Hosea, America, and Our Future (Transcript)

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Hi, it’s Bob Barney with The Plain Truth today. I’m going to talk about ways not to let things bother you and let things go out of your life so you don’t always worry about things. You know, we’re not robots.

That’s the good thing that makes us human, and many people are not human anymore, but we don’t want to be robots, and I’m not looking forward to the age of the robots that we keep seeing coming in the news. So how do we move back past the things that bother us all the time? How do we let these things that affect our everyday life, that seems to bother the heck out of us, just escape our well-being? How do we do this? Today, I want to share some best tips that I have that I think may help. They don’t always work with me because my wife would be the first to tell you that I have a very short fuse at times when things really aggravate me, and sometimes people really can aggravate you.

So, you know, if you’re often annoyed at what other people do around you, you’re not alone. There’s a lot of people, including myself, that’s in that category. Some of the things that just happen to people, you know, you’re riding on an escalator and somebody is trying to walk down the other side, working against the escalator.That happens. Or people tapping their feet, or people talking loud during a movie, or worse yet, having their cell phone on. People that just are never ready.You know, you go to a Dunkin Donuts to get a dozen donuts, right? And you’re going to go there and whenever you seem to order, it’s like, I need a dozen donuts. Give me four of those, three of those, four of those, three of those, and one of those. And you’re done.

But then you get behind the person. You’ve been waiting in line for a heck of a long time, and the person says, let me see, I’ll have a blueberry, and I’ll have a buttercream, and I’ll have a glazed donut. No, no, I don’t want a glazed donut.Make it a cinnamon donut. And how many is that? It’s only three out of the twelve, ma’am. Okay, I’ll have a cinnamon donut.No, I already said that, didn’t I? How many times have you been caught behind something like that, wherever you’re trying to order? These are people that are self-centered. They do not have their act together. They’re not worried about other people that are behind them in line.They’re only worried about themselves. Had a little short show about that. The other thing, like I said before, people talking loudly on their phones.They think everybody else is really concerned about their particular conversation. So some of the tips that I have is to learn patience. And it’s hard for me to say this because you’re listening to a man that oftentimes has very little patience, and I want to explain why.

Because I don’t always practice what I preach. I know what I should be doing, but oftentimes, especially if you’re in business, if you’re a business person and you are in charge of a lot of people and a lot of things, and you have a very limited amount of time that you can get things accomplished, there’s things you cannot do when you’re in business. Number one, you can’t allow people to steal your time.There are a lot of people, be it salespeople that come to visit you or customers that call you, that they really want someone to talk to for a long time. They just have, maybe they don’t have a good life or maybe they’re bored. Maybe their wife or husband don’t talk to them, but they get you on the phone and they do not want to let you go.And you have a limited time that you can talk to people. You have a limited time you can do everything. And most times, if you’re in business and you’re a business owner, you run out of time every single day.

You never seem to accomplish what you want to do. I’ll give you an example. I have an app on my phone called to-do list.And every day I put up a bunch of things I have to do for the next day. And then for the next two days, three days, and sometimes if there’s an appointment another week, I’ll put up another week’s time and I’ll put up another month’s time. So it will always be there so I can remember it.And so I usually have eight to 10 projects a day I have to complete. Be it balance to checkbook, balance to credit cards, call this customer, call this vendor, pay this bill, have this store meeting. So you have this in your to-do list and you go down and you get to work at, you know, quarter to eight in the morning.You know, I already started six o’clock in the morning at home from my home office, reading all my emails. I get over 150 emails a day, going through all my banking accounts, which is a good hour. I drive to work, which thank God today where I live, I only live 15 minutes away from the main office or the plant where I work at.

And then start going down your to-do list. And what you find when you go down your to-do list, you’re lucky by 4.30 when you’re going to go home, you’re lucky that you accomplished 75% of that to-do list. So then you take the next three or four items and you say, add it to tomorrow.So automatically you click, click, click, click tomorrow, and it goes into tomorrow. And then tomorrow, instead of having eight projects to do, now you’ve got 14, you only still finished seven. So now you’re seven behind.And this is the life of most business people, small business people at that, but business people in general. So what happens is you become very impatient with people because your time is very valuable to you, especially if you have a very good home life and a very good marriage with your wife of many years that you just enjoy her company and you want to get home and you do not want to keep staying at work or trying to finish tasks because somebody stole so much of your time. So I understand that it is very easy to say, be passive, be understanding, don’t let things bother you when you’re listening to a guy that lets all of these things bother me at times.But that doesn’t mean that I don’t know the answer and that I don’t have the right answers for you. If you can put them into practice, then that’s fine. If you’re like me and sometimes can’t put them into practice, then you are going to be aggravated a lot.

