Day 1 dealing with trials

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Well, hello everybody. Vince D'Acchioli here with Bentley. Say hi Bentley. Yeah, Bentley's keeping me company. I thought I'd start my Facebook live feed a little early because basically I don't know what I'm doing.

But anyway, I'll start to see those of you who are tuning in on my screen here, I'm sure in a few moments. And then I'll begin with what I really wanted to talk to everybody about. As most of you know, I'm the founder of On Target Ministries and we're headquartered here in Colorado Springs, Colorado. And today we got quite a bit of snow. In fact, I'm looking out at probably about eight inches of snow.

And it's a reminder to me of how great our God is. Even in the midst of all the things we're going through right now, this snow and the wetness is a reminder of God always showing up with provision in times of need. And I think with what's going on right now with the coronavirus and the epidemic that's hitting us, I think the greatest thing we need right now is to allow Jesus' perfect love to cast out all of our anxiety and all of our fear. And that's what I really want to talk to you about tonight. I am looking at, in fact, the next seven days.

There are, it's kind of a seven by seven. I've got seven sessions that I want to unpack for you guys, six lessons that God taught me in the midst of a struggle that I went through many years ago. And on the seventh night, we're going to do seven nights in a row, starting at seven o'clock Mountain Time. On the last night, I'm going to share with you what I believe God has shown me is the secret to life. I'm not being cute or glib here.

I'm being very, very serious. I really believe God has shown me the secret to life. And my prayer is that it will bless many of you who want to hang in there with us through this season of seven sessions. I want to begin by sharing something that happened to me. It was actually on Christmas Eve morning at 430, actually, a.m.

on Christmas Eve morning 2008. I remember getting up very early and I remember praying to the Lord because I was going through some some personal struggles in my own life. We had a business back then that wasn't doing well. We were concerned about losing everything, which we ended up having actually happen. I'll tell you more about that in a minute.

But I was as I was praying that morning, I felt the Lord speak to me and say something to me. And I don't know about you guys, but I sometimes have a very difficult time hearing God. One thing I have discovered, though, is when I am really in a very broken place, when I am really distraught and I'm really crying out, those are the times I seem to hear hear him the most clearly. This particular morning, these are the words he spoke to me. There were actually five words.

Here they are. My people. And I and I know when he said that what he was talking about my people, meaning you and I, those of us who believe God is real and where were Jesus followers. Us, my people, listen, are not prepared. Five words.

And at the time, I knew that had to be God because there would be no reason for me to formulate those words in my own mind. And I wasn't really clear what he meant. But I took them in. And in a broad sense, I thought what he was saying to me was that his people, generally speaking, are really not prepared for what I don't know, but not prepared. I took it to mean that perhaps we're not deeply rooted enough in the knowledge of him to be prepared for the future.

In a general sense, that's what I thought he was saying. It turned out to be much more specific than that because it wasn't. But a few months after that, many of you remember the crash that hit us at the end of 2008 going into 2009. What happened as a result of that crash is that a lot of people were very, very scared. And it's been said that trials and struggles in life do not make a person.

They reveal them. And so we ended up having a whole stream of people. I was at a local church during that time. And I remember talking to some of the counselors. And there was a stream of people headed into church counseling offices whose marriages were falling apart.

And what we discovered is a lot of the reasons for this was being fearful about financial, their financial situation and the tough stuff that was coming against them. But listen, what was happening really is the situation, the circumstances were simply revealing the lack of substance that was in that relationship all along. There was no deep rooting going on in terms of their relationship with Jesus. So they were frightened by the circumstances that the world had placed upon them. And many of them were ending up getting divorces because of it.

And so we began to see that. And then little did I know that those five words were five words that I was going to have to process personally. Because at the end of 2009, I ended up taking my wife into a local hospital in November. And we thought she just had a cold or walking pneumonia. It ended up going to a local hospital where the doctors told me that I had I not brought her into the emergency room that night.

She would have died by the next morning. She ended up contracting what they then knew as H1N1 double pneumonia. Sound familiar? A lot like what's happening in our world today. So let me explain in my situation what took place.

I don't think I was prepared. I think what God was saying to me, Vince, are you sure that your relationship with me is as strong as it needs to be in order for you to be prepared for the kinds of stuff that are going to come against you? Because leading up to that hospital visit, let me tell you a series of things that happened to us and to our family. Not long before that doctor visit, we had a financial crisis. Our business failed.

Cindy and I lost everything that we had in our little nest egg for our retirement. It was all gone. Cindy's mom, who had lived with us for about 25 years, had passed away. She was a dear woman, 95 years old. It was time for her to go.

But nevertheless, it was very, very difficult for us. A lot of other loss. Several of Cindy's dearest friends. We lost our pet, Golden Retriever, not too long before that. The culminating and most difficult thing that happened to us, however, happened just shortly before this when our daughter, Kristen, who had a full term pregnancy.

In fact, it was the last day before she was scheduled to go into the hospital the next day for a C-section to deliver little baby L. Our family was so looking forward to the delivery of that little baby. But what happened is the night before, she felt like something was wrong, went to the hospital and discovered that the baby had died that day. One day before she was to be delivered. And many of us believe that that was like the nail in the coffin in terms of Cindy being in the kind of place emotionally where her immune system was so compromised.

