by admin | May 2, 2024 | Behind the Bucking Chutes
By Scott Hilgendorff / Cowboys of the Cross
For Christians in the cowboy crowd, or those who at least believe in God, one of two things seems to happen when a cowboy hits rock bottom.
The first: he shares publicly with everyone who will listen how bad things are, how bad he feels about it and how much he wants to change. It often includes social media posts and that generate lots of encouragement, especially when he says he wants to get things right with God and is going to make some serious life changes.
The second: he shares with a couple people close to him the struggle and asks for help coming to Jesus as he experiences a deep feeling of repentance and a desire to understand what it really means to be a Christian; a follower of Christ.
The first has good intentions but is likely dealing with guilt or self-pity over whatever circumstances have led to him finding himself at rock bottom which can be any number or combination of these examples or plenty of others that aren’t mentioned here: lost marriage or girl friend, lost job, impending jail time, loss of visitation rights with children.
But when feeling guilty over what has happened is the dominant reason for professing to want to change, it’s far less likely that any lasting change will take place.
The first happens far more often than the second and that’s just how it is supposed to be because scripture tells us that the number of people who make it to Heaven is going to be a small percentage of the population.
I’ve shared with the first person free access to an otherwise paid Christian teaching service with all kinds of videos and lessons, many of them short and simple, to help a person grown and “get right with God” as they have said they want to do. The Cowboys of the Cross website and YouTube channel have more than 300 videos and written devotions and sermons to help and usually when I send that to the first person, he tells us he’s going to take a look at the site but never does.
When rock bottom brings about real repentance, you have the second person and God begins to do a work in him to bring about real change and transformation.
Ephesians 4:20-24 17 Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. 18 They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. 19 They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. 20 But that is not the way you learned Christ!— 21 assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, 22 to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, 23 and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, 24 and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
In this letter from Paul, he is describing both types of people: the ones whose hearts are not ready for change and the ones who are and have become new ‘selves’ transformed by their faith in Jesus and becoming more like him; more righteous and holy. By that, we understand we aren’t perfect and if we’ve hit rock bottom, we may have a long way to go to ever become like Jesus but like all Christians, day by day we begin to grow and change more into his likeness.
Without a saving faith in Jesus, we can climb back up from the bottom but nothing about our nature is truly changed.
by admin | Apr 18, 2024 | Behind the Bucking Chutes
By Scott Hilgendorff / Cowboys of the Cross
If there’s ever a time when people in the cowboy culture pray, it’s at a rodeo or bull riding before competing. Some pray not to be hurt, some pray to win, some pray for the stock and some just use it as quiet time to talk to God.
The Bible gives us lots of examples of praying to God to meet our needs as well as verses that tell us not to worry; that God will provide.
Matthew 7:11 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!
When we look at just this verse without context and careful understanding of the power a single word in the verses before it, it sounds like God will give us more than we could dream if we just have faith and ask. It’s a common belief but it comes from not having a more full understanding of God’s word.
Here is the whole section:
Matthew 7:7-11 7 “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. 9 Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? 11 if you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!
The word we need to look at closely: “Seek.”
Seeking means we are looking hard into what it is we should be asking God for. Are we trying to follow His will for our lives? Then we would be seeking what we need to follow His direction for us. Are we looking for ways to share the gospel or love our neighbors as Jesus commands us? Then we would be seeking what we need to accomplish that.
And then we would trust that if our parents, who are flawed compared to God’s greatness, are going to meet our needs, then we trust even more that God will give us what we need.
In James chapter 4, he comes at the issue from a different direction, explaining how it’s our nature to want things for our own, selfish desires to the point it can lead to fights and even murder—something we still see in society today. He explains to us that this is why it sometimes seems like God isn’t giving us what we want.
James 4:3 3You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.
It’s okay to want to win the rodeo, but what is our motivation? If we’re digging into what it means to be a Christian, a follower of Jesus, then we should be wanting what Jesus would want us to do or what the Bible teaches us about living out our faith. We know in Scripture that we are meant to live in a way that glorifies God. So how can our win be used to give Him glory or point others to Jesus? It can and if what we pray for lines up with what God wants for us, we could see that win come our way.
