God and work in a way that would be pleasing to Him. That in turn will most often be pleasing to our employers, but it’s God who we are thinking of ahead of our employers.
And this view then applies to other parts of our life like how we compete while we’re at a rodeo or a horse show. We put everything into it but we do it in ways we know will please God.
The more we understand what is in the Bible and the more we make an effort to apply it, the more natural it becomes to honor God in everything we do.
Suddenly, that finger point to the sky is just a natural reaction. We begin to look for ways to show others how Jesus has impacted us by how we live our lives in the hopes it creates opportunities to tell others about a saving faith in him.
You wouldn’t leave home without your smart phone but what about your Bible?
By Scott Hilgendorff / Cowboys of the Cross
If we leave for the rodeo without our cell phone, we’ll run back into the house to get it. If we’re 10 minutes down the road, we’ll turn around. Chances are, we’ll notice we don’t have it before we leave the driveway because we’re going to plug directions into the fairgrounds or arena and use the GPS to either help us find the way or get around any obstacles in our path by letting it route us around a traffic wreck. It alerts us to speed traps while other apps play music or help us keep in touch with our buddies who are on their way to a different event.
It isn’t a cell phone anymore. It’s a smart phone and we’ve come to depend on them to literally help us get through the day.
But how many of us leave the house without our Bible? When we’re 10 minutes down the road and realize it’s still at home, would we turn around to get it?
How about this? Do we even know where our Bible is?
And what about that smart phone in our pocket? There’s an app for almost every version and translation of the Bible out there.
We live in a time when we have more access to God’s word than in any other time of our lives but it’s possible we live in a time when turn to God’s word less than ever.
Matthew 4:4 But he answered, “It is written, “‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
Before Jesus began to preach and before he called his first disciples, he spent time alone in the wilderness facing temptations from Satan including what he is responding to in this verse. The devil wants him to turn stones into bread but Jesus says he needs more than physical nourishment; he needs God’s word.
We now have an entire Bible that we understand is God’s word to us.
We struggle to get through a day without the apps on our smart phones to help us, but we are starving for God’s word and most of us don’t even know it.
That smart phone now is a way we can ensure we never leave home without our Bible again by making use of the Bible apps that are there. Since we know we won’t forget our phone or will go back for it, then by having an app on the phone, we can know we will always have it with us.
The next step is to make sure we open it up, whether it is opening the app or opening a physical Bible that we keep in our rigging bag.
It can feel overwhelming at first to understand it all, but just reading a small book of the Bible or just reading a few verses is a step toward it getting easier. CowboysOfTheCross.come has tons of Biblical teaching and just like we live in an age where we have access to more Bibles than any other time, we have access to countless sermons and podcasts that can help us to digest God’s word and make sure we are well-fed.
Motivated by a win or by God’s direction
By Scott Hilgendorff / Cowboys of the Cross
What is your motivation when you pray?
In church culture, it’s normal for us to ask how to pray for one another, especially if we’re part of a Bible study or small group. And it’s biblical to do that. The book of Acts is just one place that makes it clear we’re supposed to pray for each other.
But we train ourselves to ask God for our needs without checking our motives and those motives can sometimes get in the way.
James 4:3 “When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.”
We forget that God wants us to give Him glory. We forget that the Bible is full of instructions about putting others first over our own needs. We forget that as Christians, we’re in a process of becoming more like Jesus and less like our selfish selves.
When we pray to win a rodeo, why are we wanting that win? Are we chasing a buckle that we can be proud of or to bring ourselves the glory of the win?
It is totally okay to want these things but a more Biblical perspective is to use our victories to bring attention to God. Talking about our win opens the door to tell others about how we know we couldn’t have done it without God, for example.
And a loss? Same opportunity. Someone will likely come up to you to tell you it was a good effort or to offer some advice on what to do. Any conversation can open the door to turn it to God.
