Every man in that room received a tape measure on Father's Day, not as a novelty but as a reminder: there is a standard, and it doesn't bend to fit you. The text is Ephesians 4:13, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ. Not the man next to you, not whatever culture says manhood looks like this decade, but Christ. Most men are holding the wrong tape measure, and the result is either pride or a sense of inferiority depending on who they happen to be comparing themselves to. Neither one produces growth.

There is a list of things that simply don't measure up, and it gets named plainly: insulting people, cowardice, abuse, dishonesty, bondage, and quitting. The measure of Christ is edification. God gave us a spirit of power, love, and a sound mind, not cringing fear. And finishing matters more than starting. Christ went through the grave and didn't stay there, and that's the model for what it means to get back up.

Walking as Jesus walked is not possible in the flesh, and that's an invitation to activate the anointing rather than a loophole to avoid the assignment. Life as a man, as a father, as a leader, is a life of sacrifice. Not occasionally, but every day. You cover your wife, you cover your children, and when they leave the house you don't stop. The depth question is whether Christ is actually visible in your life in measurable amounts, or just trace evidence. A man makes God's presence so real and so large in his home that there is simply no room left for anything else.

Published on Subwave

https://subwave.app/@thelastdayspodcast/post/episode-447--the-true-measure-of-a-man

I was in my turbocharged sports car, made a stupid move on a two-lane road with a double yellow line, and found myself staring down an 18-wheeler with nowhere to go. I shut my eyes, gripped the wheel, and screamed one word: Jesus. When I opened my eyes, I was in the parking lot of a QuikTrip convenience store, a mile and a half ahead, parked between the lines, engine running, everything at peace. That story is the whole point: when you wait confidently and expectantly on God, He comes through.

Filling up with hope before you need it is not passive. Romans 15:13 says the God of hope fills you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him, so that you overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. What overflows from you is what people around you are catching, so be deliberate about what you let in. There will always be people ready to share their worst-case stories. Be the person who brings something refreshing into the room instead. Romans 5:3-4 lays out the progression plainly: suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. Good times do not do that work. It is the difficult seasons that reveal what is actually inside you, and rejoicing in the middle of the hard stuff is what produces the kind of person who does not quit.

God will not allow you to be tested past your limit, and His mercy is bigger than most people understand. He is not waiting for you to slip up so He can write you off. I keep a note in my phone, one sentence per entry, of every encounter and experience I have had with God. When things look dark, scrolling through it reminds me how many times He has already come through. Second Corinthians 4:17 puts it plainly: our light and momentary troubles are producing for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. That perspective changes how you see every single day, including the worst ones.

Published on Subwave

https://subwave.app/@thelastdayspodcast/post/episode-446--i-wont-lose--i-wont-give-up-pt-3

Giving up has never seriously crossed my mind, and I can trace exactly why: I expect things to change, and that expectation is grounded in something as reliable as the law of seed time and harvest. Romans 8:25 puts it plainly — if we look forward to something we don't yet have, we wait patiently and confidently. That combination removes anxiety from the equation. When you genuinely know what you need is coming, and that God knows both what you need and when you need it, the waiting becomes purposeful rather than desperate. I've been preaching since 1981, and from those earliest messages I was already pointing toward something I hadn't seen yet, because God had told me it was coming.

One of the things that trips people up is insisting that what God does next has to look like what God did before. It won't, necessarily. I share the story of Aaron, a twelve-year-old boy on a ministry trip to the Caribbean, who stepped up to a microphone to say the food was different and then prophesied for ninety minutes nonstop, with people being saved, filled, and healed all around him. He had no template for it, which is exactly why God could use him so completely. Our imagination is built entirely on reference points we've already encountered. God doesn't have that constraint, and the next move of His Spirit won't be limited by our categories or our history.

The law of sowing and reaping is what keeps my expectation from wearing out. Genesis 8:22 describes it as a fixed law: seed time and harvest shall not cease while the earth remains. Because I know what I sow, victory, blessing, acceptance, love, and peace, I know what's coming back. Dark seasons are real, but they don't suspend the law. The most important thing to do in a difficult time is keep sowing, keep speaking high praises rather than low-level curses, and keep operating according to the Word. He has over thirty thousand promises in Scripture, and He hasn't missed one yet.

Published on Subwave

https://subwave.app/@thelastdayspodcast/post/i-wont-lose--i-wont-give-up-pt-2

Heaven is not the final destination, and that reframes everything about how believers are supposed to live right now. The call to "occupy until I come" is not passive coasting toward eternity. It's ground taken, ground held, active forward movement. Overcomer is a position passed down from Christ's victory, not a personality trait earned through personal toughness. The illustration is a heavyweight boxer who wins the championship and hands his wife the $20 million check. She didn't take a punch. She got everything.