But you know what? Being aggravated is not very good for your health. It’s not good for your blood pressure. It’s not good for the chemical makeup of your blood, which is your life.You know, the Bible says that the life is in the blood. That’s why you’re not supposed to eat blood. You’re not, you’re supposed to drain the meat of all its blood.You’re not supposed to eat the fat or the blood. You know, God knows what’s healthy and what’s not healthy. And your, the stress puts out hormones, cortisol and other hormones, stress hormones that just fills up your blood supply.And it just wreaks havoc on your body and it lowers your life expectancy. So if you want to live a long life with your husband or your wife or your family, one of the things you do have to do is learn how to control things that bother you. And it’s hard work for some of us.Some of us, it’s very easy. Some of us just have the ability to take it easy and be slow. Some of those people actually aggravate me, especially if you’re behind them on a line.

But one of the things, one of my reactions or suggestions is non-reaction is not a weakness. As many business people, many type A personalities try to make it into being. Sometimes you find that non-reaction is actually a strength.It’s sometimes more strengthful or more powerful to be able not to react. And this is something I learned a long time ago from my family when I was young, that sometimes remaining silent is often better than yelling back out and let things go. Remaining silent keeps you from engaging in a pointless discussion.You ever heard the statement, don’t argue with a fool because that person may be doing the same thing. Well, sometimes the best way not to be in stress with arguments is just don’t argue back. I remember Garner, Ted Armstrong, one saying in person as well, many times on his TV and radio shows, you can’t get into a fight if you refuse to fight.If someone says, I think you’re an idiot. And you say, well, maybe you’re right and walk away. How can I continue to fight? Now, your ego may not allow you to do that.

But if you did that, you stay out of a lot of fights that way. So remaining silent can help you. When you start venting about things that bother you, you have the tendency to exaggerate things a bit.My wife will tell you if she’s honest, and she will be because she never, she don’t pull punches that I exaggerate a lot when I’m upset. You know, I’ll say it’s every time they do this and she’ll say it ain’t every time. But it’s just part of the thing that you got to try to keep in mind.So, you know, rule number two is try not to exaggerate the things that bother you because all that does is add more and more stress. And the stress is what we’re trying to get away from if we want to live a long, happy life. You know, it’s not just exercising.You should exercise, you should keep busy, you shouldn’t stay on your posterior all day long at a table somewhere or desk looking at a computer. And then you go home, you sit on the couch and watch TV. And during every other time you’re sitting on your, your posterior driving your car, and you never seem to walk you, you, you park as close as you possibly can to the front door of that restaurant that you shouldn’t be eating at anyway.And then you don’t ever seem to walk or exercise or do anything like that. So if you can, it’s best. And by the way, if you do exercise and you ride a good stationary bike or a treadmill, and you lift, you know, band weights type things, light things, you don’t have to be really aggressive, but you exercise for 30 to 45 minutes every single day, you change the kind of exercise one time you ride the bike for 45 days, maybe the next day you do, you do weightlifting with the bands and stuff like that.

And I actually have one of these things you squeeze together. It’s like a Thighmaster that Suzanne Summers used to sell. But this is actually to build your, your biceps and stuff.And I also have a, a band thing that you step on and you can do curls, you can do lifts over your head, you can do squats with weight. And you do that day two, maybe day three, you ride the bike again, and maybe day four, you do a little of both. And on the Sabbath day, like I do, you just lounge around, let your body refocus on itself and reheal itself because your body does heal itself when you go to sleep.And that’s why sleep is very important. And you got to make sure you get good sleep. You also have to make sure you eat good food.One of the things that really aggravates the body is stressful eating food. And there are these fast foods and especially these preprocessed foods that release so many different hormones in your body that you don’t realize is being released. And it all adds to the stress on your heart, stress on your lungs and your liver and your kidneys and stress everywhere.And just because you don’t feel the stress, that doesn’t mean your body is not feeling the stress. So one of the things you got to do is don’t exaggerate the stress you already have. Face it and try to mitigate it.

