Latest / The Living Waters Podcast / Ep. 181 - What a Faithful Pastor Looks Like

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Ep. 181 - What a Faithful Pastor Looks Like · The Living Waters Podcast

• 1:05
  Emeal Zwayne: All right, Mike, we have a bunch of questions for you.
• 1:06
  Emeal Zwayne: I want to talk a little bit about the books you've written.
• 1:08
  Emeal Zwayne: I want to talk more about your radio program, but we want to get into some questions about ministry.
• 1:12
  Emeal Zwayne: This is a big question for believers, especially as they're trying to find their way through, figuring out what's my place in the church.
• 1:19
  Emeal Zwayne: Obviously, your heart is to raise people up, train them up and to multiply discipleship, teaching others what we've received, as Paul talked to Timothy about.
• 1:29
  Emeal Zwayne: But, Mike, how does someone know if they're called to full-time vocational ministry?
• 1:34
  Emeal Zwayne: Obviously, we're all called the minister to serve in the church.
• 1:37
  Emeal Zwayne: We all have a part in the body.
• 1:38
  Emeal Zwayne: But when it comes to full-time vocational ministry, how would you encourage someone to go about finding out if that's what they're called to do?
• 1:45
  Emeal Zwayne: It's a great day.
• 1:50
  Emeal Zwayne: We're here with us on the Live and Watch.
• 1:52
  Emeal Zwayne: We love you all so much.
• 1:52
  Emeal Zwayne: Thank you for being here.
• 1:53
  Oscar Navarro: No, you were doing.
• 1:55
  Emeal Zwayne: How was that?
• 1:55
  Emeal Zwayne: Yes, friends, as we told you on the previous podcast, we're doing a series of podcasts where we interviewed people at NRB.
• 2:02
  Emeal Zwayne: This one in particular went longer than we thought because it was so fascinating.
• 2:08
  Emeal Zwayne: It was with our dear brother, Mike Fabarez, and it went like 55 minutes, and most of our podcasts are like 45, so that's why I'm being real quick here.
• 2:16
  Ray Comfort: I read a lot.
• 2:16
  Ray Comfort: I'd love to have an introduction, because I've been listening to tapes double-speed lately and it's really really good, yeah, Listen to the videos you adjust after a while.
• 2:24
  Ray Comfort: Yeah, you do yeah.
• 2:26
  Emeal Zwayne: but yeah, mark, mike Fabarez, you're familiar with them.
• 2:29
  Emeal Zwayne: We've heard them speak at our church in Kindred.
• 2:31
  Mark Spence: Yeah, compasschurchorg, I believe his website is.
• 2:34
  Mark Spence: We recommend his teaching.
• 2:36
  Mark Spence: He's here in sunny Southern California.
• 2:39
  Emeal Zwayne: Yeah, and he's planted a number of churches and, yeah, we talk about all that on the podcast.
• 2:43
  Emeal Zwayne: Real quick, here's a comment from friends.
• 2:45
  Emeal Zwayne: And who says dogs don't fly?
• 2:48
  Emeal Zwayne: Jesus equals love.
• 2:50
  Emeal Zwayne: Quite enjoyable.
• 2:51
  Emeal Zwayne: I'm thankful for how the videos and the episodes help one to feel encouraged and reflective.
• 2:56
  Emeal Zwayne: Amen, thank you for that, friends.
• 2:58
  Emeal Zwayne: And who says dogs don't fly?
• 3:01
  Emeal Zwayne: And don't forget to check out friends' Tough Questions DVD course, where we answer questions like who made God?
• 3:07
  Emeal Zwayne: Why is there suffering and evil?
• 3:08
  Emeal Zwayne: How can the loving God send someone to hell?
• 3:10
  Emeal Zwayne: Isn't the Bible filled with contradictions and a whole lot of other things, the evidence study Bible and the Living Waters podcast Mogs at livingwaterscom without any further ado.
• 3:19
  Emeal Zwayne: Man, that was fast.
• 3:20
  Emeal Zwayne: Here is Mike Fabarez.
• 3:23
  Emeal Zwayne: So we're here at the NRB convention.
• 3:27
  Emeal Zwayne: Here it's a bit of a circus, as you can hear friends from all around.
• 3:30
  Oscar Navarro: I mean all sorts.
• 3:31
  Oscar Navarro: Literally, there's jugglers right behind me.
• 3:33
  Emeal Zwayne: I think I had SpongeBob almost bump into me earlier.
• 3:35
  Emeal Zwayne: It's kind of like that.
• 3:36
  Emeal Zwayne: But one of the highlights for me is the fact that we get to sit down here with our brother Mike Fabarez.
• 3:41
  Emeal Zwayne: Pastor Mike Fabarez.
• 3:42
  Emeal Zwayne: Doctor, pastor Mike Fabarez.
• 3:44
  Emeal Zwayne: Any more titles in there?
• 3:45
  Emeal Zwayne: Mike?
• 3:46
  Mike Favarez: Bishop, I'm aiming for the Pope.
• 3:48
  Mike Favarez: Yes, the Pontiff.
• 3:50
  Emeal Zwayne: The Pontiff is here with us.
• 3:51
  Emeal Zwayne: The.
• 3:51
  Mike Favarez: Pontiff Vicar.
• 3:52
  Mike Favarez: I prefer Vicar.
• 3:53
  Emeal Zwayne: Yeah, I'm excited because Mike.
• 3:55
  Mike Favarez: It's good to start my interview with blasphemy, isn't it?
• 3:58
  Mike Favarez: Let's just start.
• 4:01
  Emeal Zwayne: We've got to give him some expectations.
• 4:02
  Emeal Zwayne: A.
• 4:02
  Mike Favarez: Protestant preacher.
• 4:04
  Emeal Zwayne: We've got to get creative somehow.
• 4:05
  Emeal Zwayne: But, mike, one of the reasons why I'm so thrilled to sit down with you is not only am I excited about your ministry and what God is doing in and through it, not only am I blessed by the friendship that the Lord has been developing between us and partnership and ministry.
• 4:17
  Emeal Zwayne: We'll get to that, but it's been a delight for me because God has used you to directly minister to my beloved cousin.
• 4:25
  Emeal Zwayne: Nancy and her husband.
• 4:27
  Emeal Zwayne: Matt, so great.
• 4:27
  Emeal Zwayne: Yeah, they were at our house maybe eight years ago.
• 4:30
  Emeal Zwayne: They had just moved to Liso Viejo, the area down there, and they're looking for a new church, and so I jumped on, looked up Compass because I was familiar with you as I'm at Kindred Community Church and you've been there and spoken and so found Compass and said man, it's seven miles from your house, and so they've been there ever since and it's been such a blessing to see how God's been using them there and building them up there at the church.
• 4:52
  Mike Favarez: Well, it's great, it's been great to have them there in church discipline right now which is sad.
• 4:57
  Oscar Navarro: Well, they're in easy family.
• 4:59
  Oscar Navarro: That's not a surprise.
• 5:00
  Oscar Navarro: Well, that's a little bit of a surprise we can get over that hump, we'll be fine.
• 5:03
  Oscar Navarro: Yeah.
• 5:04
  Mike Favarez: No, they're a blessing to our church.
• 5:05
  Mike Favarez: We love them so much.
• 5:06
  Oscar Navarro: Mike, for a point of reference, you're the founder of Compass Bubble Church and when did you guys start and where you were at today?
• 5:13
  Mike Favarez: We started about 17 and a half years ago.
• 5:17
  Mike Favarez: Yeah, it was a rolling start and we had a good little core group and God has been gracious and it has grown and so, yeah, we're busy planting churches and we've kind of just gobbled up a business park.
• 5:31
  Mike Favarez: It's not a cathedral, it's a lot of tilt-up buildings.
• 5:35
  Mike Favarez: It's not as pretty as Kindred Church but, it's, you know it works and we've got about 100,000 square feet of space.
• 5:41
  Mike Favarez: We've got a college now Compass Bible Institute, training people to maximize their giftedness for work and ministry.
• 5:49
  Mike Favarez: We've got a radio ministry.
• 5:50
  Mike Favarez: We're planting churches.
• 5:51
  Mike Favarez: We've just planted a brand new church in North Dallas.
• 5:54
  Mike Favarez: This summer.
• 5:55
  Oscar Navarro: Ok, that was going to be my next question.
• 5:56
  Oscar Navarro: I know you guys have some churches in Southern California, or else for our listeners, where else could they expect to find a Compass Bubble Church?
• 6:02
  Mike Favarez: Well, the first thing I should say they're not campuses, as a lot of churches just kind of put the pastor on a screen.
• 6:07
  Mike Favarez: I want to make sure, if I get hit by a bus, that all these church plants will have their own leadership, their own pastor.
• 6:13
  Mike Favarez: And so, yeah, we started in Huntington Beach.
• 6:16
  Mike Favarez: That was our first church plant and we've done some internationally Guatemala City, amon, jordan but domestically we started in Huntington Beach and that's thriving.
• 6:24
  Mike Favarez: Then in Tustin, california, not far from where we're at, between our churches.
• 6:29
  Mike Favarez: And then we started out of state because we looked at the mass exodus of people leaving California and we said, well, where are they going?
• 6:35
  Mike Favarez: And they're going to these places that the population is just exploding and even if the good churches in those areas that are preaching the Bible, even if they were to double time, it can't keep up with the growth.
• 6:46
  Mike Favarez: So we targeted those areas, went to the Treasure Valley of Idaho, in Boise, and we've got a church there that's thriving now, great pastor, great pastoral team, multiple services, and they're doing great.
• 6:57
  Mike Favarez: We went out to Texas and one of the fastest growing areas in Texas at the time was New Braun Foles, outside of San Antonio.
• 7:03
  Mike Favarez: So we planted there.
• 7:04
  Mike Favarez: We got them in a building, got them situated and they're thriving and growing and the most recent one this summer is in North North Dallas.
