 Okay, let's go ahead and get started. So, this evening is more of a, I'm gonna preach on one verse, Proverbs chapter 21 and verse number 31, I'm gonna preach on this evening where the Bible reads, the horse is prepared against the day of battle, but safety is of the Lord. I'm gonna preach just on this one verse in the Bible. And this is more of a safety message than an actual or a sermonette. I guess you could call it a short sermon, but really I wanna focus on something very specific this evening. The Bible does say, we've read this verse many times. You know, we always, we quote this, when we go out soul winning, you know, safety is of the Lord. We've never had problems out soul winning. We go in the worst neighborhoods. People are always telling us, I mean, we're always out soul winning, right? And people are always like, be safe out there. I mean, one guy said to me the other day, he's like, watch out for the crazies. You know, I'm not sure who the crazies are, but he said, watch out for the crazies. I mean, but look, we just, God just takes care of us when we're out soul winning, because we know that we're doing the work of the Lord and God is gonna protect us. It makes perfect sense. But I wanna just look at the whole verse where the Bible says in verse 31, the horse is prepared against the day of battle, but safety is of the Lord. So this is how the Lord works. Hopefully you understand the philosophy of the Lord, but he tells you what to do, and if you do it, you can expect those results. That's kinda how the Lord works. I mean, if you don't get that from the preaching at this church, I don't know if you're going to get it, but if you do what the Bible says you're supposed to do, you can expect the results that the Bible says you're gonna get. That's how the Lord works. I mean, I can't just sit at home and eat Cheetos and expect the Lord to just bless my life and expect the Lord to just pour all these blessings upon me. I knew a guy one time that actually he didn't work and he didn't wanna work and he wouldn't go to work and he wouldn't get a job. And he just told me, he said, well, welfare and food stamps, that's how the Lord takes care of me. Wrong, wrong. That is not God blessing you. That is just taking advantage of a socialist situation. The Bible says very specifically that you are to do certain things and then you can expect those results. Yes, all blessings come from the Lord. We get that, but we must be obedient to his word. So safety is of the Lord, but it also says that the horse is prepared for battle. So what I wanna talk about this evening is just being prepared. You all are men here tonight and you all are, many of you are leading families and I've been yelling about leading your families for the last couple of weeks. Take advantage of, let's look at this philosophy when it came to COVID, right? The whole COVID thing that we're finally getting past, it's done, the mass mandates are even being dropped at work. I mean, it's kinda like, hey, we've made it. We made it through that event. Here we are, we're safe, but what do we do? We just continued to do what we were supposed to do during that time. I can't tell you how many people when they found out that we just kept having church through the two years. You know, how many people are like, oh man, how many people died? You know, or how many people did you lose in the church? I got asked that question so many times over the last couple of years. But look, we just continued to do what we were supposed to do, our horse was prepared for battle is what we did and the Lord took care of us in that. But look, as men, we should be prepared for unforeseen times. COVID was just one of those things. COVID was just one of those things. Look, the Bible says that there's gonna be tribulation. The Bible says that there's gonna be great tribulation in Matthew 24. There is going to be, now that COVID is over, we're starting to see difficult times pop up in the world. We're starting to see some wars pop up in the world that we'll be talking about in the next few weeks. But the point is, is that, yes, safety is of the Lord, but we should be prepared as men and especially as leaders to other people. We should, we have a responsibility to be prepared. Now look, I'm not talking about quitting the Christian life and digging a hole in your backyard and living in a hole, okay? That's not what I'm talking about. But we should be prepared to take care of our families for an extended period of time, should the services that we're used to as Americans become unavailable? This is a very specific safety message for you this evening. Think about your home. Are you prepared in your home? Do you rely on, do you rely on just services for you all the time? I mean, just think of the 3-3-3 rule is if you've ever heard of survival situations where you can survive three minutes without air, you can survive three days without water and you can survive three weeks without food. What does your home look like? Do you have water in your home? Do you have food in your home? I mean, I have a goal of having a few weeks of survivability in my home for my family. Should something happen where services, stores, things like that are not available? This is very possible and I believe that it's a responsibility that a leader of a home should have. You should think about things like supplies. What kind of supplies does your family need? What kind of just think about the things that you take for granted every day? Does your family, do you have family members? Do you have a wife? Do you have yourself? Do you need medicine? Is there medicine that you depend on every day, every week, every month, whatever it is? You know, things from just like glasses. You know, do you have glasses in contact? Should these types of services become unavailable? And then you know, you can even go so far as to think about toiletries and comforts and things like that. I mean, think about the toilet paper disaster a year and a half ago. But the point I'm trying to make is that you should be prepared for these types of things. You should think about these types of things and you should have a goal, or as I was explaining to Garrett, you should have a design criteria for your home. Like my design criteria for my home is that I will be able to be autonomous for a month. That's a design criteria in everything I can build from there. How much water will I need? I mean, how many people are in my home? How much water will I need? How much food will I need? Does my son or daughter or kids need medicine? How much of that will I need for a month? You need to design these things. Look, this takes time, this takes effort, and this also takes resources to put this type of thing together. Another thing that you need to think about for your home is energy. You know, California is a little bit different than North Dakota. I had a lot of energy concerns on the farm in North Dakota because if the power went out, things would freeze, things would break. Animals could not get water, animals could not get food if I didn't have electricity heat. So I needed to have backups for all those things. Here in California, in our design criteria in our home, we would like