This is at least one of the theories the doctors put forward. She was so compromised that this this H1N1 hit her so hard that she almost died. In fact, she was in the intensive care unit for four and a half months. Most of that time was in a coma, being kept alive by machines. In fact, on Super Bowl Sunday 2010, I remember the doctors brought me into a small room and they sat me down and showed me all the CT scans, all the x-rays, all the data that they had accumulated about my wife's condition.

And I was all alone there. My family wasn't there that day. And they said, Mr. D'Acchioli, your wife is going to die. There is absolutely no chance for survival.

You know how sometimes the doctors will say, hey, it's 50-50 or there's a 60-40 chance. No, there was nothing. Needless to say, that was one of the lowest points of my life. I remember driving home that day. I was headed to actually a Super Bowl gathering at a friend's house.

And I was crying all the way home. And I got there and we had an incredible intense prayer time. We were pretty devastated, but we were not giving up hope. We're still praying. Well, during that four and a half to six month time period, when we were navigating through this difficulty, there are some similarities, I'm sure, for many of you who are watching right now in the time that we find ourselves in.

There's a lot of uncertainty, a lot of fear, a lot of tendency to give into our flesh and be anxious about certain things. And that certainly was happening with us. But during that time, the Lord shared with me probably 30 or 40 different things. In fact, I like to tell people probably more actual ministry went out from our family during that six month period of time than in 25 years of prior history on purpose through On Target Ministries. Why?

Because we were sending out email letters to people that went viral. I mean, there were tens of thousands of people around the world literally that were hearing about our story and praying for us during this season. And we had no idea what our newsletters and our information was doing. But the feedback we got afterwards told us that it really blessed them. Because at the end of the day, guys, what people are really looking for, especially from those who call ourselves followers of Christ, they want to know if this stuff really works.

When the chips are down, does it really work? So they were tracking with us. They were watching us. And so I remember one day I was traveling in an airplane and this was now near the end of this whole season. Cindy had gone through all this.

She had a miraculous recovery. She was they sent her home actually to die. They sent her home to die. And like six weeks later, Cindy was completely healed home. No telemetry required, nothing.

And the doctors to this day have no clue why. It was just absolutely a miracle. We really, really know that now. But during that time, it was tense. So I remember being on an airplane and I remember kind of flipping through all the emails that we had written.

I wrote them all out. And I'm on the airplane and I'm choking back tears, man. There are people watching me and they're thinking, you know, what's this guy doing? You know, I'm sitting in a corner and I'm reading all these and bringing back memories. And so here's what I did.

I prayed, Lord, I know most of the things that I'm reading right here. As I write down the principles that I believe you're trying to communicate to me, I know, Lord, that most of these are for me. However, Lord, I'm so grateful that you've given me a platform from which to speak about the life and love of your Jesus to other people. And I know that there may be some of these things that you would like me to encapsulate and share with others. Could you please direct me to those principles you want me to communicate more publicly?

And that's exactly what he did. And that conversation with him distilled down to six things that God was showing me that I now for many years have been communicating everywhere I go. Let me just pause here for just a second. And for those of you who are viewing, if you want to get a jumpstart on what I'm going to be talking about over the next six nights, you can go to our website. It's simply OTM.

That's on target ministries. OTM.co. Not dot com, just dot co. And when you go there, you can click on, I think it's on target Institute, and there's a place where you can go to see videos. There's a video there that was put together by one of the largest churches in Las Vegas many, many years ago.

The title of the sermon is armed dot dot dot ready for battle. And then if you want to, you can watch that whole sermon. And that's where I unpack all of the things that I'm about to unpack over the next six days. So if you want a little head start, you can go there. But I want to encourage you to join me anyway, because it's much more fun to have this kind of personal conversation.

But anyway, so let me just close tonight by sharing the very first thing that out of the box that God wanted me to learn. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to I'm going to ask you on each of these occasions to write down just a few words. And these words are going to be a challenge for you that on a scale of one to 10, let's say one, I'm not doing too well in this area to 10 man. I'm I'm hit on all cylinders, even in the midst of the struggle that we're in right now on a scale to one to 10. How are you doing in these six areas?

The first area right out of the box? Let me give you the thing to write down in the midst of the trial that we're in right now. Are you listen? Are you believing? And are you expecting God to be there for God to show up?

Now, let me unpack that a little bit. Are you believing? Well, early on, my my two daughters and I and my extended family had to really come to terms with a lot of different things. And let me tell you something, guys, it's one thing to stand up as I do often and talk about the faithfulness of God and how much we love God and how much we believe in God. But when you're going through a tough time, that's when your faith really gets challenged.

And I know many of you know that. So upfront, are we really believing God is going to be in the midst of our circumstances? And are we really expecting him to show up? I often use this illustration. There's a difference, by the way, between believing and expecting.

A woman can believe that she's going to become pregnant one day. But when that same woman is expecting, she buys the furniture. I mean, it's a different mindset. It's a different attitude. And I remember early on with Cindy, we got to a place where we were saying, you know what, Lord, we do.