And if that win doesn’t come, no matter how hard we were seeking God before we asked for it, then we also trust that our loss, even at a time when we personally needed the money or confidence, is still a better gift than what even our own parents could want for us. It just may take some time to see what God was doing in that moment and we rely on God’s strength to endure what feels like a struggle and trust that everything works together for His good–and we get to be a part of that, even when it feels hard for us.
by admin | Apr 4, 2024 | Behind the Bucking Chutes
By Scott Hilgendorff / Cowboys of the Cross
Sometimes the bad guy wins. There really is a rodeo judge out there that has it in for someone and successfully screws the cowboy over every chance he gets. There really is someone lying and cheating their way to get ahead of you at work. Some of you are victims of crimes in which the person got away with it or the punishment just didn’t seem like enough.
When I get to teach something and it’s one of the ‘difficult’ Bible verses like the one that you’re about to read, I get it. I know it’s easy for me to teach it but it doesn’t mean it’s always any easier for me to live it out when I’m standing there asking you to try.
Romans 12: 19-21 Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” 20 To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” 21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
This is honestly harder for me to say than you might think because I don’t want to share the bad thoughts as someone who is in a position to teach and minister to you but this is my reality right now: there is someone out there that a small part of me would take satisfaction in taking a swing at with my baseball bat. I’m not joking. And it troubles me that as mature as I would like to be in my faith, that I’m still capable of a thought like this, though I’m grateful and want to be clear it is a small part of me and I would never take that action.
But what it shows about me is that I do get it when I teach verses like this. I’m not asking you guys to do things I either presently find hard or have had a chance to work through myself as I’ve learned more about what’s in the Bible.
It’s hard to see someone get away with evil and be satisfied that God will take care of it when the systems in place fail. But here’s the deal. Adam and Eve decided in the garden they wanted the same knowledge as God and allowed sin to be a part of our world. They wanted to be able to judge for themselves what is right and wrong, rather than leave it to God. It’s a natural part of being human but as Christians, we’re made new and meant to be becoming more like Jesus and less like our old selves.
When we’re dealing with Christians who do wrong to others, there are several Biblical responses to that including church discipline e and a process to make the situation right. A Christian who is truly saved would want to follow these steps, particularly ones laid out in Matthew 18:15-20.
For non-believers, there are two outcomes for someone who has done evil to you, they will repent through God’s grace and mercy
or they will face God’s judgement and spend eternity in hell.
I have a hard time taking comfort or being at peace with someone who has wronged me enough to want to hit them with a bat, suffering for eternity in hell when I know I’ve been forgiven of my wrongs and received God’s grace and mercy through Jesus’s death and resurrection and my own repentance and saving faith in him.
Right now, I’m also having a hard time with the idea of showing kindness to the people who have done evil but they deserve the shot at salvation I received and while they haven’t received the justice that I would hope for them, they don’t find Jesus the lord of their life, hell is the reality they face.
While those verses in Romans are not teaching this, while I continue to wrestle with God’s direction for me to repay evil with kindness, what I can do in the meantime is follow other Biblical teaching that directs us to treat others with kindness so that they could come to saving faith in Jesus.
It doesn’t take away my responsibility to work through these verses and adopt them into how I approach the evil that we do in this world, but it does provide a positive outcome that can impact the world around us for Jesus.
by admin | Mar 21, 2024 | Behind the Bucking Chutes
By Scott Hilgendorff / Cowboys of the Cross
Do you ever get frustrated that someone you know rejects God and the Bible but always seems to come out on top?
Maybe it’s a team roper or bull rider who lives how he wants, parties hard, treats others badly but just won that year- end buckle while you’ve tried to live right by God’s word and always come up short in the money. Maybe you’ve been tithing faithfully
You aren’t alone. Asaph expresses those frustrations in Psalm 73, 3,000 years ago.
In this Psalm, he describes the wicked as seeming to gain more and more. He openly shares his own envies as their status increases while he is left to feel like God is punishing him.
Through it all, he describes how faithful he has been to what God commands, doing what is right while others continue to flourish.
He realizes his negative thoughts toward God are causing him to stumble and he reminds himself of who he is to God and that the wicked are going to perish while he will be with God for eternity.