to have some refrigeration for food. So, you know, you should think about that, energy. You know, are you gonna need a generator? You need fuel for the generator. You know, how long will you need to run that every day? How many things are you gonna be running every day in your home off of those devices? Once again, the design criteria, you start with what am I going to need to run if there is no more electricity and just build from there, okay? In California, you really don't need heat. It would be nice to have air conditioning but you don't really need it to survive. A fridge and a freezer would be nice. So it's a little bit easier on the energy side. In California, we have solar that is very available here in California. But we, you know, we are spending some time planning for these types of things in my household just to let you know. At least keep our fridges going and you know, you gotta think about fuel storage and things like that as well. How about this one? An emergency plan. Do you have an emergency plan for your family, men? You know, if you have to, if something catastrophic happens, where do you meet? If you can't meet at your house, if that's not gonna work and everyone's at different places, how do you get a hold of each other? You know, I actually have some documents at the front of the church that you can take with you tonight. It's a nice template for building an emergency plan, things you would need for your home. You don't have to use everything on it, but it's a very well thought out professional template for this type of thing. Where will you go if you can't stay at your house? What will you take? How long, how long will it take you to get out of your house? Because typically emergencies, they don't happen where you have a lot of time. I remember I was building a power plant north of Sacramento a few years ago and the Paradise Fire broke out about 15 miles north of the power plant. I walked to the top of the dam and it looked like a nuclear bomb had gone off. There was a mushroom cloud coming out of the mountains and I worked with several men from the plant that lived in Paradise. They left the plant immediately after we saw the cloud and they went to their homes and they literally had 15 minutes in their homes to get everything that they could, gather their family, find out where their kids were, find out. It's a miracle that more people didn't die, in my opinion. Because they had 15 minutes, they got their stuff and they got out and that whole town burned in less than an hour, the entire town. The fire moved through there at something like 50, 60 miles an hour. So you need to think about these things. You need to have your family trained on these things because it's not going to be, if it's an emergency, it's probably not going to be a situation where you just have a whole lot of time to get trained on everything and let everybody know and discuss what we should do. Look, you're going to need to have a plan. Everybody's going to need to know what to do, where to go and you need to get out fast, okay? How about this one? Brother Trevor brought it up in his sermon. Defense, do you have a way to defend? Look, self-defense is a very biblical concept. Okay, it's a sermon in itself but do you have a way to defend your home? You know, do you have guns? Do you have ammunition? Do you have the skills to be able to use these things? Does your family have the skills? Look, every boy should know how to shoot a rifle. That's my opinion. I was telling Jacob the other day as we were talking about countries invading other countries, imagine that. I said, you know, the United States, while there may be a lot of threats against us, really like an actual invasion is not much of a threat to the United States in my opinion because literally everyone has guns here. And Jacob said, especially you, Dad. But look, it's not just having weapons, it's knowing how to use them, knowing how they work, how to clean them, how to take care of them, how to fix them. These are all things that just don't happen in five minutes, okay? Here's another one, how about this one? Money. If everything should go wrong, do you have, you should have, if electronic systems go down, there's no electricity anywhere, you know, you should have some cash on hand in your house. You should have some cash, some way to go out and purchase things that you may need in an emergency. And just the things that I brought up tonight, just they are going to take money by the way to accomplish. So if you are thinking about these things and you're thinking about a plan, look, this plan is not cheap. It will take savings. You can't be living paycheck to paycheck and then execute a plan like this and have a month's worth of supplies in your house and you'll have some cash on hand in your house. You need to be a frugal budgeting person to be able to set things aside and start, and you don't have to make this plan in a week either. You can make the plan and then you can start saving and budgeting your money to start executing this plan over time, okay? But look, we should just recognize, and look, this is not a comprehensive list. I'm just trying to spark your responsibility here and get you thinking about these things because look, we should recognize things when they have the potential to go bad and this should help us lead our families to preparedness. And men, you are leading your families, whether you're gonna be a good leader is up to you. And I'm not just talking about what's on your mind right now is probably war, nuclear wars, everybody's talking about now. But look, I'm talking about earthquakes, natural disasters. Look, what does the Bible talk about? Famines, pestilences, look, if nothing is an advantage to us, the Bible should be an advantage to us. I mean, we know that these things are going to happen. And look, I'm an optimist. I'm an optimist. I hope that the end times are not 10 years from now. I hope that the end times are not 20 years from now. But look, earthquakes, natural disasters, famines, all these things, war, they're gonna happen. They're gonna happen and they're gonna happen more and more frequently. What are we seeing happen now? I keep wanting things to reset and go back to normal and then something worse always keeps popping up in the last two or three years. But look, preparedness is not gonna happen by accident. That's all I'm trying to tell you tonight. It takes leadership, it takes training, it takes drills, it takes phones, it takes technology, it takes radios, but look, as a leader, this is your responsibility. If you take nothing from that, take that from this sermon. We're to make sure that we're not victims because I gotta tell you, when something like this happens, if a major event happens to this country and don't you think that it can't? It is a mathematical probability in my opinion that something major will happen in this country. The majority of this country, they can't even find toilet paper. The majority of this country is gonna be casualties, they're gonna be cannon fodder in a situation like this because everyone will be unprepared. But that should not be us because we have the Bible. Let's bow our heads and have a word of prayer.