• 7:12
  Mike Favarez: It's way up in what they call North Texas McKinney Prosper, right there, frisco.
• 7:19
  Mike Favarez: So, that's just.
• 7:20
  Mike Favarez: It's growing.
• 7:21
  Mike Favarez: They say it's going to grow by 3 million people in the next eight to two years.
• 7:25
  Emeal Zwayne: That area is exploding.
• 7:26
  Emeal Zwayne: It's exploding.
• 7:26
  Emeal Zwayne: A good friend, emilio Ramos, is out in the area and it's been growing like crazy.
• 7:30
  Emeal Zwayne: You know, mike, we want to talk to you a little bit about church planning.
• 7:32
  Emeal Zwayne: But I had the opportunity to go and visit your church recently.
• 7:36
  Emeal Zwayne: You know I'm going to be speaking with that adult Bible fellowship my brother Kellan there such a dear brother.
• 7:41
  Emeal Zwayne: But I was blessed to see the Compass Bible Institute.
• 7:44
  Emeal Zwayne: I got a tour of it and I was radically impressed.
• 7:47
  Emeal Zwayne: I mean, you guys are serious about training people up.
• 7:49
  Emeal Zwayne: Tell us a little bit about that.
• 7:50
  Mike Favarez: Well, you know, in the late 19th century there was an explosion of what were called Bible institutes and they saw themselves as serving a gap between whatever training you could get in church.
• 8:01
  Mike Favarez: And then, with the seminaries we're doing, Most of these Bible institutes developed into something else.
• 8:06
  Mike Favarez: You know, like the Bible Institute of Los Angeles became Biola and they became like normal universities and you'd go there and you could train for whatever you wanted to do in life.
• 8:16
  Mike Favarez: But the real niche where these started?
• 8:19
  Mike Favarez: I had a passion for this.
• 8:20
  Mike Favarez: I read a lot about it.
• 8:21
  Mike Favarez: I just love the concept of how do you take a guy who just wants to be maximally useful in the church and give him more training than just saying, hey, take notes on a sermon here or go to Sunday school and see what you can learn, but tests and books and papers, and how can you get them to really have a competency in doing whatever they're called to do in the church?
• 8:42
  Mike Favarez: And so that's what we set out to do.
• 8:45
  Mike Favarez: It's kind of really in the spirit of the great Bible Institute movement of the 19th century and we said let's just recreate that and try and do that.
• 8:52
  Mike Favarez: So we've got about four different key target audiences and one I'm happy to talk about briefly is we just announced this last month.
• 9:01
  Mike Favarez: What we're starting in the fall next year and this was part of my vision for this is to have a gap year program, one year where you can send your 18-year-old before he goes to his university to get his dental degree and learn Christian worldview, apologetics, bible survey, bible study methods, hermeneutics, and then we end the first semester with a trip educational trip to New England to study the history of America and the Great Awakening, and then they come back for another semester on campus and then we send them to Jerusalem to study for a month.
• 9:34
  Mike Favarez: And so we've got it all set up and we're going to launch it a year from now and we're going to see if we can get parents to do what I think and I know this is a big statement Do the right thing by not sending their kids off to college without grounding them first in a more formalized training where they're getting good education about what they believe and why they should believe it.
• 9:56
  Oscar Navarro: Two questions real quick.
• 9:57
  Oscar Navarro: That is all of that in one year.
• 9:59
  Oscar Navarro: One year, that's an incredible year let me just say Well, we need it.
• 10:02
  Oscar Navarro: Yeah, I 100% agree.
• 10:04
  Oscar Navarro: Second question is the Bible Institute.
• 10:06
  Oscar Navarro: Is that in Southern California, near you?
• 10:07
  Mike Favarez: Yes, we bought a building right across the street from our church and that's what you were just saying.
• 10:12
  Mike Favarez: You visited and that is a place where we've just said let's just see if we can invest in a place that will not only train our gifted leaders in the church to be more effective and other churches that want to send their leaders, but let's take our young people and get them prepared for adult life.
• 10:28
  Mike Favarez: And so that gap year program all takes place right across the street from our church.
• 10:33
  Oscar Navarro: The reason why I ask that second question is because I think Bible Institutes have a very important role to play, developing a pastors of the future.
• 10:40
  Oscar Navarro: One of the things that I've noticed in seminaries is that sometimes not all the time, but sometimes students will go off for an education but they'll do four years of no discipleship because they're disconnected from a church and they're just there going to school.
• 10:53
  Oscar Navarro: How important is it to have these Bible institutes connected to a local church?
• 10:59
  Oscar Navarro: I guess the question is what happens when we stop discipling and only educate pastors?
• 11:05
  Oscar Navarro: How is that a problem?
• 11:06
  Oscar Navarro: 100%, it's a gigantic problem.
• 11:08
  Mike Favarez: As a matter of fact, if you go back to the history of the Bible Institute movement, like when Ruben Archertori came out to LA from Chicago he was the president of Moody in Chicago.
• 11:16
  Mike Favarez: He comes out to LA, he said I won't take the leadership of this nascent institute, this Bible Institute of Los Angeles, unless it's connected to a church.
• 11:24
  Mike Favarez: And so they actually started the church in LA, church on the way, and that's how it became.
• 11:30
  Mike Favarez: He had to say this is a laboratory.
• 11:32
  Mike Favarez: You don't just learn in the classroom.
• 11:34
  Mike Favarez: This is really in.
• 11:35
  Mike Favarez: Some of the early working titles of these institutes were like a training, a workers' training institute.
• 11:40
  Mike Favarez: It was all about making sure that you learned something in the classroom and you immediately put it into practice within the context of a local church.
• 11:46
  Mike Favarez: So the reality of church being connected to school is essential.
• 11:53
  Mike Favarez: I mean, how can I teach someone to do like one of our tracts is on being a certified biblical counselor?
• 11:59
  Mike Favarez: Why are you going to do that if you're not involved in the church and dealing with people's lives?
• 12:02
  Mike Favarez: Or we say, well, you want to learn to teach the Bible.
• 12:05
  Mike Favarez: I went to traditional seminaries.
• 12:07
  Mike Favarez: They had no idea whether I was a good preacher or not.
• 12:09
  Mike Favarez: And that little 10-minute thing you did in class and homo-letics, I mean no one knew if I was any good at it.
• 12:15
  Mike Favarez: Well, in a Bible Institute, a traditional old school Bible Institute, you're going to go into a real situation where you got 100 people sitting there and they're coming to church and here comes this guy who's in training and they find out whether he's gifted or not to do this.
• 12:30
  Mike Favarez: And the great thing is, we're not in it like a university where we just want to make sure everyone's check clear and we fill our classrooms.
• 12:38
  Mike Favarez: We don't have a problem coming up to someone and saying hey, we don't think you're gifted for this.
• 12:42
  Mike Favarez: We don't think you should be a pastor, so we don't think you.
• 12:44
  Mike Favarez: And it's not just about pastors, it's about counselors, it's about Sunday school leaders.
• 12:48
  Mike Favarez: Even we got small group leadership track how to lead a small group.
• 12:52
  Mike Favarez: I mean, you've all seen bad small group leaders, so we want to make sure you know how to do it and on top of gifting, real quick, on top of gifting.
• 13:00
  Oscar Navarro: One of the other things being known and loved and discipled in local church is that it's not just about gifting, it's also about fruitfulness.
• 13:06
  Oscar Navarro: Are they growing to be more like Christ as they grow, to learn to become disciples?
• 13:11
  Oscar Navarro: Because often there's a gap between someone's gift and someone's fruit and that can be a devastating effect on the church.
• 13:17
  Oscar Navarro: 100%.
• 13:18
  Emeal Zwayne: Yeah, mike, I love the gap year concept.
• 13:21
  Emeal Zwayne: One of my favorite words in the English language is the word provident Thinking ahead, planning before you reach a certain destination, and the thought of young people graduating high school.
• 13:31
  Emeal Zwayne: As much as we may have equipped them at home before that and hopefully we have as parents, even if we homeschooled them, even if they were a part of a Christian school oftentimes they're not going to be ready for the barrage of godless philosophies that they're going to be inundated with when they hit the university level.
• 13:47
  Emeal Zwayne: And so that's what I'm going to do idea of, hey, take a gap year, get rooted, get equipped and then go out, not just in a Sort of passive sense, but even in an offensive sense, to go out and to Proclaim the gospel and be light as well on these campuses.
• 14:01
  Emeal Zwayne: That when did you guys come up with that idea?
• 14:04
  Mike Favarez: Well, it's always been what I call a back page prayer request in my prayer book and it's been there for years.
• 14:10
  Mike Favarez: And I just finally got to the place where we planted enough churches, where we kept saying where are we going to find all the youth guys and the associate pastors?
• 14:19
  Mike Favarez: And you know we need a training center to do that.
• 14:22
  Mike Favarez: Well, that just perfectly comported with my prayers over years.
• 14:26
  Mike Favarez: Right, and we had an opportunity and, and literally the building across the street was the key.
• 14:31
  Mike Favarez: It's awesome.
• 14:31
  Mike Favarez: I got a call from a guy who works in the building and he said and he goes to our church.
• 14:36
  Mike Favarez: He said pastor, mike, this building across the street, mutual, is not on the market yet, but I know it's going to be for sale.
• 14:43
  Mike Favarez: Do you want to talk to the owner?
• 14:44
  Mike Favarez: And it was like this is an open door right here.
• 14:47
  Mike Favarez: And and we needed the space.
• 14:49
  Mike Favarez: We were maxed out in our church space and this was perfect and you've been there, you've seen it, we've got library, we've got study halls, we've got classrooms.
• 14:56
  Emeal Zwayne: Well, you know, this is another thing.
• 14:57
  Emeal Zwayne: It's kind of a side note, but it's.
• 14:58
  Emeal Zwayne: It's relevant.
• 14:59
  Emeal Zwayne: It grieves me when Christians don't do things with excellence.