He shares frustrations many of us have experienced. We do everything we can to follow God’s word and somehow, those who live how they want to live in sin, seem to be the ones getting ahead and we feel like we’re getting further behind.
As he shares your frustrations, he still comes back to the reality that God is still everything to him.
Psalm 73:26 My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
Life may not always go as we want it to, but we have to remind ourselves that when we have repented of our sin and asked to be forgiven through a saving faith in Jesus and what he did for us on the cross by taking time punishment meant for our sins, we have a perfect forever waiting for us in Heaven.
We are sometimes mislead by the idea that becoming a Christian means life will keep getting better and better. We forget this is a fallen world and that because Adam and Eve chose sin, we live in a world where bad things really do happen to good people. It isn’t God that does it to us, it’s God that has offered us an eternity free of this sinful world when we pass away while those who do not have a saving faith suffer an eternity in hell.
That doesn’t mean we should take joy in knowing what waits for those who reject God and the way to salvation through Jesus; it means we should take comfort in knowing our hope is in eternity.
“God of the is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”
It’s hard for us to understand how short our time here is and even if nothing ever goes the way we want it to, we have a perfect eternity waiting for us. We have a time fast approaching where everything is made right and it will last forever.
by admin | Mar 21, 2024 | Behind the Bucking Chutes
The following was written to help us understand false prophets in response to false ideas that the cowboy community, among thousands of others, were sharing at the time of the April 8, 2024 solar eclipse, centered around End Times prophecy and the United States’ connection to it.
By Will Brunke / Cowboys of the Cross
Prophecy. Who gets it, right?
Ironically, the answer is inside the question that was a poor attempt at dry humor. History tells us that modern interpretation of prophecy is akin to a complicated and entangled ball of yarn. Even the best of us can find that tugging on a single string in earnest opens up a realm of confusion that seems delivered to us by Hollywood’s newest multi-verse-themed blockbuster.
It’s true. New Testament prophecy is an elusive concept to biblical scholars today much like the Theory of Relativity once was to scientists. There are competing attempts to define New Testament prophecy and make it fit into a neat, clean, square little box –like we humans love to do. Typically, the main competing theories of how prophesy works fall into five main categories such as;
Inspired exegesis (interpretation)
Pastoral exhortation (preaching)
Exposition (proclamation of the Gospel)
Inspired thoughts (inner divine voice)
Mediation (spirits speaking native tongue of the spectator)
STOP!! We get it, it’s complicated!
Don’t worry, this is as far as we will go on “diving deep” into prophecy.
So why are we here then? What are you getting at, Will? The important thing to grasp is the lack of reconciliation between the five or how they fit together. But any of the five can be identified in the New Testament. The real danger for us today is that there are voids of ambiguity between these five groups where evil can set up shop, lurk, and look to devour the undisciplined.
There’s no secret that we are surrounded by false teachers and spiritual warfare. It has become so apparent in today’s society, that even a “prophet” who has a low-percentage track record of accurate predictions can still wield a huge amount of clout and influence.
Why? It is only because the “prophet”, (profiteer would be the better word) knows his/her consumer and is ready to supply their audience with the desired product of their hearts, feeding into what they want to hear. Corrupt hearts, that is. In today’s day and age, the desire for specifically obsequious and self-serving content is chosen at a far greater margin than content centered in truth and holding to account.
A heart truly given to Jesus, even in the infantile stages of faith, should be able to distinguish and want to question why a prophesied event did not occur. Because God is never wrong and His word and meaning in the Bible never changes. God does not change His plan on the basis of unseen information a ‘prophet’ today comes up with reading into or reinterpreting scripture to fit a scenario while we as humans do.
I could spend hours divulging stories about individuals who I have ministered to or have personal relationships with, who have bought into and supported false prophets.
There are strong parallels between false profits and many other scams that we poke fun at or wonder, “how did that person ever fall for that?” But while our neighbor may have sent $5000 to that imaginary prince in Nigeria, we have given our personal seals of approval by sharing, liking and reposting the latest scripturally untested fad, or bought the newest apocalyptical rhetoric of the latest profiteer of prophecy.