“Man, I just keep asking God to help me get better at keeping my chin tucked and if nothing else, I got that right tonight, so praise Him for even the small things.”
That’s just one way it can look to give God glory.
We can’t know what God’s plan is and praying for that win may not bring it about. If it doesn’t, our motivation still needs to line up with what’s in scripture.
Are my needs for myself because I want that year-end buckle before I retire or do I need this check to help my mom with a medical bill or to put food on the table for my family?
This isn’t to say we shouldn’t tell God what we feel we need.
Philippians 4:6-7 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
We’re told not to worry because God is going to take care of us but being thankful for our current circumstances, good or bad, we’re also supposed to tell God what we feel we need.
Then we have to trust that God is going to meet our needs but sometimes it’s the struggle that we need to help us grow and learn to rely on Him.
Alone in a crowd, what is ‘quiet time’ and why do we need it
By Scott Hilgendorff / Cowboys of the Cross
Waiting to do cowboy church at a rodeo recently and just wandering around behind the chutes at a rodeo, I saw a young bull rider with a Bible in his hand. It’s not a common sight anymore so that in itself was encouraging. Was he giving it to someone? Did he want to share something from it with one of the other guys that might have asked him a faith-based question?
Nope, it was with him to read it.
In all the noise and commotion around him with music blasting, rodeo cowboys getting their gear ready and countless other distractions, he stepped off to the side and leaned on a low section of wall around the arena to open his Bible up and read from it.
He spent about 10 minutes with headphones in, ignoring everything around him, reading from his Bible. Afterward, I asked him what he had been reading and it was a chapter in Isaiah.
Even at a rodeo you can find a little of what is referred to as quiet time. ‘Quiet time’ is kind of a church-speak phrase but it takes its example from the Bible. In church terms, quiet time is usually time spent alone studying the Bible and in prayer, obviously with the idea that you’re doing it somewhere without distractions.
Many Christians strive to make this a part of their daily routines to grow closer to God as they talk to Him and learn from His word to us in the books of the Bible.
People didn’t have a Bible to carry around then, all of what we know as the New Testament, hadn’t even been started, so there are no specific verses directing us to make this quiet time with our Bibles. However, there are plenty of scriptures that give us an example of Jesus taking time away from the crowds to spend with God.
Several times, Jesus would go off by himself to spend time with God.
Mark 1:35 And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed.
The verse in Mark was between an intense period of time Jesus spent teaching and working miracles. He broke away from the crowds to be alone to pray. Then in Luke, early is his time teaching, he had just healed a man with leprosy and word was spreading of the miracles he was working. It was causing crowds to gather and follow him. The work he was doing was essential to God’s plan for salvation, but he still broke away to spend time alone with God.
Luke 5:15-16 But now even more the report about him went abroad, and great crowds gathered to hear him and to be healed of their infirmities. 16 But he would withdraw to desolate places and pray.
The clearest example is for us to make time to pray but as Christians, now armed with Bibles we understand is the main way God speaks to us, it only makes sense that we follow Jesus’s example and take time to not just pray but also read what we know to be God’s word to us.
And while the example Jesus gave us was to go away in isolation, even in a crowded place, this cowboy still managed to make a quiet place for himself to spend a few minutes in the Bible to put God first before getting his mind on the business of competing.
We can be strong, we can fight woke, we have to remember Jesus’s words still stand
By Scott HIlgendorff / Cowboys of the Cross
We have a conservative and even Christian culture right now that is turning hard against anything that can be described with the term “woke.”
The obvious ones are the cultural topics around women’s issues that blur into issues about transgender rights that blur into issues about toxic masculinity. Movies and television shows seem to endlessly work these kinds of issues into their storylines while corporations work to champion various causes.
As they do this, boycotts are encouraged and a tactic is used that once seemed to largely only come from ‘the left’–cancellation. Cancel culture is becoming more widely used.