• 15:04
  Emeal Zwayne: When I walked through that place, just from an aesthetic standpoint and and you know that could be frivolous and it could be vain, but it wasn't in connection with what you guys are doing this place is set up with excellence.
• 15:15
  Emeal Zwayne: I'm excited to hear about the fruit that's going to come from it.
• 15:18
  Oscar Navarro: When you mentioned Christians being grieved by Christians that don't do things with excellence, I thought you're going to reference the shirt Eddie Roman decided to wear today.
• 15:25
  Emeal Zwayne: I was going to reference you, but I Was trying to be humble.
• 15:30
  Mike Favarez: Eddie didn't even have a collar.
• 15:31
  Mike Favarez: You got to pay this guy more.
• 15:34
  Emeal Zwayne: That's true.
• 15:34
  Emeal Zwayne: Wow, oscar, look at that, he chimed in on us.
• 15:36
  Emeal Zwayne: All right, mike, we have a bunch of questions for you.
• 15:38
  Emeal Zwayne: You know, I want to talk a little bit about the books you've written, want to talk more about your radio program, but we want to get into some questions about ministry.
• 15:43
  Emeal Zwayne: This is a big question for believers, especially as they're trying to find their way through, figuring out what's my place in the church and obviously your heart is to raise people up, train them up and to multiply Right discipleship, teaching others, what, what we've received, as Paul talked to Timothy about.
• 16:01
  Emeal Zwayne: But, mike, how does someone know if they're called to full-time vocational ministry?
• 16:06
  Emeal Zwayne: Obviously, we're all called the minister to serve in the church, we all have a part in the body.
• 16:11
  Emeal Zwayne: But when it comes to like full-time vocational ministry, how would you encourage someone to Go about finding out if that's what they're called to do?
• 16:19
  Mike Favarez: Yeah, well, you can watch American Idol and you can see a lot of people that want to be singers and their parents go yeah, you'd be great at this, and and and they're not.
• 16:27
  Mike Favarez: I mean, I don't know if they still do that.
• 16:29
  Mike Favarez: I haven't seen the show for years.
• 16:31
  Mike Favarez: But still going but you know the idea of you saying, well, I think I want to be in ministry professionally.
• 16:36
  Mike Favarez: That really means very little to me.
• 16:40
  Mike Favarez: It's part of it, but it's like one small part of it and I know that comes from you know, first Timothy, chapter 2, verse 1 If you desire the work, that's a noble thing you're desiring, but the reality is you've got to look at so many other things.
• 16:53
  Mike Favarez: Of course there's character requirements within Titus and Timothy and there has to be an engagement In something that shows that you have an endowment from God that makes this productive.
• 17:04
  Mike Favarez: Yeah, that's going to come from seeing a giftedness that works out, where people say, hey, you're trying to help the church, your help is helpful.
• 17:11
  Mike Favarez: And I know a lot of people say, well, I want to help the church and I want to do it more and give me more time and more opportunities, and it might be well.
• 17:17
  Mike Favarez: Your help is really not helping us, right, you know playing the accordion, you know before communion.
• 17:22
  Mike Favarez: It's not helping us right now.
• 17:23
  Mike Favarez: You just got to realize that your help is helpful and that's going to come from Pastors that already are doing the work, congregants that are receiving the work that you're doing and a sense that you're affirmed that God has gifted me to do this and I'm qualified and I have a desire to do it.
• 17:38
  Mike Favarez: Like all those, five things have to come together, and I think you always need people that are coaching and affirming the way through it.
• 17:46
  Oscar Navarro: Yeah, I'll real quick.
• 17:47
  Oscar Navarro: Can we talk about this guy that's playing the accordion drink?
• 17:50
  Oscar Navarro: Yeah, I shouldn't.
• 17:51
  Mike Favarez: I always picture that I did have a guy once say can I play the accordion in the worship group?
• 17:57
  Mike Favarez: I'm like, well, you have to talk to a worship director, but I'm I'm thinking the answer is going to be no.
• 18:01
  Oscar Navarro: We have a polka.
• 18:04
  Emeal Zwayne: That's the polka church right well, I love the fact, mike, that you said earlier that you guys don't hesitate to tell people hey, you really shouldn't be doing this, and that's the major disservice that's going on in the world.
• 18:14
  Emeal Zwayne: Like you said, american Idol and nobody cared enough about that guy to tell me you shouldn't be doing this how much more important it, you know, is it in the church, obviously should be of maximal importance.
• 18:24
  Mike Favarez: think about it.
• 18:24
  Mike Favarez: What's more important than someone Leading in in learning the bible?
• 18:29
  Mike Favarez: I mean, that's what ministries Everyone's got to be apt to teach, yeah, if you can't do it, well, if you're not gifted by god to do it.
• 18:36
  Mike Favarez: So fruitfulness is important and discipleship means it's not you just sitting around by yourself figuring this out Are you even learning in a book or going to a class?
• 18:44
  Mike Favarez: It's someone putting their arm around you and saying Let me help walk you through this process.
• 18:48
  Mike Favarez: I just think we've got to have that kind of one-on-one counseling through education, where people are mentoring you to decide where your place in ministry is.
• 18:58
  Oscar Navarro: Yeah, yeah, I also think, real quickly here, that we need to have a better understanding, a theology of work.
• 19:04
  Oscar Navarro: The problem is that, you know, in the 1500s the roman catholic church made the work of the priest's sacred and everything else Secular, and something that we forget, that was a part of the reformation, is that they sought to To remind us that all of the work that we do that is glorifying to god can be sacred, which, of course.
• 19:23
  Oscar Navarro: There's this the famous story of a Shoemaker writing you know, martin luther a letter saying hey, how can I make shoes to the glory of god?
• 19:31
  Oscar Navarro: Or what can I do to the glory of god?
• 19:33
  Oscar Navarro: and his response was simply make Excellent shoes and so for some of these young men that feel the call to glorify god and all they do.
• 19:42
  Oscar Navarro: Maybe it's not full-time vocational ministry, but that doesn't mean the work that you are called to do is not Sacred.
• 19:49
  Oscar Navarro: Whether it's sacred work of picking up chairs and putting them the way after services, whether it's sacred work of going and being an electrician Monday through Friday and then serving your church on the weekends, that is also sacred work that god calls us all to do.
• 20:03
  Mike Favarez: Let me comment on that, because if you think about the, the reformation, part of the legacy of that is even the word that is trickled down into our vocabulary about your job.
• 20:12
  Mike Favarez: They talk about a vocation, right, like a vocational counseling vocation, right, that word is calling, that's what it is in latin, a vaquette to call.
• 20:21
  Mike Favarez: And and god has called us to be a plumber, an architect or whatever, if that's where we find that we are maximally helpful to the good of society and we can glorify god in the work.
• 20:33
  Mike Favarez: Now, the things I can't do to glorify god, right, I can't be a pimp or, you know, a drug pusher, right.
• 20:39
  Mike Favarez: But there are so many things that we can.
• 20:42
  Mike Favarez: And we've got to see that the, the clergy, like clayate divide of the pre-reformation world, was a disaster because people thought, well, I'm not living for god here, they're living for god in the monastery, and that's a big mistake.
• 20:54
  Mike Favarez: And so, yeah, we need to make let people know.
• 20:57
  Mike Favarez: That's why the institute is so helpful, because it's not just and you said it earlier by accident, it may be slipped out of your mouth that this is training pastors.
• 21:04
  Mike Favarez: Well, it does train pastors, but that's not what the institute is for.
• 21:07
  Mike Favarez: The institute is for not only people that are going to go on to be pastors, but most of the people are not.
• 21:12
  Mike Favarez: They're going to find their usefulness in apologetics, christian world view by.
• 21:17
  Mike Favarez: They are going to their office every day.
• 21:19
  Oscar Navarro: That's good by cleaning.
• 21:20
  Mike Favarez: You know the toilets as a janitor somewhere.
• 21:23
  Mike Favarez: That's fine.
• 21:23
  Mike Favarez: It's that we're training you can get you ready for that.
• 21:25
  Emeal Zwayne: Amen.
• 21:26
  Emeal Zwayne: Yeah, you know, back in the day when I was at one of those original institutes viola, actually Uh, in my christian thought class, one of the most helpful things that I learned as a new believer was a whole concept of integration versus Compartmentalization.
• 21:40
  Emeal Zwayne: And that is, believers, we can integrate the lord into every aspect of life and that really is that the revolution that transforms lives.
• 21:48
  Mike Favarez: When we grasp that as believers, so right and and look at eddie roman over here, without his collar on, we couldn't do this without him, yeah, or someone like him, yeah, gifted to do.
• 21:58
  Mike Favarez: Or the guys who made this microphone, or the people that bottled this water, or the people that made that, that iPad.
• 22:03
  Mike Favarez: But we, we need christians that see everything as we're doing this, to utilize the mandate of exercising dominion over this created world to try and channel this for the good and glory of god.
• 22:15
  Mike Favarez: If people can think that way.
• 22:16
  Mike Favarez: Now, plenty of people are making water bottles and iPads without ever thinking about that.
• 22:20
  Mike Favarez: But, christians, that are right.
• 22:21
  Mike Favarez: You start doing turning those dials, eddie, for the glory of god, it, it, elevates everything.
• 22:26
  Mike Favarez: Yeah right.
• 22:27
  Mike Favarez: It becomes a, an active worship, which is what luther and calvin everyone else was trying to get people to see exactly.
• 22:33
  Emeal Zwayne: Yeah, whether you eat or drink or whatever you do to all to the glory of god, absolutely Did you just come up with that.
• 22:37
  Emeal Zwayne: Yeah, just on the spot, it sounds like bible to me.
• 22:39
  Emeal Zwayne: So, all right, mike, let me ask you this.
• 22:43
  Emeal Zwayne: So you've got, you've got a young person who's beginning to get involved in leadership in the church.
• 22:48
  Emeal Zwayne: They don't have the opportunity to become a part of compass bible institute.
• 22:52
  Emeal Zwayne: They live somewhere else.