So what’s the solution then, Mr. Smarty-pants? Will, how do we defeat these heretical zealots and send them back to the pits from whence they came? Well, the short and sweet version is we can’t. The Bible affirms they will exist and if you want apocalyptic, end of the world signs, we’re told by Jesus himself in a list of what to watch for near the end that false prophets are what people will follow.
Matthew 24:11 And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray.
Earlier, Jesus warns us inMatthew 7:15 Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.
And Paul encourages Timothy in a letter to him that Timothy needs to stay strong and press on with preaching the gospel because people are going to follow what they want to hear.
2 Timothy 4:3-4 For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, 4 and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.
This was a problem 2,000 years ago and it still is. We will never remove from ourselves every wolf in sheep’s clothing just like we will never be totally free from the evil one’s temptations. However, we can each resolve to have a greater impact on our immediate surroundings through Christ and being intentional about learning and then teaching others Biblical truth.
The speed at which technology has enabled us to witness change in our lifetime is unprecedented. But this is still nothing outside of Gods perfect plan. For the Lord has given us powerful tools within our design that transcend time.
One of the best tools He has equipped us with is the value of intimate personal relationships. We are called to cultivate relationships both inside and outside of our marriage, church, and family. How Christians treat their neighbors and how we are seen as innocent as doves yet as shrewd as serpents will open doors for us not only to spread the Gospel and tell others about our Lord Jesus, but it will give others a pause for wisdom and a cause for ears to open to issues of concern that we share in our daily life.
It’s these personal relationships that we can have the most impact with as we minister to those who are frustrated and stumbling, whether in their faith or outside of faith. Used tactfully, conversations can lead and steer a person toward truth and away from chaos. These relationships and therefore the conversations within those relationships take time and attentiveness. It’s no wonder the enemy is trying its best to speed up the mechanism to a near blurry pace.
by admin | Mar 7, 2024 | Behind the Bucking Chutes
By Scott Hilgendorff / Cowboys of the Cross
What do you think about the most? What gets most of your attention?
A rodeo cowboy, especially on the roughstock side of the arena, is always thinking about his sport. Where he’s going to enter, what went wrong or right the weekend before. How he’s going to get his fees paid this week. Visualizing bull or bronc ride after bronc ride.
A rancher is always thinking about his stock and operation. How he’s going to finance the new barn. What’s the weather going to be like next week. When does he need to be ready to move the cattle to the summer pastures. What are the prices doing.
More than a lot of work or interests, both of these lifestyles demand we give it much of our time and attention to be successful so our thoughts are never far from it.
That’s what Paul means when he tells us to pray without ceasing.
1 Thessalonians 5:15-18 See that no one repays anyone evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to everyone. 16 Rejoice always, 17 pray without ceasing, 18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
Toward the end of his letter to this church, Paul offers them several sets of instructions in how to conduct themselves in a Christ-like way from trying to do whats right to someone to being thankful even when we might not be feeling grateful for a challenge we’re face.
In that list, he gives us a three-word instruction that sound impossible: pray without ceasing.
How can we possible do this. Even if I didn’t have to fight against my mind wandering after a few minutes of praying, how am I supposed to pray and never stop? How can I always keep my attention on prayer and accomplish any other task at the same time?
But it isn’t about constantly praying to God through every waking moment. Paul wants us to develop a heart for prayer. He wants us to have an attitude that is aware of the opportunities around us to pray so that we are always ready to go to God.
The same way rodeo or ranching takes a lot of our attention, our thoughts about God’s presence should never be far from our minds. Having a thoughtful readiness to pray helps us keep God in the front of our thinking.
We understand through numerous other verses the importance of prayer, the different reasons for praying and how it is much more than just asking God to meet what we think our needs are.
With prayer being so important, Paul wants us to see that we should always be looking for those moments when we can pray.
A person with a heart or attitude toward prayer will find himself just naturally praying in his mind for God to give calm to that nervous barrel racer back for her first time after a wreck that injured her horse. That person will automatically think to pray for the people in the car wreck he passed on the way to the rodeo. The rancher will automatically pray for his wife off and on throughout the day despite the distractions of two calves being born while she starts her new job.
It takes practice, but the more we are intentional about opportunities to pray, the easier it gets to find ourselves always ready to pray.
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