And for example, you’re driving to work and it’s raining. And it stops raining the time you get to work and you go inside but you go out noontime and it’s starting to rain again. So you tell your wife it’s been all day long.Well, it hasn’t been raining. It’s raining whenever you want to go outside, but it’s not raining all day long. So what you got to try to do is put yourself back in reality.Because stress is really, you think stress is real, but the stress is actually being over exaggeration of reality. And so you just step back. Sometimes it’s good by the way, if you know you have a tendency to have a short fuse and you’re busy all day long, some of the tasks that you have to do, maybe it’s best that you assign, if you’re a boss, that you assign to someone else.Or even if you’re an employee, you might ask someone else to do things that you know you’re not very good at doing. And that’s just an important thing. One of the most important advice, and I think I do have this, I have some real bad problems that I have to fix myself.I am not one of these who are saying, I’m great and this is what I personally do. Because I personally don’t do a lot of things I know I should do. But I do know the truth, the plain truth.

I know what you should be doing. Just the fact that I do not do them all the time, does not necessarily mean you shouldn’t listen to my advice. Because I think my advice is right and I think experts would agree with it.Just because you don’t always follow your advice, doesn’t mean the advice is not good. If an adulterer was to say, do not commit adultery because it’s bad for you. Just because they’re still an adulterer, don’t mean that their advice is wrong.Because they’re giving you the words of God. Do not commit adultery is the Ten Commandments. So no matter who tells you that, if they are following their own conscience or not, and they’re following their own advice or not, doesn’t mean the advice is wrong.I just wanted to get there. But it is very important, and this is one of the things I do think I have, is you must be optimistic and not pessimistic. It is very easy.It is very easy to have a pessimistic view of things, especially when everything’s going wrong in your life. And there are times when everything is going to go wrong in your life. There are times that every time you do something, the worst thing that can happen happens.

There’s times like that. But it’s always best for the most part to be very optimistic about your day, about your life, and about your future. If you’re very pessimistic, you’re going to have some problems.And one of the ways, by the way, to stay optimistic, you know, I’m going to get some letters from people saying, you’re not talking enough about God in the Bible. Well, this is a news show. This is not a religion, though God is part of the news.And so whenever God is a good example to use in the news, I use it. So I’m going to use it right now. One of the ways to stay optimistic, in my humble view, is that you take time every day to pray.Now, one of the things I do not do often enough, I tried to do, but I do not do it often enough, is pray three times a day. If you prayed three times a day, a minute, three times a day, which I think you should pray longer, but if you talk to God in a prayer, in the morning when you get up and you say, you make a prayer to God for the day, you ask for a good day, a safe day for you, your family, your employees, and you talk a little bit about what you expect for the day. And then noontime, before you eat, you thank God for what you’re going to have for lunch.

Maybe if you’re trying to lose weight or trying to stay healthy, you have a nice healthy lunch, maybe fruits and some vegetables, no meat or tuna, maybe, or something like that. But you give a prayer about the day so far, that you ask for, give thanks for what you have. You ask for a good, safe day for the rest of the day, and that you will pray again on your way home from work is your evening prayer. Now, I do pray religiously, I will admit, on my way to work. It’s about 15, 20 minutes. I do like to listen to music. And so, probably seven minutes of that 15, 17-minute drive, I’m listening to music. But I always start off, when I leave the house, in my vehicle, driving to the plant, I will do a prayer. My prayer is something like this, and I’m not trying to give you the Lord’s prayer to copy me. I’m just giving you my example. I say, blessed art thou, O Lord God, both Father and Son, creators of the heaven and the earth, for the dawn of the new day, watch over me and my family, watch over my wife Tammy, make us stay safe, bless our employees and keep them safe, and bless our customers, bless those who bless us. And I always say this, curse those or confound those who are our enemies trying to harm us, and be our defenders.And then ask God on your way to work what you want. What’s the big thing of the day? You should include God. You should look at God as your very best friend, as Abraham did.