• 22:53
  Emeal Zwayne: How do you advise them to grow in order to become more effective in leadership?
• 22:59
  Mike Favarez: Yeah, I would say this you need to be fully present and fully engaged in all three areas of what you should be doing in church.
• 23:05
  Mike Favarez: And just in terms of how you're there, you're supposed to attend Right at worship services, bible studies your chairs are next to each other.
• 23:13
  Mike Favarez: You're looking at someone who's feeding you and worship leaders and you are, you're taking it.
• 23:18
  Mike Favarez: Be fully engaged in that, yeah.
• 23:20
  Mike Favarez: And then you're supposed to be engaged in chairs face to face, right, we are supposed to have interaction.
• 23:24
  Mike Favarez: You can't.
• 23:25
  Mike Favarez: You've got to be known, right.
• 23:26
  Mike Favarez: And and think of the distinction between how many people come to a church service and then how many people don't involve themselves in something where their chairs are face to face, in small groups.
• 23:35
  Mike Favarez: And if you think about that, that disparity is like people aren't even moving from being a perceiver of what's happening to someone engaging and edifying and sharpening iron and all those things.
• 23:46
  Mike Favarez: And then there's one more aspect of church you got to get up out of your chair and do ministry.
• 23:50
  Mike Favarez: Now, if all I'm focused on is, I want to find the place where I can get out of my chair and help the church, but you're not fully engaged in your small group body, life of the church or in receiving what's going on in the Exposition of the word and the worship of the of the assembled congregation.
• 24:04
  Mike Favarez: I think you're you're going to be messed up.
• 24:06
  Mike Favarez: Some people just think I'm just here to lead, I'm just here to be a leader and I'm saying be a full-blown engaged congregant, be a full-blown engaged small group participant and be a zealous worker for the lord.
• 24:17
  Mike Favarez: If you can be fully there for all three Parts of that, I think you're gonna.
• 24:22
  Mike Favarez: You're gonna thrive, you're gonna do well.
• 24:24
  Oscar Navarro: Let me also just say you, you didn't just describe a future pastor or leader in the church.
• 24:28
  Oscar Navarro: You described what a church member period Should be, and I know you know, because we live in southern california.
• 24:34
  Oscar Navarro: I know this is a global issue, but especially in Southern California there's so many churches in which people want to go to consume right, they want the sermon to serve them, they want the worship music to be entertaining and they want to go and have no responsibility, get their cup of coffee, be entertained for 45 minutes to an hour and then leave.
• 24:53
  Oscar Navarro: And what you just described is what's called church membership being a family, being known and knowing others.
• 25:02
  Mike Favarez: And let me add one aspect I didn't mention, and pastors don't like to mention it, but do we fully engage when our chairs are side by side?
• 25:08
  Mike Favarez: There's something in that service that involves as giving our offerings to the Lord right, and those people those are usually the people if you were to look up they're giving it.
• 25:17
  Mike Favarez: They're not even sacrificially involved in giving to the church.
• 25:21
  Mike Favarez: Right Giving is one of the corporate congregation things that we do and and it's funny how, the more we're fully participating in congregational life, small group life, then when we stand up to do ministry, it's just an outgrowth of that.
• 25:35
  Mike Favarez: And some guys who stand up to ministry are like you need to be doing more of that.
• 25:37
  Mike Favarez: You need to get more hours to that.
• 25:39
  Mike Favarez: We need to train you to do this full time.
• 25:40
  Mike Favarez: Well, even if you're doing it full time, you're in a small group, you're in congregation life, you're experiencing preaching and giving and singing.
• 25:48
  Mike Favarez: It's just it.
• 25:49
  Mike Favarez: That's what life's all about.
• 25:51
  Mike Favarez: And if you happen to say they're identifying giftedness to where, when I get out of my chair to do ministry, it's good and they want more of it, great.
• 25:59
  Mike Favarez: You just.
• 26:00
  Mike Favarez: I guess they start paying you to do it, but it's just Christian life.
• 26:04
  Oscar Navarro: Yeah, and let me just say because I think sometimes really quickly here, when we talk about this idea of what it means to be a church member, it can sound something like you're not doing enough.
• 26:12
  Oscar Navarro: But also, yes, but also let me poison a little bit differently we're inviting you into something you were designed to participate in.
• 26:22
  Oscar Navarro: You were saved out of anonymity into community to experience the glory of God, the love of God and the love of other people.
• 26:30
  Oscar Navarro: This is the thing that our souls desire.
• 26:34
  Oscar Navarro: So many of us live lonely, unfulfilled lives, and God has called us into the local church community to experience his glory and the goodness of our church.
• 26:45
  Mike Favarez: I thought we were created to sit on a couch and thumb through reels on Instagram.
• 26:50
  Emeal Zwayne: No, that too, it's both, and oh is it.
• 26:53
  Mike Favarez: But think about our culture, so absorbed in these like solitary things Just to get people to think I'm supposed to be a part of a community and people are supposed to know me.
• 27:04
  Mike Favarez: If I ask the average man in particular, who really knows you?
• 27:08
  Mike Favarez: No, really, who knows you?
• 27:09
  Mike Favarez: Who are your friends?
• 27:10
  Mike Favarez: Most guys don't even have an answer to that.
• 27:12
  Mike Favarez: My cat, it's time for us to get you, like you just said, get more of us to see this is the purpose of our lives, right?
• 27:23
  Mike Favarez: Not just our church responsibilities.
• 27:25
  Mike Favarez: This is why we were created, you're right.
• 27:26
  Emeal Zwayne: Good luck.
• 27:27
  Emeal Zwayne: Well, you know, I think, that what churches often desire they're not willing to invest in producing.
• 27:35
  Emeal Zwayne: They want to circumnavigate the process that it takes to get to a place where there's that real kind of health and vibrancy and effectiveness in the church.
• 27:44
  Emeal Zwayne: Well, that takes a lot of investment in terms of time and effort and unpopular elements that aren't a part of the consumer church that we have today, and so it delights me to see that you guys are doing that at Compass.
• 27:58
  Emeal Zwayne: So let me ask you this, Pastor Mike what would you say are the biggest pitfalls for leaders in the church?
• 28:06
  Mike Favarez: Well, I guess we've touched on one.
• 28:08
  Mike Favarez: I should at least say there's a lot of guys that are involved in church vocationally.
• 28:13
  Mike Favarez: That shouldn't be.
• 28:14
  Mike Favarez: Some people have said about church planning and I do a lot of church planning they say it's easy to start a church, it's hard to kill one.
• 28:21
  Mike Favarez: Right, it's easy to have a birthing party, but hard to have a funeral for a church.
• 28:26
  Mike Favarez: Some guys need to say this isn't what I should be doing.
• 28:29
  Mike Favarez: I do think that's a starter.
• 28:32
  Mike Favarez: But then the other thing is we find a culture where people think I think about this, I'm working for the weekend or I'm living for my retirement.
• 28:39
  Mike Favarez: If you don't have a good work ethic coming into church leadership you're always looking for your Starbucks run or your walk with your dog in the afternoon you're not going to be a good church leader.
• 28:48
  Mike Favarez: Paul talked about the spending and being expended for the souls of people.
• 28:52
  Mike Favarez: You got to love people.
• 28:53
  Mike Favarez: You got to care about people.
• 28:54
  Mike Favarez: It's not about you on a stage and you being a great preacher.
• 28:57
  Mike Favarez: It's ultimately about you helping people know Christ, conform to Christ, and that's just going to suck a lot of life out of you.
• 29:04
  Mike Favarez: You've got to be willing.
• 29:05
  Mike Favarez: In my pastoral ministries class I teach you've got to be willing to give up normal life.
• 29:08
  Mike Favarez: You cannot just expect to.
• 29:10
  Mike Favarez: Whatever you envisioned your life when you were 12, you thought here's what adult life is like.
• 29:14
  Mike Favarez: You've got to give that up because we're going to serve, we're going to enter our rest when we get past this life.
• 29:20
  Mike Favarez: Right now we're going to work and I think a good solid it came up at some point a good solid Protestant work ethic that says we need to give I rest to work.
• 29:29
  Mike Favarez: I don't work to rest.
• 29:31
  Mike Favarez: I'm engaging in sleep so I can wake up and do what I'm supposed to do.
• 29:34
  Mike Favarez: The next day, I don't work so that I can get to bed.
• 29:37
  Mike Favarez: The reality of our problem in leadership is so often we've got lazy leaders and ministry life.
• 29:44
  Mike Favarez: Here's the liability.
• 29:45
  Mike Favarez: You don't have someone looking over your shoulder and saying here's what you should be doing at two o'clock in the afternoon on Thursday.
• 29:50
  Mike Favarez: Here's what you've got to be doing at 10 o'clock on Tuesday morning.
• 29:53
  Mike Favarez: You have to be self-governed, self-disciplined and a self-starter Particularly a lot of guys that might be listening to this podcast.
• 29:59
  Mike Favarez: They're in a small church, right?
• 30:00
  Mike Favarez: They don't even have the accountability of a staff around them in the office.
• 30:04
  Mike Favarez: It's like we've got to be workers, you've got to be disciplined, you can't be distracted, and we're so easily distracted.
• 30:10
  Mike Favarez: How long is the attention span of people today?
• 30:12
  Mike Favarez: What was that Right?
• 30:15
  Mike Favarez: They haven't even gotten this far in the podcast.
• 30:16
  Mike Favarez: So the bottom line is we need to change the way we look at what ministry is Ministry's work.
• 30:22
  Mike Favarez: When I started working as a kid, my dad, when I said, dad, I want to go get a job and I was young he said well, just remember this, son, once you start working, you're never going to stop.
• 30:29
  Mike Favarez: And he said number two work is work.
• 30:31
  Mike Favarez: And as long as you know that, work is work.
• 30:34
  Mike Favarez: And I thought that was a good bit of advice from my blue collar father If you're not ready to work, certainly don't step into ministry, because there's a pitfall there of thinking that you can make your own schedule.
