Saturated Friday: What Is Keeping You From Going All In?

Pastor Jonathan Pokluda opens with a confession: he grew up in church—every Sunday, every Friday, a church school for nine years, shuttling between his dad's church and his mom's church and the Wednesday Baptist service. Then he went to college and ran from God as hard as he could. After graduating early from a two-year technical college at 21, he moved to Dallas wanting to be a millionaire before 30, chasing parties, clubs, and gambling. He couldn't afford Vegas, so he went to the riverboat casinos in Shreveport, Louisiana.

There, down to his last five dollars, he put the chip on red at a roulette table. It landed on red. Then ten dollars on red. It landed on red. Twenty dollars on red. It landed on red. Forty dollars on red. It landed on red. Now he had eighty dollars. And he couldn't push it across the line. "It had gravity," he says. "It was way more difficult to go all in." He pocketed the money and cashed out.

That image—the ease of betting small, the paralysis when the stakes feel real—becomes the frame for the evening's central question: What is keeping you from going all in with Jesus?

The rich young ruler's three obstacles