I have a show that I talk about, is God your very best friend? Because God is my very best friend. And I talk to God like I would talk to a friend in a car. I just don’t have the person talking back to me.I’m not one of these crazy religious types that, you know, have breakfast with God every day and have coffee and afternoon tea. And God just standing over the bed to 90 feet tall telling me what to do. But I do talk to God and I say, you know, I have this problem, I have that problem, or this is going on, please make this happen.Please help this. Or if somebody’s sick, please pray for someone. And sometimes if you’re upset with God, if God is your friend, you can let God know you’re upset with him.I think one of the things that people are surprised about when they read the Old Testament, so many people just read the New Testament. But when you read the Old Testament, you find the heroes of the Old Testament, be it Moses, be it Abraham, be it David, or even some of the prophets like Jeremiah especially, who actually complain to God and tell God when they think he’s wrong. And you want to know what? There are times where the Bible actually says in the Old Testament that the Lord changed his mind.

Happened with Moses. There was a time when God got really mad at the people and said to Moses, stand back, I’m going to destroy all of Israel. I’m going to make your descendants, Moses, the promised people. I’m going to bless them and make them the greatest people on earth. And Moses says, repent, Lord, of your sin. I don’t know if he said sin. Repent, Lord, of what you’re going to do. You promised Abraham that his descendants would be blessed. You must follow through on your promise. And if you don’t, take away my eternal life. Take away everything I have. I am not looking for myself. I’m looking for you to glorify your name and to keep your promises. That’s somebody who has a lot of oomph to argue like that with God. And it says God changed his mind. God actually changed what he planned on doing. Now, did he just test Moses to see if Moses would say that? Maybe. But the point is, if you’re a friend of God, you can be mad at God. And I’ll give you a little explanation right now. I’m going to do a show, a new show on, Oh God, why did you allow this tragedy to happen? I have several shows on this, and it’s a very good standard answer. But there are times when things happen close to home that it really bothers you.

And you pray to God and God doesn’t listen. There’s a song by Johnny Cash. It was an old song when he was first starting out. And I guess things happen that way. And part of the line is, I don’t like it, but I guess things happen that way. And ultimately that is the answer with God. When things don’t go your way, and God does not answer you the way you want him to answer you, you may not like it, and you can tell God you don’t like it, but you better accept it. Because at the end, you have to accept God’s will, knowing that God knows what’s best, that you do not know what’s best. Because you don’t have the foresight and the knowledge and the incredible view of the things that God does. So you have a right to tell God you’re mad. You have the right to tell God you’re not happy. But you have no right to be mad at God when he makes his final decision. You have to take it like a man or a woman. You don’t have to like it, but you got to take it. And so the same thing happens. Last week, we had an employee who is very important to us. He is our technical director. And he, last summer, had a stroke. And he’s had a very hard recovery. We pray for him constantly. But at the same time, his wife is suffering from breast cancer.

And so she tried an experimental procedure, which is that T-cell therapy that I’ve talked about before in the show on Your Health Today, which is an absolute wonder of a treatment for people with cancer. It actually cures many people with incurable cancers. And she went to the Mayo Clinic, and I believe it’s Jacksonville down there, to have T-cell for her breast cancer.

And unfortunately, she went into a coma and she died last Thursday. And it hit us hard because we prayed for her, my wife especially prayed for her and for Pat, that they could overcome it. And she did not overcome it. I still pray for Pat, that he can overcome the complications of his stroke. But this is actually going to make things harder for Pat down the road, because he depended so much on Maria. But we prayed and it did not work. And there is a little anger there. And I’ll give you another example. And this is going to be in another show that I do. The little boy that was on the rooftop with his grandparents and his mother, when everything was being washed away, and a little boy who really believed in Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ was his hero. And then the waters kept coming up, and the building collapsed, and they were thrown into the water. And the little boy said, Jesus, save us. With all the faith in the world, that Jesus would save him and his grandparents and his mother. And only his mother, by a miracle, survived. She was washed on a piece of wood. Didn’t even mean to, didn’t even plan on it, but she found herself alive. Her parents dead, and her eight-year-old boy, who believed in Jesus Christ as his superhero. His prayer was not answered. And it bothered me for days. I don’t know who that little boy is, but I can’t stand watching children suffer anyway. Adults can suffer, but not children, in my opinion.

