The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Reliance - Tossed To and Fro

Episode Date: July 13, 2025

God bless the Menking family

I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called, with all lowliness and gentleness, with long-suffering, bearing with one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all. But to each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ's gift. Therefore, he says, when he ascended on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts to

men. Now this, he ascended, what does it mean but that he also first descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is also the one who ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things. And he himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints, for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, that we should no longer be children,

tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting. But speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into him who is the head, Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effect of working, by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love." Lord, thank you for your word. Lord, thank you for your word. Thank you for the hope that is in us. Thank you for the steadfast truth of your resurrection, Jesus.

Thank you that your word is powerful and quick and alive and it will not return void. It will accomplish its purposes and it will never pass away. Lord, thank you for your victory. Thank you for your goodness and your mercy and your grace. Thank you for placing us and calling us and equipping us and transforming us. Thank you for giving us direction and guidance and for filling our hearts Lord with love. Love for you, love for one another. Lord we repent of every single situation where we have fallen short of expressing the kind of love that unifies us and brings us together. Lord we repent of being distracted or distractible or apathetic or uncaring.

God, we seek your forgiveness and your guidance. We don't want to be tossed to and fro, carried about by every wind of doctrine or every rumor from the world. We understand, rumor from the world. We understand, according to your word, that there are tricks and deceit and everything that is intended to close our eyes to the truth or to misdirect our attention to things that don't matter. God, help us to be sound in our minds. Help us to be focused on what counts. Help us to prioritize your will. Help us to be your people and your representatives. Help us to stand firm in a time of great challenge. Help us to represent you. We need your power to do it for we are weak and lowly We need your power to do it, for we are weak and lowly, knowing that it is in that position that you will make us strong for your glory so that we could not claim it as our own. We bless you, Lord.

And ask in your name, Jesus, that you would redeem this time. Holy Spirit, equip me and equip the ears of those listening to receive from you what you want them to receive. In Jesus' name, amen. Now this is a famous passage, of course, from Ephesians 4 as Paul writes to the church. I suppose it feels like every week now I say that this is a famous or widely quoted scripture but it's because all of it is widely quoted all of it is famous it's because there is an eternal weight of glory that all of these teachings that all scripture has and so as we look at this portion of the Epistle to the Church in Ephesus, this call to walk in

unity and humility, this oneness of Jesus, but also the diversity within his church, one body of many members, one common grace that applies in different individual contextual circumstances with gifts and roles and measures and calling. And I want to point out specifically, verse 14 from this chapter four, why should we do these things? Why should we come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God so that we could be transformed according to the promises of God to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ?

What that means, what that implies for us, what that would look like, I little know because we're still all so far away from that, the fullness of Christ, one whom the heavens and the earth could not contain and yet humbled himself to the point of the incarnation and the cross. But why should we do these things? What happens if we don't pursue this unity and we see this division? We will be like children, tossed to and fro, carried about with every wind of doctrine, and we will find ourselves being preyed upon by the trickery of men, where there is cunning craftiness and deceitful plotting. And there's this idea of childishness versus maturity and that it is maturity that understands the foundational principles of operation and is As we grow, as we are intended to be fruitful, as we become trees planted by pure sources of water,

our roots should grow deep and increasing in strength to the point where as tree systems, root systems in a forest, entire ecosystem, the roots of each tree will contribute to the strength of the whole. All growing in their own places, in their own manners, in their own roles independently, but part of a unified system. In this case, part of a unified body, if we can extend the analogy here. But I want to right now apply this scripture, Ephesians 414, to our perception of not just theological doctrine, but to the world more broadly. We live in a time when the modality of influence and warfare and secular power and forces of control has changed the overall vectors of attack

has changed the overall vectors of attack to ones that are psychological, informational, and narrative based. It doesn't mean that there isn't concrete, kinetic, legal, economic, military, it doesn't mean that there are not these other components of power. But we would be extraordinarily foolish to imagine that people who want to direct the affairs of society, regardless of their motives, regardless of the perceived direction that they want to take it, they must, absolutely must, if they have any degree of competence whatsoever, even if you think that there is generally high levels of incompetence,

you would admit that the people who are in these positions of influence and power, they must understand, because it is widely published in our own documents and everywhere else that the primary element of the battle space that nations that nation-state actors that supranational bodies face is one of hearts and minds is one of

