Generational Blessings

0:00:00 – (Steve Gray): Some people are sure they’ve got a generational curse on them that’s on their lives and that’s why everything goes wrong. Well, today on the More Faith, More Life podcast, I’m going to turn that around for you. And you’re going to get a generational blessing. So don’t miss it. It could change your life forever.

0:00:15 – (Steve Gray): You were made for more than the status quo. I’m Pastor Steve Gray, and this is the More Faith, More Life podcast. This podcast is for Christians with an ambitious heart who want to be more for their family, do more with their career, and see more of God’s promises in their life. I’ve spent many years as a worship artist, minister, non-profit leader, bold truth speaker, and most importantly, father and spouse.

0:00:40 – (Steve Gray): When I was in my early 40s, I was craving more. More from God and more from life. I’d done everything I was supposed to do. My life was good, but it wasn’t good enough. So I spent the following years diving into the word of God and searching for the biblical principles that would bring me closer to God and help my purpose and life flourish. That’s what I want to share with you. In every episode, you’ll get practical tools based on real life experiences that you can put into action to redefine your faith and ultimately your life.

0:01:14 – (Steve Gray): So if you’re ready to do more.

0:01:17 – (Steve Gray): So subscribe to More Faith, More Life and hear an unfiltered biblical truth every week. It’s time to be and experience more.

0:01:25 – (Steve Gray): Hello everyone, and welcome to another More Faith, More Life podcast. And I’m Steve Gray here with my wife Kathy. And we’re excited to talk to you today because she’s been putting together what it’s popular today to put together. And you hear the word legacy. Put together your legacy. Leave a legacy. I hear that a lot. Financial people say leave a legacy, and we’re doing that too, aren’t we? We’re trying to do that.

0:01:49 – (Steve Gray): Been putting together the stories and legacy to leave for others, to inspire them and to understand it and to build your own legacy. Right?

0:01:58 – (Kathy Gray): So important.

0:01:58 – (Steve Gray): Yeah. And you, you coined a phrase that I really, really like when you talk about legacy and generations.

0:02:07 – (Kathy Gray): You know, there’s been so much teaching on generational curses and how they’re passed on from generation to generation and how you have to pray backwards and cut off everything and you got to repent now for what happened generations ago. So I thought, you know what? God is bigger than that. And God’s not the God of cursing his people. And so I thought, you know, It’s a generational blessing that I’ve lived and that you’ve lived also. It. There’s a wonderful principle. It’s a spiritual principle of blessing that. That is passed on from generation to generation.

0:02:44 – (Steve Gray): Yeah. And what I like, what I’d like people to get, is the generational blessing is more powerful than a generational cursing. You may feel like you had it. And I think people, over the years, since we’ve been Christians, it’s been real popular because then people kind of. They. They kind of figured themselves out. Oh, now I know why I’m such an idiot. You know, I got a. I have a generational curse on me. But.

0:03:06 – (Steve Gray): But I think knowing our country and how spiritual things happen through history, most people probably have somebody that prayed for them, not directly by name, but prayed and prayed for their generation, prayed for themselves, attached themselves by faith to God, and that generational blessing started. But if people don’t realize it’s there, then they can fall into the trap of a generational curse, which is more popular. You don’t hear.

0:03:35 – (Steve Gray): You’re the first one I ever heard.

0:03:36 – (Kathy Gray): Talk about a big crowd. You can write lots of books and you can do.

0:03:41 – (Steve Gray): But the generational blessing is great, too, though. And I have never. I’ve never. I mean, there’s probably somebody that coined the phrase, too.

0:03:48 – (Kathy Gray): Oh, I’m sure.

0:03:48 – (Steve Gray): But I never heard. I knew I had never heard it before.

0:03:51 – (Kathy Gray): Well, listen, I got it from Psalm 78, and it says that he commanded our fathers that they should make all these statutes and the wonderful praises of the Lord known to their children, and that the generation to come might know them, the children who would be be born, that they may arise and declare them to their children. So there it is. And declaring it and living it before God has commanded us.

0:04:23 – (Steve Gray): And of course, the Bible’s very strong on generational blessing. We have Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and it just keeps going until it gets down to David and then Jesus, and Jesus is out of the throne of David, and they have all these. And it’s very, very strong in the Bible. We need to remember that.

0:04:42 – (Kathy Gray): Yeah, we do.