It bothers the heck out of me. One of the reasons why we try to give donations to, you know, the Shriners Hospital or St. Jude’s, because I just can’t stand seeing children suffering. But anyway, to make a long story short, I was despondent over it, and I didn’t even know the little boy. I was very upset over it, because I was thinking to myself, and I said this to God on the next day to work, you know, you have a little boy who believed in you so much, and if you just listened and answered his prayer and somehow saved him, just how great that would have inspired that little boy to do something with his life. But it did not happen. I don’t like it, but I guess things happen that way, and I have to accept it. Knowing that that little boy, he’s not in heaven, I know that. Other people don’t know that. His mother does not know that. He’s in a grave. He’s dead. But there is a resurrection from the dead. Read 1 Corinthians 15th chapter about the resurrection of the dead, and when it happens, it happens at the return of Christ, when those like that little boy who believed in Jesus Christ with all his heart and prayed and did not have his prayer answered, he will be resurrected back to eternal life, never to be judged again, and to have total happiness and total everlasting life as a son of God, as in the family of God. He himself will be a God. God’s children are gods. God created us after our own image, after our own likeness, and so you don’t have to like it, but you have to accept it, but you have to have this friendship with God, and so each day when you pray to God, pray to him with all your problems. Ask him to take things away. Winston Churchill said, going back to optimism and pessimism, a pessimist sees the negatives or the difficulty in every opportunity, whereas an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty, and pessimism is a way to just make things get worse for you and make your stress worse.

It’s just very, very important. Another thing is, tell God what bothers you. Write it down if you want, but more importantly, in your morning, afternoon, or evening prayers, when something goes wrong, put it on God’s doorstep and tell him it’s bothering you and you need help overcoming it. You may not like it again. God may not answer. God may take away your stress. Acceptance is part of life. You have to accept the good. You have to accept the bad, and you have to still like yourself, and that is where I’m going to end this thing. The most important thing that you can do to make sure that things go bad and don’t go bad is how your attitude is about yourself. You have to love yourself. Jesus did not say, love your neighbor more than you love yourself. Do you notice that? Jesus said, love your neighbor as you love yourself. If you do not love yourself, if you are not happy with yourself, now, we all are sinners, and we all do things that we’re not proud of, and we all need God’s forgiveness and guidance, but at the same time, when we have a good relationship with God, we are going to like ourself because we’re going to know that, for the most part, God is our best friend and God is happy with us, even when we do wrong, because God understands. Jesus Christ is God, and Jesus Christ lived as a man, and the Bible tells us he was tempted in every way you and I are tempted, but he himself did not sin, but he knows he’s our high priest in heaven, and he does know how and why we do the things we do, and he knows how to forgive us and to defend us in the court in heaven from our sins.

We have a friend in Jesus, as the song says, and we do. We have a high priest that knows our weaknesses and overlooks them and gets God the Father to overlook them for us. That is the good news that Christ brought, that all of us, no matter where we are, no matter what we’ve done, no matter how bad we think we are, we need to learn to love ourselves. We need to learn to accept ourselves and to go forward trying to continually please God and be God’s friend and allow God to be your friend, and you will find out that all of the things that used to bother you don’t bother you as bad. I am getting better. I said I’m somebody who does not practice what I’m preaching right now, and I’m not preaching. I’m just giving you my advice. I’m somebody who does not always follow through, and I lose my temper, and it’s something that I am not proud of. I’ll tell you that right now. It’s something that happens to a lot of businesspeople whose time is so constrained and whose time is going by, and they’re approaching 70 years old, and they know it. They’re honest with themselves, and honestly, how long am I going to live? It’s not like when you’re 30 years old, and you pretty much think you’re invincible at 30 years old. You don’t know if you’re ever going to die, and you think you at least got 50 years more to go, right? You’re going to probably live to 80.

You think that when you’re 30. When you’re 50 or 60, you start having blood pressure problems or diabetes or other problems. You don’t think, well, maybe I won’t live to 80, and as you approach 65 or 70 years old, and people around you who went to school would start to die, friends start to die, people you know start to die, or customers in our case start to die, you start to think, well, how long do I have? And when you’re, like I said, when you’re my age, you think 10 years, maybe 10 years.If I’m really lucky, and I work out, and I continue doing the good things for my, and eat right, I might get 10, maybe 15 years if God is gracious to me. Then you think about 15 years ago, seems like it was yesterday, and you say, even if I get 15 more years, and I live to 85, it’s going to be over with before I know it, and am I ready to make my, be my maker? I’m not, and I’ll be truthful with you. I am not, but I got to learn to be. I got to take it. Anyway, that’s the end of this show. Went by pretty fast, I think.This is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth today. I do appreciate everyone who does listen. I also appreciate people who send their comments or suggestions, but until tomorrow, this is Bob Barney saying thank you for listening. I do.