What comes out of your mouth builds your life. Job 22:28 says to decree a thing and it shall be established, and the distinction between facts and truth is one of the most practical points covered: your situation is a fact, and tomorrow it can be different. What God says about your situation is truth, and that never changes. Faith is not activated by thinking, analyzing, or weighing every angle. That process crowds faith out. The activation mechanism is obedience and speech, not a committee meeting in your own head.

Five specific reasons why losing is not an available outcome are laid out, grounded in Deuteronomy 28, Psalm 119, James 1, Joshua 1, and Revelation 22. Blessings that overtake you, supernatural wisdom, strength through trials, the constant presence of God, and eternal rewards already waiting. The only condition that needs to be met is not quitting. The declaration that frames it all: "I am created for accomplishment, engineered for success, and endowed with seeds of greatness."

Published on Subwave

https://subwave.app/@thelastdayspodcast/post/i-wont-lose--i-wont-give-up-pt-1

The quiet slide from active surrender to comfortable assumption is one of the most common ways people lose their edge in the call of God. We dig into what it actually looks like to keep progressing, not just starting well, but staying in step intentionally. Every time Jesus called someone, he said "follow me," not "here is your title." That distinction matters because the call is about a person, not a function, and the Holy Spirit operates completely outside what people think your label permits you to do.

John 6 shows us what tested loyalty looks like when the teaching gets hard and crowds start walking. Offense rarely feels like a severing. It feels like a reasonable response to something unreasonable, and that is exactly what makes it so effective. We also look at the specific failure mode that catches people who have been faithful for years: they stopped actively pursuing God and started assuming they were still in step. My husband and I sit down every year and lay it all before the Lord. What do you want us to change? What needs to go? That is not insecurity. That is stewardship.

Insecurity and pride get tested more consistently the higher you go. A new open door, a divine connection, a higher assignment, and suddenly something surfaces that you did not know was there. Some quiet keeping of score. Some reaction to being overlooked. The Lord cut through one of those seasons for us with a single question: did any of what you gave actually come from you? That question ends the argument faster than any rebuke. We close on 2 Corinthians 4 and Paul's anchor for all of it: pressed on every side but not crushed, knocked down but not destroyed, fixing attention on what cannot be seen because what we see now is temporary.

Published on Subwave

https://subwave.app/@thelastdayspodcast/post/a-study-on-the-call-of-god-pt-2

Every person carries a specific assignment from God, not a general invitation to do good things, but a precise plan written before they arrived. Both teachers open with personal confessions: one spent years resisting public speaking, the other had ministry in her family and firmly chose business instead. God was unimpressed by both alternatives. The call is real, and so is the cost of ignoring it. Jesus himself was led into the wilderness immediately after his baptism, before a single miracle, which sets the pattern for everyone who follows: affirmation comes before the proving ground, not after it.

Going higher in the call of God consistently costs more, and the skiing analogy makes this plain. Fighting the lower slopes in foggy, icy conditions feels hard until you climb above the fog line, where the snow is fresh and the terrain, though steeper, is actually easier to work with. The complaining, low-grade offense, and restlessness that settle over people who have stayed in one place too long are often symptoms of someone who has outgrown where they are. Surrender is not a one-time decision either. You say yes to what you understand, then God shows you the larger picture behind what you agreed to, and you have to surrender again, then again, and the process of purification does not stop at a comfortable midpoint.

Melanie Green, a ranked LPGA professional sitting somewhere around 68th to 75th in the world, came to a place of total willingness to walk away from her career entirely. That posture of genuine sacrifice was the turning point. God did not take the golf away; he used it, and she has since cracked the top ten while serving as an open witness inside a world most Christians never reach. Loving God and fulfilling the specific call of God are not the same thing. A person can serve faithfully across many capacities and still not be walking in what they were created to do. When alignment finally happens, something is lit from the inside that technique alone cannot produce.

Published on Subwave

https://subwave.app/@thelastdayspodcast/post/episode-442--a-study-on-the-call-of-god-

Waiting for the feeling is a trap. The anointing doesn't precede the movement, it accompanies it. Samson is the clearest example: the anointing didn't manifest until he actually moved against the enemy. The same principle applies every week, whether a podcast is recorded with a blank set of notes or a service is delivered when ministry feels heavy. You open your mouth, and God makes your tongue as the pen of a ready writer. Discipline is what motivation gets credit for, and making the bed is the small, absurd illustration that captures it: you do it because it's a responsibility, not because inspiration arrived. Faith isn't passive. It's mixed with action.

Bitter fruit needs trauma to become sweet. Working in the orange groves of Charlie Crisofolli, who ran what was then the largest citrus operation in the world, a moment unfolded that has stayed vivid for decades: Charlie pulled an orange from the tree, found it bitter, and scored the trunk with an axe to cause the tree to heal and produce sweeter fruit the following year. A year later, the orange from that same tree was a completely different thing. The fruit of the Spirit in a believer's life works the same way. It develops through difficulty, it's not for your own benefit, and it's for the people around you who will receive something from your life because you didn't quit when things got hard. Mistaking the test for the devil is a common failure: the teacher who gives an exam isn't working against you, the exam is part of the process that makes you capable.