0:04:43 – (Steve Gray): To talk about this. I’ll do it real quick, though. A lot of people have heard of the Smith and outpouring. The Smithson Revival, Cornfield Revival, which was in that country church. The church was built in 1859, and it still had the same floor flooring in it since 1859 when we took it. And it was a town of 532 people. There’s nothing there. Long story. But 12 years later, it exploded into a great revival called the Smith and outpouring. And now a quarter of a million people walk through the doors of that country church in three years or three and a half years.

0:05:14 – (Steve Gray): Now, the point being is that church was built in 1859. That’s before the Civil War. And you know, because you know the history that they used to pull up their horses to that church, tie them up, and people would go in and pray during the war.

0:05:28 – (Kathy Gray): Yes.

0:05:29 – (Steve Gray): And now, you know, and now in the, in 100 years later or better, now all of a sudden, this outbreak of revival, why Smith then? Why there? Why Who? What? And of course, we played a bit. Why? Because we planned on it and we prayed for it. But who knows? People laid and prayed on that floor during World War I.

0:05:49 – (Kathy Gray): Right.

0:05:49 – (Steve Gray): They prayed on that floor when Japan attacked Pearl harbor. And now years later, we reap the benefit. You know, Jesus said this way, he said, others have done the hard work. And now you’ve received the blessing, others sowed and did the hard work.

0:06:03 – (Kathy Gray): That’s right.

0:06:04 – (Steve Gray): And you reap the harvest. And so, you know, I’m saying yes. And I’m also saying no, that we had to play the part because otherwise every church would have a history like that. But, but think of that. And that’s why I want you to think, who could it have been that was praying for you? Generationally has set faith into motion, blessing into motion, connecting with God. And you don’t know who they are.

0:06:30 – (Steve Gray): Grandma, great grandma, great grandpa, pastor. Maybe in your past you didn’t even know their pastor. You, one of your relatives was a Circuit R and one of her relatives was working with, I can’t say the missionary in Africa. So the famous missionaries. And so.

0:06:51 – (Kathy Gray): Yes, and so let’s talk today then about that legacy that you have in your life. And we were talking the other day about someone more than a century ago now in your family line who was touched by God. And I want you to share how you even found out about that legacy.

0:07:12 – (Steve Gray): And I didn’t know it existed. If you had to ask me, I would have thought of no relative that’s ever been in the ministry or my dad preached once in a while for the Methodist Church on when the pastor was on vacation a couple of times is all he did. But I knew nothing. Okay, so. So I found out this, that my mother’s uncle or my grandmother’s brother, last name Philby, was in the hospital on the east side, east of St. Louis, and he pastored in whatever, I can’t remember the town, but A nice church, nice assembly of God church for years and years and years.

0:07:49 – (Steve Gray): That’s all I knew. Well, I heard he was in the hospital and not well, and he was 90 some years old. So I took my…You went with us. I took my mom and my grandma and you. And she asked if we would go and pray for him. And she wanted to see him one last time before. Before he died. Well, that’s all I knew. All right. So what I found out from that was in the turn of the century, when it was 1800s, then it’s 1900s, right? In those first years, there was an outbreak of the Holy Spirit and people began to speak in tongues and they began to praise the Lord and it exploded. It was a holiness movement, but a lot of those people didn’t want to go this way, so they kind of died out. But it was a good movement at the end of the 1800s. But then 1900s came and so we had a new group.

0:08:35 – (Steve Gray): They started calling themselves Pentecostals. That’s how it started. Imagine, we didn’t have any churches where anybody spoke in tongues and barely raised their hands until the 1900s. That’s a long time from Jesus. When Paul said, I want you all to speak in tongues. And now we got this silence of it, but it came back in. Now, you know, the biggest churches in the world are praising tongue talking folks, but some people don’t like to hear that either. But anyway, but okay, so he gets filled with the Holy Spirit, he speaks in tongues. He’s got, I don’t know, my grandmother. There’s like six or seven, eight, nine kids. I don’t know how many. The whole family rejected him and people rejected him.

0:09:14 – (Steve Gray): So his family, he told me and others, when he would walk down the street, they would not even walk on the same side of the street with him. They would cross over and it was basically, the word is like shun. They would shun him and then they would make fun of him and they would. He’d walk when they’d see him. And his family would do it too, his brothers and sisters or brothers and one sister. And they would do this.

0:09:36 – (Steve Gray): And what they meant was, you’re a holy roller, you’re a holy roller. Completely lost his family. They never had anything to do with him after that. And now he’s in his 90s, 90 90s old, and he’s going to pass away. He’s in the hospital. And so I take them there and my mother then talks to him, my grandmother talks to him, and they introduce me because If I met him, I would have had to have been a baby.