• 30:46
  Mike Favarez: Most people think that I'm golfing from Sunday to Sunday anyway and it's a lot of work to do the work of ministry.
• 30:53
  Mike Favarez: I think guys need to step up and know that they're called to do it and that they're ready to put in the hours.
• 30:57
  Emeal Zwayne: Yeah, you know, and a lot of times you get these young guys that basically have the perspective of you know what.
• 31:02
  Emeal Zwayne: I'm just not good at anything else.
• 31:03
  Emeal Zwayne: I might as well go into ministries, I hope not.
• 31:06
  Emeal Zwayne: What a tragedy.
• 31:07
  Emeal Zwayne: but you see that I've seen that in young people where it's like oh man, I think I'm called to serve the Lord.
• 31:11
  Emeal Zwayne: Well, how are you doing at work?
• 31:12
  Emeal Zwayne: How many jobs have you been fired from?
• 31:14
  Emeal Zwayne: How's your attendance record been?
• 31:17
  Emeal Zwayne: Yeah, there's this sort of lax attitude when it comes to ministry.
• 31:20
  Emeal Zwayne: I mean, you look at what Paul endured for the sake of the gospel, you know, being shipwrecked and beaten with rods and stoned.
• 31:27
  Emeal Zwayne: And so there is that perspective of oh cool, I get to be a pastor, do my own schedule, like you said, get my latte, go for my afternoon walk.
• 31:34
  Emeal Zwayne: But ministry is sacrificial service.
• 31:38
  Emeal Zwayne: It's foot washing, it's cleaning up messes, it's dealing with the messy issues of people's lives, and if you're not spiritually fit, you're in big trouble.
• 31:47
  Emeal Zwayne: And so that leads to my next question.
• 31:49
  Oscar Navarro: Actually, I want you to answer the question because, Ezy, you've been involved with church planning, you've been involved with discipling.
• 31:54
  Oscar Navarro: You care deeply about the young men at your church.
• 31:56
  Oscar Navarro: What are the pitfalls you seek?
• 31:58
  Oscar Navarro: I think that's a really valuable question.
• 31:59
  Emeal Zwayne: I'd love to hear you answer it Well, I think one of the biggest pitfalls is pride and it can almost sound cliche, right, I mean, that's the typical go-to answer, but pride in its deceptive forms that leads to destruction, the pride that is unwilling to receive correction from those that you're leading as an example.
• 32:22
  Emeal Zwayne: I think the greatest leaders are those who have the non-negotiable attitude when it comes to who it is that can speak correction into my life, and the leaders that have blessed me most are those that I've seen demonstrate that humility toward their congregants, toward their wives, toward their children, when they come and approach them with something that isn't necessarily pleasant about themselves, that they don't want to look at or think about.
• 32:48
  Emeal Zwayne: So I think pride is one of the biggest destructive factors.
• 32:54
  Emeal Zwayne: And then I think another element too could be believing the lies of others and the lies of the enemy, because obviously we all know that discouragement is one of the biggest destructive elements in ministry, when you're not focused on what Scripture says and I think which leads to the question I was going to ask Mike I think perhaps one of the most overlooked pitfalls is a leader that does not have a vibrant, thriving devotional and prayer life.
• 33:24
  Emeal Zwayne: I think, honestly, that's what I want to know.
• 33:27
  Emeal Zwayne: I've always said that prayer is the barometer that really shows where we're at spiritually, because it's the most difficult discipline, I believe, and it's the one that demonstrates the greatest degree of faith, because we're sitting alone with our thoughts racing with a thousand things we have to do, speaking into the air to a God that we can't see and whose voice we can't hear and whose presence we can't feel.
• 33:49
  Emeal Zwayne: I think that's huge, mike.
• 33:51
  Emeal Zwayne: How do you encourage leaders to maintain that vibrant spiritual dynamic in their lives of prayer and devotion?
• 33:57
  Mike Favarez: Yeah, and that's the difficulty, I think, of everything in the Christian life.
• 34:02
  Mike Favarez: It's going against the traffic of my flesh.
• 34:05
  Mike Favarez: Even standing up and saying sin is sin and this is righteous, that's going to be hard in terms of my popularity.
• 34:10
  Mike Favarez: But then I think about sitting down and reading books.
• 34:13
  Mike Favarez: In a world of people that want to thumb through social media, that's hard for people to do.
• 34:18
  Mike Favarez: It's like just to have a linear time of reading a book for an hour.
• 34:21
  Mike Favarez: Who does that anymore?
• 34:21
  Mike Favarez: And now I'm going to say no longer.
• 34:23
  Mike Favarez: Do you stop reading the book?
• 34:24
  Mike Favarez: Now I've got to, like you said, I've got an unscripted time of talking to God and pouring out my heart.
• 34:31
  Mike Favarez: Before it's increasingly difficult.
• 34:33
  Mike Favarez: That's why the pinnacle of difficulty is not even just your Bible reading.
• 34:36
  Mike Favarez: It is your prayer life.
• 34:37
  Mike Favarez: So all I can say is you've got to do the hard stuff, and the hard stuff is making time for this.
• 34:42
  Mike Favarez: It's not like you throw in your prayer time or your study time in the Bible Before you ever get to Christian books.
• 34:49
  Mike Favarez: You throw it in with the gaps in your schedule.
• 34:52
  Mike Favarez: You've got to schedule it.
• 34:53
  Mike Favarez: It's got to be patterned.
• 34:54
  Mike Favarez: It's like going to the gym.
• 34:55
  Mike Favarez: Your body doesn't want to do it, but you're going to have to learn to do it and discipline yourself to do it.
• 35:00
  Mike Favarez: And I like to say you need to have a place, you need to have a time.
• 35:03
  Mike Favarez: You need to have that place secured to where you're not getting interrupted.
• 35:06
  Mike Favarez: You've got to turn your phone off and you've got to spend time focused on what you're there to do.
• 35:11
  Mike Favarez: And for my life and I tell people this, it's not in the Bible, although I think there's hints of it in the Bible you better have some things that you're regularly praying through.
• 35:19
  Mike Favarez: I say you've got to have a prayer list because I think it helps keep us on track.
• 35:23
  Mike Favarez: It's like reading a book.
• 35:25
  Mike Favarez: It keeps me on track because there's words there to follow.
• 35:27
  Mike Favarez: And in my prayer life at least, I want to go subject by subject through things.
• 35:31
  Mike Favarez: The top thing on my prayer list every morning, which I kind of hate in my flesh, is like I have first John 1, 9 there sin If I confess it, god forgives, mike Fobar is what have you done?
• 35:42
  Oscar Navarro: What is your sin?
• 35:43
  Mike Favarez: today, and I know sometimes I want to get into praying for this project or that thing or this sermon.
• 35:48
  Mike Favarez: But to start even with stuff like that and it's a topic I have to cover it.
• 35:53
  Mike Favarez: Okay, now I have to think.
• 35:55
  Mike Favarez: I've got to be introspective.
• 35:56
  Mike Favarez: I've got to pray Psalm 139, search me, try me, know my heart, see if there's any evil in me.
• 36:00
  Mike Favarez: Those are the things that a prayer list will do for you.
• 36:03
  Mike Favarez: It keeps you moving from thought to thought with God and saying, okay, god, here's what you want.
• 36:07
  Mike Favarez: You want me to agree with you about my sin.
• 36:10
  Mike Favarez: Now you want me to pray about the people in my life and in my staff and in my team you just got.
• 36:16
  Mike Favarez: You need lists, I think.
• 36:18
  Oscar Navarro: That's great.
• 36:18
  Oscar Navarro: I love that because, as pastors, you've got to wear a lot of hats.
• 36:22
  Oscar Navarro: You've got to be an entrepreneur in a way in regards to you got to know the finances and plan for the future.
• 36:27
  Oscar Navarro: You've got to be a leader of leaders, raising up other guys.
• 36:29
  Oscar Navarro: You've got to be the guy that takes all the phone call and counsel people through depression and death and everything that goes on out there All of this bombardment, plus being able to understand what's going on in the culture and the pressures of the world.
• 36:42
  Oscar Navarro: As a pastor, if we are not pointing our hearts back to Christ, we will lose a sense of our calling and the reason why we do what we do.
• 36:54
  Oscar Navarro: And so, ultimately, what you're talking about is a prayer life, a time in God's Word that points our own hearts back to the gospel, because it does not matter how good of an entrepreneur you are, it does not matter how good of a counselor you are.
• 37:07
  Oscar Navarro: If your heart isn't pointing to Christ, you're headed towards failure.
• 37:10
  Mike Favarez: And let me add a phrase to that that makes it even harder to differentiate, and that is you can be a great teacher of biblical truths, right?
• 37:18
  Mike Favarez: And I think if you're keen to discerning it, you can tell.
• 37:21
  Mike Favarez: Sometimes this guy knows Bible.
• 37:23
  Mike Favarez: He's throwing Bible out, right, but I wonder where he's at with God, because I don't even sense that this is for a person, right.
• 37:31
  Mike Favarez: Yeah, and so it is.
• 37:32
  Mike Favarez: You can do a lot of Christian work and in Richard Baxter you seem like you're familiar with some of these Puritans just in talking in that book called the Reform Pastor, which is not about theology but about having a heart.
• 37:43
  Mike Favarez: That's reform.
• 37:44
  Mike Favarez: He has a section in there just even about are you sure you're even a Christian?
• 37:48
  Mike Favarez: Yeah, and it's like that's just so good.
• 37:50
  Emeal Zwayne: Well, you know, Mike, you and I are connected to someone very dear to both of us, Todd Freel.
• 37:54
  Emeal Zwayne: Yeah.
• 37:55
  Emeal Zwayne: And your son, John, was a part of Road Trip to Truth, and now you are, which we're so excited about.
• 37:59
  Emeal Zwayne: Todd Freel is one of those guys who was studying to become a pastor.