psychology is one of public perception and because of the technological tools that have been developed regardless of your hypotheses about their origin the statement about their current influence is clear these vectors of informational spread becoming exponentially more potent means that the informational battle space has by definition become exponentially more potent and exponentially more important as a result. This means that it is perfectly appropriate to assume in essentially every circumstance that there is trickery and deceit going on,

whether it's in the form of omitting a piece of the truth, whether it's in the form of completely fabricating things and all of the rest. The difficulty is, how do you manage to deal with this? Well, the first is to say, at the very least, we don't need to spend every waking moment in the wits and whims and being tossed to and fro by the news cycle, let's say.

Tomorrow, something else is gonna happen, some other revisions, some other revisions, some more perspective, et cetera, et cetera. If we are spending our time on every piece of the narrative, what does it what does it profit us really? To the extent that we can ever get to a high degree of confidence in our assessment of what is actually going on. What does that serve us directly? Now, it is important to be in service of the truth.

We can quote and cite the scripture that we should have nothing to do with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them. And that is all perfectly fair. I buy that argument for what it's worth. But there is a profound tendency because of the nature of the battle space here.

And we can look up fifth generation warfare, soft war, all of these different newer, more current information age doctrines that say any vector of power must be exploited because if it is not exploited, then it will be exploited by others. So you have to be first, you have to be best, you have to be the most knowledgeable,

you have to have the best and latest and greatest tools, some of which are going to go beyond what we can see or assess as readily available to the general public. If you're going to capture and control and maintain a particular space. Things don't just happen by accident, but they're not necessarily scripted in the way that might be imagined. It's a challenging landscape to sit in, but one thing is for certain, if we neglect the

duties that we have to our Lord and to our family and to those around us because we are so captivated in trying to dig into the nuances of every single thing that happens, then we are wasting our energy and falling prey to one of the components of the nature of these engagements. If you were planning a way to achieve influence and focus and power projection into society, you would acknowledge that there is a proportion

of the population that is going to be paying close attention to these things, and so you would need to, on a regular basis, understanding their tendencies and understanding their patterns of behavior, throw out the kind of things that would lead them to expending their energy in the wrong direction. Limited hangouts, Misrepresentation.

It is deception. Sun Tzu said all warfare is deception. And we see that manifesting in the 21st century as well. It is not as if every single person that is delivering any kind of message anywhere has all of a sudden decided, all right, let's be straight up and honest and we're going to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So help us God. We know that that's not the case. We know that that's not the case at any level basically. But what is

the response to it? The response is not necessarily to go in a direction where you say, well, therefore there is no check on deception and evil and everything is just going to be going maniacally haywire time and time again. Because if you had people who were interested in human flourishing and wanted to project power they would have to do things in a similar way. They would have to engage in the same battle. They would have to engage with the same tools. You can't just abandon the battlefield entirely if you want to contest it. And unless you're going to set up something entirely parallel

which is difficult if not impossible to do without the kind of breakage that destroys too much in the process, then you have to play within a certain set of guidelines and structures that require nuanced and difficult maneuvering. My primary point in all of this, to the extent that it can be followed, is that we shouldn't take things quite as literally or quite as seriously to the point where

it affects our mental health or stability or our desire to be there for those around us, the people who we can give a hug and help out right here, right now. Me figuring out what happened exactly and following every moment of updates from sources of greater or lesser degrees of trustworthiness about the latest outrage, the latest tragedy, the latest disaster is not going to make me a better father to my kids. It's not going to make me a better deacon at my church. I have to stay informed and abreast of all these things

because if called upon, I need to provide counsel, information, teaching, all of these sorts of things. But my caution to people is that people seem to be taking things at face value, every whit and whim of it, taking it to the nth degree, perhaps not understanding that part

of the amplification system that exists through the technology is designed to get us to do that very thing, not, and even if you don't assume any real true behind the scenes nefarious motive just for the sake of monetary and attention optimization, that's the way that things work. We have to think clearly about this. We can't say one thing like every the you know there's so much misconception and misdirection and people are lying and then immediately treat everything as if it is true without any kind of skepticism whatsoever or to