0:10:02 – (Steve Gray): But introduce me and say, this is Steve and he’s in the ministry, he’s traveling, he preaches, he sings and began to tell a little bit about me. And his whole countenance changed. I can’t remember if he got teary eyed, but it felt like he did. It felt like he was having an emotional moment. And he said, he said, finally, finally somebody in my family is going to carry this on. I’ve had no one my whole life and finally I know it’s you. And it was like, it felt like he’s saying, I can go now, I can leave this earth because finally there’s somebody that’s got my relative’s blood because he’s an uncle of my mom, but he’s a brother of my grandmother. So you know, that family thing’s going, finally somebody is going to carry this word on and preach the gospel.

0:10:55 – (Steve Gray): And I had no idea that that happened. And then he. And he didn’t, he did die pretty quick, but, but we all got to hear that. And I had no idea he existed. He didn’t know I existed.

0:11:05 – (Kathy Gray): Right? That’s right. And so we, we learned about you were his legacy. And now let’s go way back to when you’re just a small child to almost the beginning of your legacy and you have told our family and our children about, about what happened to you, about this wonder. But you were, you lived in Kansas and you were just a little kid and you guys went to a Nazarene church, right?

0:11:33 – (Steve Gray): And I know the story’s real, real, real, because we just visited with my sister out of state and she brought up this story because she remembers when it happened. Well, we went to a Nazarene church. I was not the good kid of the Nazarene church by any means. I was one of the kids that, you know, went in the bathroom and locked the stall and then crawled out, you know, about every week, you know, that kid.

0:11:56 – (Steve Gray): So there was nothing significant or spiritual. In fact, when this happened, I’d had some bad things happen to me which we don’t need to go into as a child. Very tough things and, and some sickness to some surgeries and things like that. So I was kind of beat up as a person and I was only in the second grade. She thought maybe I was first grade. We’re trying to remember exactly it was first or second grade.

0:12:20 – (Steve Gray): Probably the second grade though. So I was probably six, maybe, I thought five. She said maybe six.

0:12:27 – (Kathy Gray): Six would be first grade.

0:12:28 – (Steve Gray): Okay. Six. So, yes, thanks. Because you taught first grade, you know, these things. So I just went to church, just like always. And the Nazarenes would have an altar call at the end, which is not like getting people saved, but they would go to be sanctified, and they would go and they would cry at the altar and pray for, you know, go Presence and things. It was. They were pretty spiritual people. And I really am blessed that I got to be a part of that.

0:12:54 – (Steve Gray): But still, I was a kid out of it. I saw it, but I wasn’t in it. You know, my three. My two sisters and my mother sang almost every Sunday, some special. And I just sat there in the pew, you know, with my brother and my dad, I guess, and just did nothing, you know, I don’t know what happened exactly, but they did their thing. They had the altar call. They cried at the altar. So the whole room was empty.

0:13:17 – (Steve Gray): What was I still doing in there? Because I’d be out on the parking lot running and playing and with the other kids. I don’t know how I ended up staying. I have no memory of it. I just can see myself looking at the altar, and I was on this side, and I looked at the altar at that corner over there, and I just went to the altar, knelt down by myself, and completely fell apart as a person. My humanity as a kid, just a kid, normal kid, I guess, fell apart.

0:13:50 – (Steve Gray): I fell apart and I cried and I cried and I cried. I couldn’t quit crying. And it was a God thing. But it was hard for me to know what was going. I didn’t even think it’s a God thing. I just was. I’m just in it, you know, I’m not thinking I’m getting visited by God. I’m thinking I’m in this, and I don’t even think about it. Well, then the family’s getting ready to leave, and they can’t find me. Kind of like when they looked for Jesus and he said, where do you think he’d be? He’d be in the temple. They couldn’t find me.

0:14:17 – (Steve Gray): So my dad sees me at the altar and crying and crying and crying and crying out. And so he’s trying to figure out what to do. So he goes and gets the pastor of the church. I think his name was Patterson, a great guy from our family. So they both come to me. My dad kneels this side. He kneels on the other side. Now, as a dad and a pastor, they’re thinking, probably somebody punched me in the nose or I fell down and hurt Myself or whatever.

0:14:44 – (Steve Gray): So they’re very kindly said, Steve, what is wrong? What’s happened? What is wrong? What happened to you? And I said one line, you know what it was? I said, I’ve been called to preach at that age. That’s all that came out of my mouth. They were stunned. I didn’t think, I didn’t know what that meant exactly. But I was that age. I’ve been called to preach. Well after that, then life goes on and they didn’t know what to do with me.