• 38:04
  Emeal Zwayne: He was in seminary and realized one day he wasn't saved, Right, yeah.
• 38:07
  Emeal Zwayne: And so that's so essential and so key to do that self-examination.
• 38:12
  Emeal Zwayne: I've known others as well.
• 38:14
  Emeal Zwayne: There's another guy that I was mentoring and he came to me and said hey, I'm going to start a church, and you know, I'm so excited that the foundations for the church that are our main core values are going to be friendship, fellowship, fitness, finance and failure.
• 38:29
  Emeal Zwayne: Exactly, I'm like Houston.
• 38:30
  Emeal Zwayne: We got a problem and, by God's grace and I started giving this guy some good stuff.
• 38:35
  Emeal Zwayne: He started listening, reading, and then he realized he wasn't saved and now is has a sound church.
• 38:39
  Emeal Zwayne: And so another element that I think is a massive, massive danger is pastors that don't have accountability.
• 38:47
  Emeal Zwayne: And so how would you advise the Christian leader who wants to be effective to have healthy accountability?
• 38:53
  Emeal Zwayne: What does that look like?
• 38:54
  Mike Favarez: Yeah, and you talk about Pastor Kellen.
• 38:55
  Mike Favarez: He's going to do a whole thing this summer on that.
• 38:57
  Mike Favarez: Men finding accountability, yeah, and you know, you just have to be honest.
• 39:01
  Mike Favarez: I like to put it this way.
• 39:01
  Mike Favarez: You got to learn to think on yourself, like you know.
• 39:04
  Mike Favarez: You've got to have guys in your life that you are, that you trust, because there is a sense of trust in this right.
• 39:10
  Mike Favarez: If you told your accountability partner stuff that he got on a stage and and yacked it, you know there's bells that are hard to unring, even if they're not disqualifying.
• 39:18
  Mike Favarez: So you have to have guys that you feel like you trust and I find that even the guys that you work with, who know what pastoral ministry is, become a great cadre of guys that you feel like you can walk through life with.
• 39:30
  Mike Favarez: You know, they know where you are, they know what you're doing.
• 39:32
  Mike Favarez: You have that sense of of even living life so closely together that you you have a sense of openness and transparency with it.
• 39:40
  Oscar Navarro: I think that's key, I think, just to add to that also, you need guys around you that aren't impressed with you, and what I mean by that is that it could be so easy, where you gather together, yes, men that think you're the, think you're the best pastor, the best teacher, think that you're whatever the case, and they become afraid to call you out, to challenge you, to co-disciple alongside of you, and so to have guys around you that aren't impressed by who you are, but rather know you and love you, and love what God is doing in your heart is really important.
• 40:07
  Mike Favarez: Two things will help that One is having guys that are with you for a long time.
• 40:10
  Mike Favarez: Yeah, and you watch some leaders.
• 40:11
  Mike Favarez: They rotate there.
• 40:12
  Mike Favarez: You're number two, number three, four guys.
• 40:14
  Mike Favarez: They just keep moving every two years.
• 40:15
  Mike Favarez: So I think having long-term associates is helpful because then that kind of helps get the veneer of your amazing.
• 40:21
  Mike Favarez: And then, secondly, that you're really bringing your team into decisions Right.
• 40:26
  Mike Favarez: I mean, we meet every single week as leaders and we're making decisions together.
• 40:29
  Mike Favarez: Often I'm the last one to weigh in on a topic because I want to hear what everybody says and I know there's got to be a Timothy and Ephesus that's leading other elders, but I just think you've got to show them that you really want their input and decisions are made together with a plurality of pastoral elders.
• 40:49
  Mike Favarez: And.
• 40:49
  Mike Favarez: I think, that's key, and when you do that it then it keeps this distance, this kind of back to the Laity clergy.
• 40:54
  Mike Favarez: Now it's the associate senior distinction, and we can't have that.
• 40:58
  Mike Favarez: We need to make decisions together and we need guys that we've been in the trenches with for years and years.
• 41:02
  Emeal Zwayne: Yeah, and I think a huge important element on the part of the leader is intentionality and cultivating approachability.
• 41:11
  Emeal Zwayne: And it's one thing to give lip service to that hey, call me on anything that you see in my life and point it out but to act approachable when you are approached is going to perpetuate the potential for your fellow leaders to speak into your life.
• 41:25
  Emeal Zwayne: But if you bristle the second, they bring something up.
• 41:28
  Emeal Zwayne: If you're defensive, if you're a rights defender rather than a truth seeker, as it's been said, it's not going to happen.
• 41:34
  Emeal Zwayne: You're going to intimidate your leaders and you're going to do yourself a disservice in the church, a disservice in the future.
• 41:39
  Emeal Zwayne: And before.
• 41:40
  Mike Favarez: A lot of people listen to this podcast and go, yeah, my passion needs to be more of that.
• 41:43
  Mike Favarez: Every guy who says that we need to ask even as you put earlier, easy within your family, that's good, right, yeah.
• 41:51
  Mike Favarez: Do people approach you and think you don't bristle when you say, dad, you shouldn't have done that, or honey, did you do we really need to spend that money on that TV?
• 41:59
  Mike Favarez: I mean, most people bristle by just the nature of thinking.
• 42:03
  Mike Favarez: I made a decision, I own it and now you're telling me it wasn't right.
• 42:06
  Mike Favarez: That's hard to do, so you've got to give some grace to your pastor that he may take a deep breath when you say, pastor, why did we do that?
• 42:13
  Mike Favarez: Why did you have that guy in the pulpit?
• 42:15
  Mike Favarez: Why did we do whatever we did here?
• 42:17
  Mike Favarez: And I think we all should have a bottom line commitment to that.
• 42:22
  Mike Favarez: And yet it's not as easy as someone's going to say when they're looking at someone else's life like my pastor needs to be more approachable.
• 42:28
  Mike Favarez: I want us to be approachable and in my heart, that's my commitment.
• 42:31
  Oscar Navarro: That is a tough thing.
• 42:32
  Oscar Navarro: That's good.
• 42:33
  Oscar Navarro: Mike, sounds like you have a confession to make.
• 42:34
  Oscar Navarro: How big is your TV and why was your wife upset about it?
• 42:37
  Mike Favarez: You know what?
• 42:37
  Mike Favarez: I'm glad you said that.
• 42:38
  Mike Favarez: I looked up my TV the other day, said, honey, we've had this TV for so many years.
• 42:42
  Mike Favarez: I bought it as a demo at Best Buy.
• 42:44
  Mike Favarez: I think, honey, at some point I think we should buy a new TV.
• 42:48
  Mike Favarez: So I'm glad you brought that up because currently I have an old TV that I bought off of the wall of Best Buy and Mission Viejo, so you know what I'm doing.
• 42:57
  Emeal Zwayne: all right in that department Sounds like Oscar's been spying in on your life.
• 43:00
  Emeal Zwayne: Oscar's trying to go for it.
• 43:02
  Emeal Zwayne: All right, I have another question.
• 43:03
  Emeal Zwayne: We're going to start drawing no clothes here, but we talked about busyness.
• 43:07
  Emeal Zwayne: Oscar mentioned all the things you have on your plate as a pastor.
• 43:09
  Emeal Zwayne: You talked about the importance of not being lazy as a pastor and and grinding and working hard.
• 43:14
  Emeal Zwayne: But how do you advise leaders on striking that balance, especially when it comes to family, especially those that have younger children, those that have maybe wives that are struggling in being a pastor's wife?
• 43:26
  Emeal Zwayne: I mean, we oftentimes overlook that when I first got married, I was an associate pastor and my wife, you know, suddenly became a associate pastor's wife and that wasn't her world.
• 43:36
  Emeal Zwayne: And so how do leaders strike that balance?
• 43:39
  Emeal Zwayne: Yes, busy, hard work, doing all of that, but at the same time, not neglecting your primary ministry.
• 43:45
  Mike Favarez: Yeah and this is first grinty in seven right, if you didn't have a spouse, you could be more effective in ministry.
• 43:50
  Mike Favarez: That's paul's argument and he even advocates for it.
• 43:52
  Mike Favarez: If you can do it, do it.
• 43:53
  Mike Favarez: So once you become a husband, you know you've immediately sacrificed some level of fruitfulness in your ministry, and I've heard a lot of people put flowery language on.
• 44:03
  Mike Favarez: More effective, frankly, biblically, you're not.
• 44:06
  Mike Favarez: I mean, I would sleep on my couch at the office and get more done right, more books.
• 44:09
  Mike Favarez: So we we have to realize we're sacrificing part of our fruitfulness for this, for sanity, because most of us that are gifted to be married.
• 44:17
  Mike Favarez: We would be insane if we weren't married so we need to be married, those of us that are called to that.
• 44:21
  Mike Favarez: But balance I want to make sure that we don't use that word is an excuse to say I'm gonna be at every soccer game.
• 44:27
  Mike Favarez: I'm gonna, you know, picnic with my wife every saturday.
• 44:30
  Mike Favarez: It's like my wife knows, and if you have a wife that's gifted in ministry, that she loves the church, she's ready to sacrifice for the church.
• 44:38
  Mike Favarez: When we get a call at eleven o'clock and somebody's got a gun to their head and needs the pastor to talk him off a ledge, you know she's gonna go.
• 44:44
  Mike Favarez: Okay, you gotta go, and and so you need a wife that's willing to sacrifice like you're willing to sacrifice for the church and your kids.
• 44:51
  Mike Favarez: And here's the bread and butter I think of of real pastoral ministry is that your pk's, your pastor's kids, aren't resentful of the church.
• 44:58
  Mike Favarez: Can you train your kids to say I'm not at every little league game, uh, and dad misses a lot of stuff, but you still see your kids fall in love with the church because you've somehow in your household shown that this is important, really more important than your little league game, even though I'm all for it and I'll be at the games I can be at.
• 45:17
  Mike Favarez: Balance can't be a norman rockwell experience of I have a perfect balance between my marriage and my parenting and my church and counseling and books and conference.