Staying planted beats shopping for better soil, and rootedness is what enables growth. Spiritual restlessness, always looking over at someone else's ministry or covering, produces instability and storm damage. When storms come, the answer from Revelation is clear: strengthen what remains, prop it up, and keep going. Asking for feedback after every sermon, every service, every opportunity is rarer than it should be, and the ceiling most people hit is built out of the questions they never asked. Staying teachable requires setting down pride and letting people further along speak into your life. The accumulated knowledge of the older generation gets bypassed by the people who need it most.

Published on Subwave

https://subwave.app/@thelastdayspodcast/post/episode-441--activating-the-anointing-

Hunger determines capacity, and capacity is entirely up to you. What you say out loud, and how often you say it, cements what you believe about your own situation. Venting and faith are opposites: you cannot hold both at the same time. Speaking defeat repeatedly is not processing, it is reinforcing, and there is a hard difference between talking with someone who can pray with you and reframe the situation versus talking at someone just to hear yourself say it again over coffee.

If God is genuinely speaking something, you will not be the only one hearing it. Confirmation across multiple voices and multiple directions is how God works, and that safety matters especially when someone is chasing an obscure revelation built by working Bible verses to fit a conclusion already reached. The last days move of God flows through an army of believers, not a central figure or two, which means the enemy's strategy of targeting one person tends to accelerate a movement rather than stop it.

Spiritual development shows up in practical places: how someone keeps their car, their home, their room. When the Holy Spirit says to organize something and a person actually does it, that obedience opens something spiritually. The capacity you give God to fill is the capacity he fills. Lift a thimble, get a thimble. Say overflow my entire life, fill every area, not just touch it, and that is what becomes available.

Published on Subwave

https://subwave.app/@thelastdayspodcast/post/episode-440--developmentally-challenged-christians-

Fake has shortcuts. Real takes time. Pastor Todd and his wife work through what that means across worship, ministry, social media, and personal growth, starting with a striking story: a woman at their church got into a screaming fight with her roommate in the hallway right after a service, then later claimed God had sent her to Tulsa to be Pastor Todd's "surrogate wife." The point isn't the drama. The point is that someone can worship loudly, claim a divine assignment, and still be operating entirely out of flesh. You don't judge the heart, but you can inspect fruit. A good tree bears good fruit. A bad tree cannot.

The anointing is not a shortcut, and it doesn't follow something built on personality and promotion. When people come asking for a platform, a leg up, or help promoting their ministry, the answer is consistent: show consistent fruit first. Show up for prayer. Show up for soul winning. Do the one small thing you're asked to do before you ask for a stage. The same principle applies to how people present themselves online. You can curate a profile, build a following, and fake people for a long time. God, by contrast, looks on the heart and will reveal the truth in time.

Spiritual growth is the baseline expectation for every believer, not something reserved for the early years of faith. Oranges start out green. You can pull them off the vine early and spray them to look right, but that is not the same as being ready. Staying attached until the process is complete is the only path to real fruit. For those who believe we are in the final stretch of history, the assignment is to step up, stay connected to a local body, and remain faithful in small things rather than hiding behind guilt by association or waiting for a bigger stage.

Published on Subwave

https://subwave.app/@thelastdayspodcast/post/next-level-mentality-pt-2

Todd and Katie open with something they've watched happen up close: people who had a genuine call, a real encounter, a pure heart for ministry or public life, who drifted so gradually they never noticed. The pattern is consistent. Something real starts, grows, and then the growth itself becomes the distraction. The standard for staying connected isn't casual spiritual maintenance. It's diligent seeking, every day, with all of your heart.

Todd draws the parallel to lab-grown meat: engineered to look like the real thing, accepted because it resembles what people are used to, but slightly off on closer contact. The same applies to preaching and ministry built on no genuine pursuit of holiness. The real test isn't stage performance or social media presence, it's what comes out of people who've spent time around you over years. Todd also shares the moment he nearly missed a significant prophetic encounter because the messenger's singing grated on him. The Holy Spirit told him to stop critiquing the sound and listen to what was being said. He did, and she showed up at his church the next morning without ever asking the name or address.

Katie traces her journey from someone too inhibited to raise her hands in worship unless others were doing it, to someone whose outward expression now flows directly from what's already happening privately in the car, the kitchen, the shower. Standing still at church would be the manufactured thing for her now. Todd closes with a story about a woman who went from visibly deep in worship to open-hand slapping her roommate in under two seconds, which illustrates the whole point: the outside expression and the inside reality have to match. When the fire burns deep enough, what surfaces under pressure isn't your best behavior. It's something else.

Published on Subwave

https://subwave.app/@thelastdayspodcast/post/next-level-mentality-pt-1