by admin | May 15, 2024 | Behind the Bucking Chutes
By Scott Hilgendorff / Cowboys of the Cross
Fly high cowboy, your fees are paid.
Using some form of that phrase when someone in the rodeo cowboy crowd has died is fairly common.
The problem is, most people don’t really understand what they’re saying and it creates the false impression that we call go to Heaven when we die. I see it used by people I thought knew differently but they continually place a cowboy in Heaven who almost certainly didn’t enter that rodeo.
How can you say that? How can you know for sure? That’s judgmental.
Well, the reason I can say it with almost certainty is because I’d had an open and frank conversation with that person in question and he made it clear to me he didn’t believe in Jesus and wasn’t interested in it. He was someone I got along with and was explaining why he didn’t come to cowboy church at the rodeos we were often at together because he didn’t want me thinking it was personal. He made a lot of sinful or what I would consider “dumb” choices at best, but he was a nice guy who was well-loved by all those he partied with every weekend.
Here’s the kicker: most of the time when we share a social media post about a cowboy riding a rank one in Heaven or getting his wings (we don’t become angels), we don’t actually even know what the person believed before they died and we never ask. Most of us pray. Most of us believe in God, but that doesn’t get us to Heaven. James reminds us that even the demons believe in God. A lot of us don’t really know ourselves how to be certain we’re going to Heaven, never mind how to tell someone else.
And sure, one never knows what happens privately between a person and God but we’re also told in scripture that when someone has a genuine, saving faith in Jesus, there will be fruit. Fruit are changes in a person’s life that show Christ and the Holy Spirit in them is moving them away from sin and into a life that’s more holy. By holy, we mean more Christ-like by how we see Jesus in the Bible
John 15:8 By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.
That made it that much harder personally when he died. It’s important to understand God can draw someone to Him at any time and there’s no telling what happened in his last moments, but the reality is, not only did he not believe, but he openly rejected Christianity.
So how can so many people put him in Heaven?
I think when we love someone, it’s hard to think of them suffering for eternity in Hell. I think we also just don’t think seriously enough about how real both places are. It’s also largely because we don’t really understand what is called the gospel—how through Jesus, a person is saved from God’s wrath against sin and made right before God to be given an eternity in Heaven.
We can’t ‘love them’ into Heaven. Only the love of Jesus gets them there through their faith in his birth, death and resurrection and belief that he took the punishment meant for our sins so that by repenting of those sins and asking to be forgiven, we can be given eternal life in Heaven.
This is where the expression in rodeo that “he paid your fees” comes from. It’s taken from a genuine understanding of the gospel that tells us that Jesus paid the price meant for our sins.
Being liked and loved by others, being popular, being good by how we might measure goodness; none of these ideas gets us into Heaven. Even the kindest most generous person is separated from God by just the smallest sin and none of us are able to get through life without some kind of sin like a moment of anger or a lustful thought.
Ephesians 2:8-9 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
Grace and mercy are what God has given us through Jesus’s death on the cross. We deserve God’s wrath for our sin, any sin, but we’re given a way through a saving faith in Jesus, to be made right with God. The ‘works’ being referred to is what makes it clear that just being a good person doesn’t earn a place in Heaven. Works are the good actions we do and way of living we might lead. Through an understanding that any sin deserves punishment and no amount of good can earn us Heaven, every single person has the same chance to have Jesus pay his fees.
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 | Oct 12, 2023 | Behind the Bucking Chutes
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.
by admin | Dec 1, 2022 | Behind the Bucking Chutes
By Scott Hilgendorff / Cowboys of the Cross
To get better at something, you sometimes have to increase your level of difficulty setting.
I sometimes get to lead cowboy church at a bull riding practice pen on Sunday afternoons. Most recently, a guy showed up with another bull rider who had never been on a bull before. He asked if he could get on the biggest bull they had. He didn’t do it in front of everyone to call attention to himself and there was no one there for him to impress. If he was going to try bull riding, this guy decided he needed to be all-in.
That illustrates one simple point we know from different teachings in scripture about the need to be committed, serious and all-in when it comes to our faith.
But here’s where it takes an important turn.
The producer and stock contractor was frustrated because he has an amateur division of bull riders who never turn out to practice. They typically buck the more rank bulls at the practice pen with the purpose being to help the riders get better. The frustration comes when these guys have ridden 50 or more bulls at the amateur level and won’t come to the pen to get on stock that is actually less likely to hurt them and more likely to help the build their skills.
Many seem to just seem content keeping it easy. Many of us do the same thing with our Christianity.
Hebrews 5 12-14 In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! 13 Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. 14 But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.
In these verses, the author, possibly Paul, is urging Christians to move from milk to solid food, meaning he wants to see them growing in their knowledge of Jesus Christ and what he had to teach.
Back at the practice pen, the new guy had an amazing experience and while he wishes he had wore a helmet, indicated he would the next time. He jumped into the sport at a harder level and even though he got banged up a little, he’s coming back for more.
You’re only going to learn so much getting on the jump-kicker bulls, you stand a better chance of falling off underneath one and getting hurt and unless you get on some ranker stock, you’re never going to get past that level.
We know as Christians that we will never be perfect like Jesus here in this life. But we know that we’re going through a process that will help us to become more like him, called sanctification. We can sit back and rest in our salvation and resist digging into God’s word and trying to apply it to our lives and situations and God will still welcome us.
But why would we want to settle and not have the chance to be at least a little more like Jesus now?
That’s why Paul urges us to get off milk and onto solid food, practicing what we’re learning and become more Christ-like as we train ourselves here and now for eternity in Heaven.
Back at the practice pen, we’re training ourselves to move up into professional competition where some will become world champions at the NFR or PBR. In our faith, we’re training ourselves to be more like Jesus.
We can understand the basics in scripture, milk, or we can dig in and let God’s word change us as we understand it more, being fed solid food. Solid food is what prepares us to deal with the challenges and consequences of living in
Or we can just keep getting on jump kickers and never be more than an amateur bull rider.
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