• 45:26
  Mike Favarez: You can't uh, but I do think if you've lost your kids in the process, uh, something's wrong.
• 45:33
  Mike Favarez: And so the real goal is I want my kids to grow up and learn that what I love the church is what your mom loves the church, and I want you to love the church and and by god's grace, at least in my life for the present, you know, my two sons are pastors and my daughter wants to find a pastor to marry and she loves ministry and I feel like that warms my heart as an answer to my prayers has been my prayer.
• 45:54
  Mike Favarez: Our kids get, get dragged along to a lot of stuff through the years and missed a lot of stuff and dad says I gotta make a stop at the hospital before we go home.
• 46:01
  Mike Favarez: And they're sitting there you watching some guy with a bandage on his head going I'd rather be at home you watching tv.
• 46:06
  Mike Favarez: They learn to love the church if you go at it with a right and this is why I say the table talk at dinner cannot be how much you hate your job, you you gotta love your job and love the people that you're, that you're called to love.
• 46:19
  Mike Favarez: Like the average guy coming home from the office, going like anna, the way he unloads on all the negatives of his job, pastoral ministry you can't do that and you shouldn't.
• 46:28
  Mike Favarez: It's the bride of christ.
• 46:29
  Mike Favarez: I don't complain about the bride of christ.
• 46:30
  Mike Favarez: Does it have warts and wringles?
• 46:32
  Mike Favarez: It's got plenty.
• 46:33
  Mike Favarez: My job is to do what I can to iron them out and and so I want my family to love the church and I think that's the goal.
• 46:39
  Mike Favarez: But it won't be traditional balance in terms of everything's idyllic and you make every little thing because you won't but I but I love that.
• 46:46
  Emeal Zwayne: You know intentionality and training, like you talked about how you conveyed your children.
• 46:51
  Emeal Zwayne: This is what we're doing, this is what it's all about, and I'm glad you said that, because I've seen the pendulum swing to the other end of things.
• 46:58
  Emeal Zwayne: You know it's like, hey, we, we got to make sure the kids always feel that we're there and we're at everything, but you're not teaching them really the realities of what the christian life looks like, not just in ministry but in life in general.
• 47:09
  Emeal Zwayne: Right, you have those divine interruptions all the time and if you have this attitude of, well, these are the important things, this is the agenda, you're gonna be ineffective in huge ways.
• 47:18
  Oscar Navarro: Well, there's also real quickly the opportunity to invite your kids along to serving alongside you rather than leaving them behind, and so as I go and care for this person in need, I get to invite my kids into praying for those people.
• 47:31
  Oscar Navarro: As those prayers get answered, answered, I come home and let them know how god is listening to their prayers, and so your kids.
• 47:37
  Oscar Navarro: As a pastor, we have an opportunity.
• 47:40
  Oscar Navarro: Help them see the role that they have in what god is doing in the local church, rather than but then treating them like a speed bump to the job that I want to go into right now.
• 47:50
  Emeal Zwayne: Good point yeah, and, and you can also again go to the other extreme and saying yes to everything when you really should be saying no to certain things.
• 47:57
  Emeal Zwayne: So your kids also need to see that yeah, you were invited to go speak at this event that you'd love to go speak at, and maybe it's a great opportunity for whatever.
• 48:05
  Emeal Zwayne: You're looking at priorities, your you're also you're evaluating.
• 48:09
  Emeal Zwayne: It's not just this sort of standard approach, but you're you're stepping back, thinking outside of the box and evaluating where have things been at in this season of our lives as a family, where my kids at right now, what, what's my wife going through?
• 48:22
  Emeal Zwayne: And that helps us, I think, filter out what we need to say no, do when we need to say no to.
• 48:25
  Emeal Zwayne: So excellent, like.
• 48:27
  Emeal Zwayne: As we wrap up real quick, I want you to touch on a few of the things that you're doing.
• 48:30
  Emeal Zwayne: You know, one of the things that I love and I think this was your doctoral dissertation, if I remember partners is that what it's?
• 48:36
  Mike Favarez: called partners.
• 48:37
  Mike Favarez: Partners is our one-on-one discipleship program.
• 48:39
  Mike Favarez: I wrote it as a project for my master's degree your master's, yeah okay, got it.
• 48:43
  Emeal Zwayne: So I mean this thing thrills me because my cousin, nancy, as I said earlier, is a part of your church has taken so many women through this I mean I'll talk to you and I'm taking this other lady through partners.
• 48:53
  Emeal Zwayne: Tell us about that real quick.
• 48:54
  Emeal Zwayne: And then I know you wrote a new book.
• 48:56
  Emeal Zwayne: It's it's not out yet, but it will be called envy.
• 48:58
  Emeal Zwayne: Yeah, like you to talk about that focal point.
• 49:00
  Mike Favarez: Whatever else you guys have going on yeah, and partners is great because it's not the material.
• 49:05
  Mike Favarez: That's great.
• 49:05
  Mike Favarez: That's not a very, you know you get to the greatest book ever written by me uh, no, it's.
• 49:11
  Mike Favarez: It's.
• 49:11
  Mike Favarez: It's just basic stuff about the christian life, likea do I make sure my christian do I know the gospel?
• 49:16
  Mike Favarez: How do I study the bible, how do I pray, how do I share my faith just basics.
• 49:20
  Mike Favarez: But the magic of it, if I can enlist that word, is that you're you're forced to one-on-one sit across the table from someone and talk these issues through.
• 49:30
  Mike Favarez: A lot of questions in it that we go over their deeper studies in the margins.
• 49:33
  Mike Favarez: It's just forcing people to sit down and talk about the spiritual aspects of our christian life and to me I could do that on a three by five card, because the real value in it is getting face to face with people and talk about the spiritual lives now.
• 49:47
  Mike Favarez: So it's just a guided method of how to do that and it's available out of churches in around the country are starting to pick it up in terms of their their discipleship programs.
• 49:56
  Mike Favarez: I think it's helpful writing a book on envy.
• 49:58
  Mike Favarez: I just finished it.
• 49:58
  Mike Favarez: It's at the publisher now and it's getting tight set.
• 50:01
  Mike Favarez: I'm excited about this.
• 50:02
  Oscar Navarro: Let me ask you a quick on that, because envy is one of those hidden sins, right like everybody knows that it's a sin but nobody realizes that they're probably struggling with it.
• 50:10
  Oscar Navarro: Everybody knows when they lie, everyone knows when they steal, everybody knows when they look with lust, but often people don't realize how envious their hearts are.
• 50:19
  Oscar Navarro: So how important is it?
• 50:20
  Oscar Navarro: What is envy?
• 50:20
  Oscar Navarro: How important is it for us to be able to see that we struggle with that?
• 50:24
  Oscar Navarro: And how does the book help?
• 50:25
  Mike Favarez: and you've said it so well, because I've had a lot of people confess stealing and lost and and lying.
• 50:30
  Mike Favarez: I've had no one come in and say, pastor, you pray for me.
• 50:32
  Mike Favarez: Uh, I'm confessing my sin of envy.
• 50:35
  Mike Favarez: I mean, maybe it's been done, but I've been in ministry for decades.
• 50:38
  Mike Favarez: I've never had anybody say that was jerry bridges right, respectable sins respectable sins, sins we tolerate.
• 50:44
  Mike Favarez: I want to the series on that sins we tolerate, uh.
• 50:46
  Mike Favarez: So here's the thing envy in the early church.
• 50:49
  Mike Favarez: Uh, if you look at the first five centuries of the church, a lot of sermons about envy, because they saw it and they begin to categorize it as one of the deadly sins.
• 50:58
  Mike Favarez: They call it a capital sin, and that is a sin that the other sins all find their root in.
• 51:03
  Mike Favarez: So envy was one of those sins and they said envy is the cause of a hundred lesser sins.
• 51:09
  Mike Favarez: So we got to deal with the root and so I started looking around where the books today written on envy and and the way this book started was because I sat through a series of meetings through the week, and especially in the middle of my week is when I deal with staff members in in ministry problems, and I started really identifying in one afternoon how many of the meetings I was having really based on someone in being someone else.
• 51:30
  Mike Favarez: And I, I, I, I took a little, you know, sticky note.
• 51:33
  Mike Favarez: I said this is a good book idea.
• 51:35
  Mike Favarez: I happen to be at a conference and I had a publisher that I'd worked with before say, hey, you think I write any books.
• 51:40
  Mike Favarez: I go, no, you know, because I don't really enjoy the writing process.
• 51:43
  Mike Favarez: I was like no, and he said you got no books on your heart and no, and then I felt bad because I realized just a week ago I'd written on this note we need a book on envy.
• 51:51
  Mike Favarez: So I I came back to him, said well, I guess there was one I was thinking of and I told him and then the things started.
• 51:56
  Mike Favarez: The message started.
• 51:57
  Mike Favarez: He got on his phone, he started looking this publisher about books on it, said we don't have.
• 52:02
  Mike Favarez: He said you got to write this book.
• 52:03
  Mike Favarez: And so then that set me on sitting down and laying out an outline for the book and writing it.
• 52:08
  Mike Favarez: The book is all about the secret areas of your life where you envy and it goes back to the tenth commandment which is really the fuel for envy, because envy is not covetousness, but the tenth commandment not to covet your neighbor's wife.
• 52:22
  Mike Favarez: Your neighbor's house is property, is workers.
• 52:25
  Mike Favarez: All of that is the seed of it.
• 52:27
  Mike Favarez: When I'm really, as as dr moler says, hankering for something I don't have, it's that now it starts to fuel my resentment for you.
• 52:35
  Mike Favarez: When you have it now I don't like you because you have what I don't have.
• 52:39
  Mike Favarez: So you know, kane kills able.
• 52:43
  Mike Favarez: And really, when you think about that, this sin of envy was because here his brother had what he wanted and he didn't get.
• 52:50
  Mike Favarez: And of course you know the story.
• 52:51
  Mike Favarez: God says, hey, sins, crouching at the door, just got a master.