even more subtly to treat things as important because other people are looking at them. That is to miss the or one of the most important tactics of the game, and that's the direction of people's attention. You could be dealing with a situation where nobody misrepresented anything factually. Whenever they reported on something,

they gave every single proper fact, and they did it correctly and accurately. But the choice of what to focus people's attention on, even if there's no misdirection or deceit, is capable of steering the narrative, the movement of society in such powerful ways, and that can be done instantaneously now. And it creates in people this sense of fatigue and just whiplash and a kind of big, And it creates in people this sense of fatigue

and just whiplash and a kind of destructive threat detection system where your cortisol and your stress is on overdrive. And what is it doing? Not to try to go beyond some surface level awareness and say, okay, well now I really know what's happening. I really understand it, I really get it. We have to understand that anything that we are doing, any way that we are attempting to ascertain the truth

through common informational channels is subject to manipulation that we can't see. And that doesn't mean that we just say, oh, I never trust anything from anyone, no matter what, at any point, at any time. You have to make more nuanced pronouncements than that. But certainly we can't, on one hand, claim that there is evil and deception and danger afoot

and then be completely oblivious to that or act in a way that is disconnected from it. Being tossed to and fro, acknowledging that there's deception, but then being tossed to and fro by every piece of it. Not being aware, it seems, of the nature of the battlefield of hearts of minds of decisions of psychology of temperament that is currently live across the whole planet. It is a perennial contest that has been spiritual in nature and is now manifested permanently in more concrete, direct, and all-encompassing ways in the various secular

arenas. Anywhere you look, anywhere you go, anything at all, it's going to have this component of perception steering, perception management, propaganda, and it is for the purposes of affecting an outcome. The way that you affect an outcome in human society more effectively now is less to say we will do this by the barrel of a gun. People will if necessary, but raw physical force projection

is just not scalable or as permanent as a mechanism of control that has been being built for a long period of time, has been foreseen in a variety of different approaches, whether we're talking about Orwell or Huxley. This is all old hat, but if we see our reality through that perspective, and through the biblical perspective of there being just tremendous

deception, people deceiving and being deceived at the same time, we understand that the the battle is occurring at a spiritual level. It's occurring at the level of the spirit and the soul just as much, if not in an even more primary way, than at the level of the body. Although that's a component too. Our health, our vivacity, our clarity of thought, all of these are affected by our bodily situations as well as everything else. So it is a unified, full spectrum,

all out level of warfare. But at least in terms of some of these most important fronts, we have the option to simply opt out. We don't have to voluntarily give our time, energy, and perspective, and thought, and our battery power, so to speak, to things that are of no ultimate importance, play no immediate role in our day-to-day lives, and are just not the kind of things that we can truly get

to the bottom of. It doesn't mean that we're apathetic in general. It doesn't mean that we don't pay attention. It doesn't mean that we aren't looking for opportunities to affect proper change. It just means that we're not hypocritical or myopic in our understanding of the nature of propaganda and that we don't lose our heads every time something is going to happen because wait two hours something else is going to happen. You can get caught in that Scylla and Charybdis kind of dynamic where you go one way you go the other. It doesn't matter where you go. You're headed towards disaster no matter what. There just aren't pure proper navigational routes that are available to us through all of the pervasive channels of Information we have to be careful, but we have to be engaged with the right perspective

We can't shipwreck ourselves We can't be tossed to and fro like this we have to acknowledge and everyone to a certain extent would Do we really imagine that people aren't actively trying to manipulate us at every turn. Our attention, our perspectives, of course, even if people were trying to affect positive change in society that we would agree with, their job and the success of their mission would be measured by their ability to manufacture and control people's perceptions so that there is enough of a general perspective that this is the way things are going that things actually go in that way.