We have to be so careful that as woke agendas spread and efforts to push back against them grow, that somehow we don’t start canceling what Jesus teaches us that sometimes seems to go against our conservative values.
Anything from the pulpit that pushes us to support the poor can begin to sound like it follows a liberal view. Anything that pushes us to be kind to those who are different from us, even if they are trampling on our political freedoms, can begin to sound like it follows a liberal view. For the cowboy crowd, where strength, courage, toughness and independence are encouraged, anything that sounds like it pushes behavior we think of as weak, can lead us to want to rebel and push back.
2 Corinthians 12:9-10 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
In a culture pushing back against what we consider ‘woke’, Paul admitting to his weakness begins to sound woke as well.
It’s easy to rebel against the idea of being content with weakness and taking insults. It’s easy to miss just who Paul is and what he is really telling us.
Paul turned his life around from being a persecutor of Christians to a someone who converted others to Christianity. Strength. He was shipwrecked and imprisoned awaiting death, yet continued to preach love and forgiveness. Strength.
Boasting in weakness? Strength!
Why?
Because it shows the world around us that when we are weak, and we all suffer times when we can’t handle a difficult circumstance, God’s grace toward us and His power to get us through that situation are made clear to others, giving them a chance to find a saving faith in Jesus. For us to be made strong by God, we first have to experience being weak.
In the months ahead, the worst thing we could do to our salvation and others’ is to start rejecting some of the teachings of Jesus because we don’t like it when he tells us to turn the other cheek or be kind to the person that hurt us.
It’s good for Christians to fight for their rights in freedoms, whatever country they are from. It’s best to do it while putting Jesus first.
Hebrews 13:8 Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.
Not all fathers are perfect but there is One who is
By Scott Hilgendorff / Cowboys of the Cross
There’s a sad reality that not all of us had great fathers and while this may not be universal, it certainly is common that most of us want to make our fathers proud.
As toddlers, we test our parents and look to our fathers and mothers to set boundaries for us.
Many of us as we grow up look for our father’s approval either with good grades, doing well at a sport or handing him the right tool as you work on a car together.
I’m sure there are studies out there that debate back and forth how this is learned social behavior or that it is innate behavior that we are simply born with.
Because of my faith, I believe God made us that way.
And He didn’t do it to set our fathers up to fail. Jesus was the only perfect person to walk the Earth and while as children, we can develop high expectations for our parents, we can also suffer tremendous hurt and disappointment.
In rodeo, I get to know some amazing fathers out there and I get to know some cowboys whose fathers have utterly failed them. There are plenty of rodeo cowboys out there competing not for their father’s approval, but to prove something to themselves about their own strengths and abilities.
Whether we had the ideal father who rarely let us down, a father who abused us, a father who just couldn’t get it right all the time or if we had no father at all, God wants us to have a sense of belonging to a father who is perfect and will love us unconditionally.
Ephesians 1:3-6 3Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, 4 even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love 5 he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, 6 to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.
The idea of adoption is a big part of the gospel, God’s plan of salvation for us.
Through a saving faith in Jesus, our genuine repentance of sin and desire to be forgiven of our sins, God adopts us into a Heavenly family in which He becomes our Heavenly Father. As our Father in Heaven, he loves us unconditionally. He sees us through the sacrifice Jesus made for us which means He sees us as perfect. No matter what we’ve done or how we think we might have failed ourselves or our families or in some part of our lives, He doesn’t see any of that.
Not only doesn’t He see it, He both makes us perfect and gives us a perfect life. No matter how great of terrible our fathers are or were here, there was just no way they could accomplish that. It doesn’t mean we should love our fathers any less, it means we should give them the same grace that God has given us and then embrace the gift of God’s grace that gets us through this life and into that perfect one in Heaven.
Grace when we fail to follow the rules, why we should try to anyway
By Scott Hilgendorff / Cowboys of the Cross
Some of y’all got away without a rodeo fine and it shows.