• 52:54
  Mike Favarez: He what he didn't master, it right, envy mastered him.
• 52:57
  Mike Favarez: And then the.
• 52:58
  Mike Favarez: And another thing that got me thinking about this when you look at christ, uh, standing before pilot, pilot says I know that they delivered you over out of envy.
• 53:07
  Mike Favarez: I thought to jesus was crucified for this sin.
• 53:11
  Mike Favarez: Where are the books about the sin problem that people have?
• 53:13
  Mike Favarez: So I sat down and wrote one and I will say there's another one out there, but it was mostly written toward women and body image on, which is fine, but I thought there's not a a more muscular book about any man could read it and go.
• 53:24
  Mike Favarez: I see envy in my life.
• 53:25
  Mike Favarez: So I wrote this book on envy.
• 53:26
  Mike Favarez: Half of it is about the problem, half of it is about the solution and that's coming out by moody publishing here in a couple months.
• 53:33
  Mike Favarez: But, uh, I hope that it might be helpful to some people ask a really really needs that, actually I was just about to say you're inviting me to confess something and I confess it to my pastor.
• 53:42
  Oscar Navarro: Uh, this last sunday, because we were.
• 53:44
  Oscar Navarro: We were going to the book of genesis and in preparation for this last sunday, I was to read the chapter over and over again that we're in and I'm looking at the verses that we're going to be going through in the back.
• 53:52
  Oscar Navarro: My mind I'm like and these verses are right, I wish I got this sermon.
• 53:56
  Oscar Navarro: This should be my sermon, like I would have so much fun with serenity.
• 53:58
  Oscar Navarro: And by the time I pass this preaching, there is a minute, a moment of repentance, whereby the end of the sermon.
• 54:03
  Oscar Navarro: I'm like this is his sermon, I'm so glad he's the one preaching the sermon, you know.
• 54:07
  Oscar Navarro: But that that can be rooted in envy and I'm.
• 54:11
  Oscar Navarro: Ultimately it's a lack of understanding of stewardship that god has entrusted you with your portion and he's entrusted others with their portion.
• 54:19
  Emeal Zwayne: Yeah, I think oftentimes Envy can be the firstborn child of discontentment, exactly, and that's.
• 54:24
  Emeal Zwayne: That's the other thing that we need.
• 54:26
  Emeal Zwayne: We need a book on big time.
• 54:27
  Emeal Zwayne: Well, there are.
• 54:27
  Emeal Zwayne: There have been some great ones from, from writers of old.
• 54:30
  Emeal Zwayne: But yeah, mike, you know, there was a lady at our church who just got baptized this past Sunday.
• 54:34
  Emeal Zwayne: She was in her 70s and I was so deeply moved because what ended up bringing her to faith and repentance was her sudden Realization of her big problem of envy.
• 54:44
  Emeal Zwayne: And she specifically highlighted that you, you rarely hear that I rarely hear it but, it was so refreshing she suddenly realized I'm an envious person.
• 54:52
  Emeal Zwayne: How do I, how do I get this cured?
• 54:54
  Emeal Zwayne: All right, I need Christ, right.
• 54:55
  Emeal Zwayne: So that's great, so that's exciting.
• 54:57
  Emeal Zwayne: Tell us about focal point real quick and what you got going on with that and everything else at the church where people can find compass, website, all that stuff.
• 55:05
  Mike Favarez: Yeah, focal point is our preaching that we put out on.
• 55:08
  Mike Favarez: About eight or nine hundred stations across the country run XM, serious satellite network and it just takes the verse by verse exposition and Broadcast it.
• 55:19
  Mike Favarez: And it's been a great thing to hear people talk about how it's changed their lives.
• 55:23
  Mike Favarez: You know, I had a guy call in say he was about to kill himself.
• 55:26
  Mike Favarez: He went and parked his truck in a remote area to get in his glove box, pulled his revolver out, turned on the radar to find a last song to go out on and he hears me preaching Wow, and, and you know so, here's a physical life saved.
• 55:39
  Mike Favarez: And then he becomes a Christian and Writes us about his new life in Christ and I think, okay, that's something that never would have happened.
• 55:47
  Mike Favarez: We're not humanly speaking for a guy coming to me years ago and saying 25 years ago hey, do you mind if we take what you've said and and get it on this local radio station?
• 55:57
  Mike Favarez: And I'm like, okay, I guess, if it doesn't hurt the church.
• 56:00
  Mike Favarez: And so that's what focal points all about.
• 56:02
  Mike Favarez: It's being broadcast in a lot of places and you can go to focal point ministriesorg, or I like to go to fprorg, or if you listen to this.
• 56:10
  Mike Favarez: You can't remember that member who is talking, pastor Mike.
• 56:12
  Mike Favarez: Go to pastor Mike, calm.
• 56:14
  Mike Favarez: Yeah, that'll take you to our radio ministry and kind of show you there's lots of free resources there and our church is is Compass church org and we're in South Orange County, the heart of South Orange County, in Elisa Viejo, and then if you want to hear about the Institute, compass Bible Institute org, you can find all of the, the programs that we have, certifications we have and things you can do with our training center.
• 56:36
  Emeal Zwayne: That's great.
• 56:37
  Emeal Zwayne: Well, mike, thanks for coming on.
• 56:38
  Emeal Zwayne: This has been a real delight, I mean honestly, for Oscar and I, this has been fellowship.
• 56:42
  Emeal Zwayne: Right, we plan to sit down and do a podcast, but it's been fellowship.
• 56:44
  Emeal Zwayne: I'm edified, encouraged, good.
• 56:45
  Emeal Zwayne: So I'm excited to go to the adult Bible fellowship and speak.
• 56:48
  Mike Favarez: Yes, you're coming, helen.
• 56:49
  Emeal Zwayne: I'm really excited about that and friends, if you live anywhere near the area and you're looking for a solid church that teaches Expositionally, that is focused on the call to evangelize and to Proclaim Christ and to live out the Christian faith, compass Bible Church as a church for you, so make sure to check it out.
• 57:06
  Emeal Zwayne: Thanks for coming on with us, mike.
• 57:07
  Emeal Zwayne: Oh my pleasure.
• 57:08
  Mike Favarez: Thanks guys.
• 57:08
  Emeal Zwayne: All right, bless you and now you know Mike Fabbars.
• 57:13
  Emeal Zwayne: Oscar, that was one of the really refreshing ones for us.
• 57:17
  Emeal Zwayne: All of them were no yeah.
• 57:18
  Emeal Zwayne: Yeah, we talked about that afterwards and just discussed that how, how refreshing it was.
• 57:24
  Emeal Zwayne: I mean hearing the heart of a pastor.
• 57:25
  Oscar Navarro: Yeah, towards other pastors, yeah, and the importance on the value of pastoral ministry and the importance of Guarding your heart as pastors and leaders, and what we can do to continue to be refined and grow.
• 57:37
  Emeal Zwayne: Yeah, ray, you did your pastor.
• 57:39
  Emeal Zwayne: Three and a half years, that number, to be like Sean.
• 57:41
  Ray Comfort: Yeah, three and a half years.
• 57:42
  Ray Comfort: Loved it, love loved it being over.
• 57:46
  Emeal Zwayne: It's interesting right when you fit into where the Lord has you and yeah, well, I love what John Wesley said.
• 57:50
  Ray Comfort: If he preached to the same people every week, he'd drive them and himself crazy.
• 57:54
  Ray Comfort: And that's exactly how I felt.
• 57:55
  Ray Comfort: Yeah.
• 57:55
  Ray Comfort: And you say the same you say the same joke twice from a pulpit in your senile.
• 58:00
  Ray Comfort: As far as the congregation is yeah, I said that right.
• 58:02
  Emeal Zwayne: Yeah, yeah pastors who are in that role love it.
• 58:05
  Emeal Zwayne: You know it's calling mark.
• 58:06
  Emeal Zwayne: You and I Passard for a number of years together.
• 58:08
  Emeal Zwayne: What a joy now to take what God did in us in that season and use it here in leadership at Living Waters.
• 58:14
  Emeal Zwayne: I mean, we still get to do that.
• 58:15
  Emeal Zwayne: We get to preach and speak, still in different places.
• 58:16
  Mark Spence: Yeah, you know, and I do stand amazed when I listen my pastor prepare a new sermon week after week after week.
• 58:22
  Mark Spence: That Continually grips me.
• 58:24
  Mark Spence: Yeah, and my family.
• 58:26
  Emeal Zwayne: Yeah, at home runs.
• 58:27
  Emeal Zwayne: Yeah, if you friends.
• 58:28
  Emeal Zwayne: If you're in the area you're looking for a church kindred church, dot org.
• 58:31
  Emeal Zwayne: That's where we fellowship.
• 58:32
  Emeal Zwayne: Or if you're in Oscars area, kings Cross.
• 58:36
  Oscar Navarro: KX dot church, and then, of course, Mike's church.
• 58:39
  Emeal Zwayne: Yeah, and compass dot org.
• 58:41
  Mark Spence: I think we're compass to come to church and then cross, cross, pointing them beaches where I go, where cross point HP and yeah, we've got Pastor Bruce coming in to the studio for a podcast.
• 58:52
  Emeal Zwayne: Yeah, we're excited to have them All.
• 58:54
  Emeal Zwayne: Right, friends, we hope you enjoyed that with our brother, mike Fibarez.
• 58:56
  Emeal Zwayne: Don't forget to check out tough questions, dvd course evidence, study Bible and Living Waters podcast mug all at livingwaterscom.
• 59:03
  Emeal Zwayne: And don't forget to comment and all that good stuff and send us emails at podcast at livingwaterscom, give us ratings and all that good stuff.
• 59:11
  Emeal Zwayne: I said that I'm saying thanks for joining us.
• 59:14
  Emeal Zwayne: Friends, we'll see you here next time on the Living Waters podcast where Ray, mark and Oscar have no idea what they are doing mostly true.