There are many more layers and levels to those sort of discussions in terms of expectations, determining reality, and all of the different mechanics of narrative manipulation and propaganda and the Overton window and everything else, but we don't need a technical comment on that. We just need first of all to not get sucked into things we know we shouldn't get sucked into. This, that, the other thing will we're removing our effectiveness particularly if we say on one hand yeah everything everything is propaganda or there's so there's

a bunch of deceit going on to go from that to but I'm the one who can see through all of it. I'm the one who understands the you know the ghost in the machine and the machine and the power and the motivation behind everything. It's a bridge too far. What about the person right next to you who needs your help with something? What about the people who you are immediately responsible for? What about just being a person

appreciating the fact that you're alive. One of the things that I'm struck by whenever whenever I fast and I come out of my office and I see my kids and there's a thought that just it it it overcomes me and I wish I could capture it to a fuller efficacy when I'm not in that state, but it's something special. When I've been fasting and I go out and I see my kids and I'm holding my two year old or I'm hugging my five

year old or my four year old sitting on the couch with me and I just think this is another person. This is an immortal soul who I have a responsibility for, who God has given me charge over. And yeah, in our less profound and prosaic moments, we might say, well, yeah, it's another person, obviously. What's the big deal? But when we're sensitive to the people around us, their importance, the image of God in

them, and the duty and the role that we have to come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. How could we justify spending so much energy and time digging through a morass that we know is designed to deceive us. As if people don't understand in terms of power projection based on our tendencies where we would go for information

figure out a way to get manipulating those sources as well. One way or the other. Yes, maybe we're exceptionally gifted at seeing through all those things. Maybe we just decide it's an easier position to opt out and to be an observer rather than a participant. As for me, there can be different seasons in our lives for different degrees of involvement depending on our responsibilities. But whatever season you find yourself in, in terms of being engaged with the maelstrom and the not necessarily winds of doctrine here, although comparable, the winds of society,

the winds of the information battleground that we find ourselves in. Regardless of what season you find yourself in, I would encourage you to ask yourself if you are being consistent. Have you made the claim that everything is deception? You understand that there's a war going on in these avenues and psychologically and informationally. But then do we immediately take everything at face value that we see and get emotionally

invested in it. At the very least, we should be consistent. And again, this isn't an excuse for apathy or disengagement, but it is a call to action for understanding the landscape as it is. It is one where power projection is defined largely by the ability to influence people's perceptions. And knowing that, we shouldn't be surprised at many of the things that we're surprised by. We shouldn't be infuriated by many of the things that we're infuriated by. Trust me, there's enough to be infuriated about.

And you know that that I'm sure. But how are we going to make good decisions. How are we going to be mature about our faith about our responsibilities about our family about our relationships about the things that matter. If we're continually pulled in all different directions at once by a machine and an apparatus and a battlefield technology that is designed to do that. But this is a battlefield we can choose to disengage from. We can stay in the war but we don't have to engage on every single battlefield. Let's be more tactical with our Let's be more tactical with our emotional resources. Let's be more well structured in the priorities that we place on those around us in our circles

of influence. Let's make sure we are not behaving like children, being tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the trickery of men in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting. But speaking the truth in love, may we grow up in all things into him who is the head, Christ, from whom the whole body, joined in it together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love. This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind,

having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorances in them, because of the blindness of their heart, who being past feeling have given themselves over to lewdness to work all uncleanness with greediness. But you have not so learned Christ, if indeed you have heard him and have been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus, that you put off concerning your former conduct the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God in true righteousness and holiness. Therefore, putting away lying, let each one of you speak truth with his neighbor, for we are members of one another. Be angry and do

not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your wrath, nor give place to the devil. Let him who stole steal no longer, but rather let him labor, working with his hands what is good, that he may have something to give him who has need. Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers.

And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God and Christ forgave you. Lord, help us to see these things come to fruition in our lives. Help your word to be quickened in our hearts. Show us, Lord, what we need to do, what we need to change, who we need to be, how we need to act. What would you have us to do in this moment, in this generation God?

For your glory and for your glory alone. Advance your kingdom and let your will be done in our hearts, in our minds, in our lives, in our homes, in our hearts and our minds and our lives and our homes and our communities. God, you and you alone, Jesus, are worthy, worthy of it all. Only you can show forth the power that is needed to heal a broken generation. Guard our minds, Lord, and help us to guard them. Guard our eyes and our ears and our mouths. Guard every aspect of us Lord so that we could go forth knowing that we are going to be bombarded by an informational battle space. God give us discernment. space. God give us discernment. Give us a better understanding of where our attention should be placed. Rearrange our priorities however you see fit and let

your perfect will be done. We bless you Lord. We declare your righteousness and your victory. You are a strong tower. You are the vine. You are the way, the truth, and the life. In your name Jesus. Amen.