0:15:13 – (Steve Gray): And you don’t, you don’t know if it is real? Did you make it up? But it was very, very real. And I remembered it my whole life, but I never incorporated it into my life.

0:15:22 – (Kathy Gray): Right. But you had that touch and you had a knowing, even though you were very, very young. And then. Can we jump ahead then in your life …

0:15:33 – (Steve Gray): When things happened.

0:15:35 – (Kathy Gray): Oh, so many things happened.

0:15:36 – (Steve Gray): Not all, so many, not too good. But anyway. But now I jump ahead.

0:15:40 – (Kathy Gray): Right? You jump ahead and you know some of those events and just some of the patterns of your life. You did kind of forget about that calling. You forgot about the Lord and the reality of him. And now let’s jump ahead to age 23.

0:15:56 – (Steve Gray): And now we’re married.

0:15:57 – (Kathy Gray): Now we’re married.

0:15:57 – (Steve Gray): I’m not a Christian. I can’t say you’re not a Christian. I can say you could have been a much better Christian.

0:16:05 – (Kathy Gray): I was a self-righteous person. I loved the Lord. But you know, if you’re that self -righteous, I don’t.

0:16:10 – (Steve Gray): But we didn’t really go to church. No, you believed. But we occasionally we went to church. Do you remember? We went to another church. It was a really bad. It was just boring, boring, boring church. Very traditional church. Before we were married. And they sang old hymns out of my hymn book. Do you remember that? You remember what happened to me?

0:16:30 – (Kathy Gray): You cried.

0:16:32 – (Steve Gray): I was the only person in the whole church that was responding just where I was. I didn’t do anything. And tears. What’s going on?

0:16:40 – (Kathy Gray): It was a response from you.

0:16:42 – (Steve Gray): And then at age 23, we had gotten to a rough spot in our marriage and had a big fight. And you know, it just made me feel so terrible and it made you feel terrible.

0:16:52 – (Kathy Gray): We were just newlyweds, you know, five months.

0:16:54 – (Steve Gray): Yeah.

0:16:55 – (Kathy Gray): Devastating.

0:16:55 – (Steve Gray): Yeah. And we didn’t know if we’re getting divorced now we’re quitting, moving out. We didn’t know what was next. But we just happened to be visiting my mother who had experienced the power of the Holy Spirit, like they did in the Bible and they glorify God. And I, my sister had been sick. My other sister, not the one we went to visit, sick and was taken, wasn’t it? 36, 30 some pills a day. And we’d, we’d watch her pop them.

0:17:21 – (Kathy Gray): She had huge pill bottles and her.

0:17:23 – (Steve Gray): Hair had fallen out and she looked a mess and she would fall in the street sometimes and the police would come and get her or somebody would call me, say, you need to come get your sister. So it was a bad thing. Now my sister is chirping around the house like a new creature, just like a new creation. And I have no idea what’s happened. My mother is going to prayer meetings. We never went to prayer meetings.

0:17:45 – (Steve Gray): And now she’s going to two prayer meetings a week. I’m like, what fanatic is this? But I could not deny my spirit compared to their spirit. And it was starting to eat on me and curiosity to the point where I finally said to both of them, what has happened to you? What a great, you know, what a great thing to say to have somebody so represent the kingdom that I know something’s happened. You’re not the same. And that’s what we hope. Everybody can be that light.

0:18:15 – (Steve Gray): They said, do you want to know? I said, I want to know. Sat and I did. And they began to explain and they, it was a two hour lecture kind of, you know, not, you know, they just, I just listened and listened.

0:18:28 – (Kathy Gray): Encouraging life giving.

0:18:29 – (Steve Gray): It was in their family room and I was sitting on the floor, sitting in a chair and I’m just moving and they’re telling everything, everything. And then Kathy and I hadn’t spoken all day because of the big fight. And pretty soon though, she edges into the room and she’s sitting across on the floor and I’m sitting over here on the floor. And finally they get finished and my mother, I don’t know if this is how she did it exactly.

0:18:53 – (Steve Gray): It felt like she was saying to me, which no one had ever done, expressing like you could be like these people in the Bible. It’s not like become a Christian so you go to heaven when you die. She said, you could be this, like these people in the Bible. And then they asked me, would you like us to pray for you to be saved, give your life to Jesus. And they went the other step, like what happened to my uncle and be filled with the Holy Spirit just like they were in the Bible.

