Dr. Tony Evans is the founder and senior pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, founder and president of The Urban Alternative and author of over 100 books, booklets and Bible studies. The first African American to earn a doctorate of theology from Dallas Theological Seminary, he has been named one of the 12 Most Effective Preachers in the English-Speaking World by Baylor University. Dr. Evans holds the honor of writing and publishing the first full-Bible commentary and study Bible by an African American. His radio broadcast, The Alternative with Dr. Tony Evans, can be heard on over 1,400 radio outlets daily and in more than 130 countries. Dr. Evans’ sermons are also streamed and downloaded over 20,000,000 times annually.
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what’s funny is me and my dad are
completely opposite in the area of
emotion
because he he can he can button up and
i’m like oh man this happened to this
you know
i’m that guy
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i remember one time that natalie is
coming back
it shouldn’t be coming back right now
but it’s coming back uh
he was sitting at the piano playing the
piano
but he wasn’t singing yet but he was
just pilling at the piano
i told him stop playing that piano i
said stop playing the piano let’s play
football
we don’t play the piano we we play
football
all right and i remember i don’t know if
you remember that
you you do and you weren’t supposed to
remember but but uh uh
i don’t know i want him playing no piano
i want him playing football look how big
he is
you know and that’s imposing something
i was perpetuating the wrong thing with
him
see uh you know what one of the
principles of scripture
is when it says train for trial and the
way it should go
you know hebrew word there is train up a
child according to their bent
and what i was doing is i was taking my
bent
and i was imposing it on anthony
there were years where i felt
disconnected because i wasn’t the
football player’s son and it actually
messed with my mind because of the way
that
between my dad being that football dad
and culture in general and then being an
african-american male on top of that
where emotions aren’t necessarily a
thing we talk about or discuss or you’re
weak if you let them come up
so i had this dichotomy between what
culture says masculinity is and then
david who’s a guy who’s a guy after
god’s own heart who was
always on on being led by his emotions
and having tried having to try to reign
that in but he was a man after god’s own
heart
um so i’m working with that internally
but then also i have a dad who
when things are brought to his attention
i’ll never forget being 27 and
staying at their house when one of these
times i’m in dallas and i
tell him how things affected me growing
up i’m having this conversation with him
and my mom
telling them how i felt growing up as i
tried to
be the third child peacekeeper and keep
everything on the inside and bottled up
and my dad at the i’m 27 years old he
opens the door
and proceeds to apologize about how i
felt how he didn’t know he didn’t make
excuses it wasn’t like i’m sorry but i
it was just i’m sorry about the way that
you thought i did not know that
and if i would have known that i would
have done things different i thought
that i was
helping and i didn’t wasn’t i mean he
went that was at 27. so to have
that kind of moment it’s the same thing
that happened with you and your dad in a
different way it’s
that moment changed a heart that was
actually getting hard and callous toward
faith in general
and he actually didn’t know that like i
was singing and running around
but i was doing it to get the acceptance
for the performance and all that stuff
and i was about to be done with it all
until that apology happened becoming a
kingdom man
starts with surrender and a lot of times
masculinity in our culture
is is the antithesis of that it’s it’s
not about that it’s about
my world my kingdom my thing but the the
biblical definition it starts with
surrender
and being vulnerable and authentic and
transparent enough to admit where you
are
and allow jesus to meet you where you
are and make you who he wants you to be
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you