We believe in you and we're expecting you to come through. We actually went and bought the furniture. We actually went and set up a room on the main floor of our home because we felt she probably wouldn't be able to navigate the stairs, you know, and we prepared a place because we were believing and expecting her to come home. The other thing we had to come to terms with in this area was the question, the big question. Here it is.

Why? Why, Lord, is this happening? You've all heard the whys and you've all used the whys. Let me just tell you this up front. You and I, please hear me, have no business asking God why.

Why would I say that? Well, think about it. There's a bit of an arrogance associated with that question. It's as though somehow I'm owed some cosmic explanation as to why I find myself in these circumstances. And let me tell you, dear ones, we're not owed anything.

In fact, I want to tell you that if God did share why, most of us probably couldn't handle it. Now, please don't hear this as me laying on any kind of guilt on any of us, because let me just ask you this question. How many of you honestly have ever been mad at God? I doubt there are very many of us that wouldn't raise our hands, but you know what? God can handle it.

He understands our humanness. He understands our frailty. But having said that, at the same time, we have to understand that God knows best. And our job during times like this is just to lean into him, just to bend into him and to trust him. Easy?

No, especially when you're in very, very difficult times. It's not easy, but that's what God is calling us to do. So my encouragement is to, instead of asking why, just say, Lord, I don't need to understand. I don't need to understand, but help me, Lord, with my faith. Help me to just trust you, to just lean into you.

Let me close with this. When Cindy came back from the hospital, of course, she had been in a coma for most of that time. The very first question she asked was why? Why did bad things happen to good people? Well, she prayed about that, and she went over to the bookshelf, and she found a little book.

The author is Gene Edwards, and the book title was The Prisoner in the Third Cell. And somehow she was drawn to this book. Someone had recommended it earlier, and she remembered it, and we just happened to have a copy of it. And when she opened up the first page, the author had dedicated the book to his daughter, Cynthia. And it just happens to be my wife's full name.

So she read that, and she said, you know, I think I have to look at this book. So she read it. And The Prisoner in the Third Cell is just a little book. It's the story of John the Baptist. And John the Baptist, of course, we all know the story.

He found himself in this cell, arrested. And The Prisoner in the Third Cell, the Third Cell in that day, this was not just a regular cell. It was the worst cell in a deep hole, in a deep pit, filthy, muddy, rodents. I mean, it was really a bad place. And John found himself there.

Now keep in mind, John is Jesus' cousin. Okay, so here he is in the worst pit you could possibly imagine. Do you think John might have wondered what's going on here? Why am I in this predicament? Sure, he did.

In fact, the Bible says that he went and he got all of his disciples together. And he said, hey, guys, I want you to go find my cousin. And here's what I want you to ask him. Are you the one or should we look for another? You all remember the story.

Well, what happened? They went, they found Jesus, and they asked him that question. What does Jesus say in response? I love it when this happens because what Jesus says is not straight away. He doesn't say, hey, look, go back and tell him all these things.

And yes, I am the one. He talks kind of in parables all the time. He says, hey, the lame walk, the blind see, the deaf hear. And he goes through all this list of things. And then at the very end, he says these words.

And this is very interesting. He says, oh, yes, tell John one more thing. Blessed are those who are not offended with me. I don't know about you, but I've read those words many times and failed to recognize. What is he really communicating?

Well, here is what the author is saying. He's communicating. Blessed are you, John, if you are not offended with my ways, if you are not offended with me and what I do and what I don't do. In other words, blessed are you in that even though you're in this predicament, you trust me and you trust my ways. Well, the disciples didn't know what he meant, but they went back and they told John.

John knew exactly what he meant. And by the way, a few days later, he lost his head. But John went to glory knowing what Jesus was trying to communicate to all of us. Blessed are we who believe in Jesus no matter our predicament, no matter our circumstances. We're believing, trusting and expecting him to show up in the middle of it all.

Dear ones, as we unpack these next several days, we're going to move to a place where the secret to life is going to really put the exclamation point on what you and I really need to do when we're navigating not this tough time, because I believe this is preparing us for tougher times, maybe yet to come. But I hope and pray that what I'm going to be unpacking with you will bless you as we're going through this very difficult season. So as I close tonight, let me just pray. Lord, thank you so much for this opportunity to communicate to all of our dear Facebook friend followers and people who follow on Target Ministries, the people at our church right here in Colorado, the road, and people around the globe that are partners with On Target Ministries. Thank you for our ability to connect with them.

And Lord, I pray that you would give each and every listener right now a supernatural sense of peace, that you are in control, that they might come to a place where they are believing and expecting that you are in the midst of whatever circumstances they may be going through. And Lord, as we talk about these things over these next days, I pray that you would open up hearts to understand the things that you're trying to teach each and every one of us in the midst of our struggle. We give you all the glory and honor and praise for what you're doing, Lord, and what you're about to do. We pray all of this in the precious name of Jesus and everybody said, Amen. Thank you so much.

You need to know how much we love and appreciate each and every one of you. And stay safe. And tomorrow night, we'll have the second installment in this series. Look forward to seeing you there. Bye bye for now.