Proverbs 10:17
Whoever heeds discipline shows the way to life,
but whoever ignores correction leads others astray.
The opening line is an attention-getting play on a meme that went around awhile back.
But there’s a truth to it. Where unpaid fines can mean fewer entries, there’s often a fear to issue them if it could affect a show. When it comes to issues like not showing up at a performance, that can have a costly impact on the producer and when there aren’t fines, it can turn this issue into a pattern of bad behavior. Then others, knowing they can get away with, do the same thing.
Rules are in place for a number of reasons: to keep order, to keep people from harm, to keep people from harming others.
Hundreds of verses in the Old Testament are rules that kept God’s chosen people in right standing with Him in addition to keeping order in their culture. Much of it is referred to as “The Law.”
Jesus came to fulfill the law. He died on the cross to take the punishment meant for our sins so that with a saving faith in him, repenting of our sin and asking to be forgiven, we no longer will be punished. Instead, we gain a perfect eternity in Heaven. We no longer have to follow any rules to be in right standing with God. Instead, through our salvation through Jesus, God sees us as perfect.
Even though the Bible is filled with instructions for us, God extends grace to us when we fail to follow them. It is never to give us an excuse to sin knowing we’re already forgiven; it allows us to move forward in this life without the burden of guilt or shame for the mistakes we’ve made.
But knowing we’ve been saved from God’s wrath, knowing the freedom we’ve been given from the burden of our mistakes and knowing the gift of a perfect eternity has been given to us, if our faith and salvation is real, how can we not want to try to live out a life that shows we’re being changed by what we are learning from our Bibles and the good biblical teaching out there? How can we not want to learn enough on our own so that we can also avoid the bad teaching that is out there, because there’s plenty of that to follow as well. Some of it is done with good intentions, much of it is not, all of it will lead you away from Jesus.
Yet many of us ignore the opportunities put in front of us, like this one right here, to learn and grow closer to Jesus, who saved us. For some, the hard reality is that our salvation was never real; our hearts never changed and we still don’t really understand the fullness of who Jesus is and what he did for us or we’ve never truly repented. For others, our salvation may be real but we still take advantage of God’s grace and love for us. Our Bibles sit unopened. We watch countless minutes of videos about anything other than ones posted by others right here in our cowboy and rodeo community that could teach us more. We ignore opportunities to attend cowboy church at a rodeo or we never set foot in a traditional church to learn more deeply than what can be offered at cowboy church.
If you’re in a good place with God and get all of this, what keeps you from sharing messages like this that could help point others to the need for Jesus? What keeps you from passing on to others anything deeper than the occasional self-help-sounding Bible verse or quote that may not even be in any kind of correct context; it just sounds good?
I’m grateful lately that God is showing me more people than ever in more than 20 years of ministry, that are not just listening at cowboy church but applying what they’re learning or, better yet, attending a traditional church when their rodeo schedule allows.
We don’t claim to be the best teachers out there and we can mess up sometimes like the rest of us, but every one of us that serves together under the Cowboys of the Cross umbrella, has a burden for you and the far bigger rodeo and cowboy crowd that are never going to see this message or give time to the other teaching we put out there week after week. We don’t do anything for attention for ourselves, but out of a desire to follow the Great Commission that God gave to all of us– to share the gospel (how to be saved) and to make disciples (teach others what Jesus taught us and God gave us through the Bible.)
We love you and want this for you: a perfect eternity in Heaven and a life transformed through a closer relationship with Jesus as we learn together from God’s word.
There are countless communities and people groups out there that need to hear and learn about Jesus. The cowboy crowd, full of strong, independent thinkers, isn’t an easy one, but I’m thankful God put me in this one because it has some of the most incredible people you could ever want to meet. It can sometimes be dysfunctional like any family, but that’s exactly what you get in this crowd: a family that looks out for one another. Let’s make looking out for each other’s souls a priority in this one.