0:19:25 – (Steve Gray): And I didn’t know what that meant exactly because I’d never gone past this point. I’d seen evangelism on tv, but not past this point. And my first reaction is amazing, too, because my first reaction was not to say yes. My first reaction was to speak to you. And that’s the first. We’d spoken in hours, almost 24 hours. And I said, Kathy, would you like to receive, too? I don’t know what came over me to ask you that, but I did. And you crawled over and we held hands and we received together, gave our lives to Jesus, asked to be baptized in the Holy Spirit, just like they were in the Bible.

0:19:58 – (Steve Gray): Didn’t know what that meant. But you know what happened? My voice broke out. I was a musician and a singer, and I got a music degree and all that, and I was a music teacher. My voice broke out into song. And I am singing in what sometimes is called the heavenly language, but I am singing in tongues, and I’m not faking it. It was not fake. I’d never even heard a person speak in tongues. I never even heard of speaking in tongues. As a matter of fact, I didn’t know what. What it was.

0:20:23 – (Steve Gray): But it was a beautiful, beautiful moment. I did that. And then I began to speak in tongues, too, like that. And then. But then I stopped the tongues speaking, and the first words out of my mouth in English were what I’ve been called to preach. And suddenly it all came together. It all came together.

0:20:44 – (Kathy Gray): Yes.

0:20:44 – (Steve Gray): And I. I didn’t think, oh, that’s what I said when I was a kid. I didn’t think that then. I thought later, I just. Just out of my mouth it came, yes. And did you know, I had a friend that after that I went and told my friend what I was really close to in high school and college, and I went to that friend and I was thought, I’m going to sit him down. I’m going to tell him what happened to me, you know.

0:21:05 – (Steve Gray): And so I began this way, talking to him, and I said, I know this is going to be a big shock to you. I know it’s a change. I know I. I know all that, how you’re going to. I know it could be a hard thing to react to. And then I told him, you know what he said? After I just spoke a little bit about it, he says, I’m not surprised at all. I knew that was in you when you were 18 years old. You were. You were.

0:21:27 – (Steve Gray): He said, I’m not shocked at all that this is what’s happened to you, because you had something trying that he saw. He was Catholic, but he saw it in me.

0:21:36 – (Kathy Gray): You had a general generational blessing, just all about you that you hadn’t recognized.

0:21:42 – (Steve Gray): So my Uncle Philby prayed, who knows before him, who prayed later, who knows who prayed in Smithton on those slats that helped us get through what we needed to, to get through. But I’m pretty sure most people have somebody in their line that has the blessing of God on their life and believed like they should. And that’s why we want you to tap in, pray about it, even if you don’t know who it is, tap into your generational blessing.

0:22:13 – (Steve Gray): And I think your generational blessing is much more powerful than any generational curse. And so of course a blessing is more powerful, you know, and you know, Jesus said, “I lay before you life and death, blessing and cursing …” Well, which, forget the cursing, choose the blessing, choose life and choose the blessing. Choose to believe it and, and let it happen to you as it happened to us. And you, we mentioned that you have a heritage too. You have a legacy that we said circuit riders and all that stuff and, and oh yeah, it was, wasn’t it?

0:22:47 – (Steve Gray): William Moffat?

0:22:50 – (Kathy Gray): You should never say names because then I don’t get them right. It was Robert Moffat or James Moffat who translated in South Africa. He went there as the very first major missionary there and he paved the way for his son in law who became the famous one, Livingstone, Dr. Livingstone, I presume. But he.

0:23:13 – (Steve Gray): And that was your relative.

0:23:15 – (Kathy Gray): That was my relative, but he, my relative took their native language and he translated the whole Bible into their native language and then he translated it also into English. He was a Scotchman. And it actually became he was ahead of his time because his version of the Bible kind of got criticized a little bit. But it became like the message Bible is today or the Good News Bible is today, more in the Venetian vernacular of regular people or the Passion or the Pat. Well, not quite the Passion because he. Well, anyway, he didn’t interpret it.

0:23:59 – (Kathy Gray): The Passion really is an interpretation, not a translation.

0:24:02 – (Steve Gray): Oh yeah, you’re right.

0:24:02 – (Kathy Gray): So don’t be upset with me, Passion people. But anyway, that was part of my legacy. But I’m so thankful for that. And I’m so thankful for what you’re doing now and have been doing since you said yes, and we’re filled with the Holy Spirit and called to preach. You’ve impacted not just our family, but nations.

0:24:23 – (Steve Gray): Yes, thank you. And in our church, I’m working people that know me and go to our church know I’m building a legacy, passing it along from one generation below me and then they’re doing it and we’re working for the generation below them. The guys in this room know that. I’ve been working with them to leave a legacy that they’re totally prepared to walk by faith and continue on in the kingdom of God. So our encouragement to you is to–even if you don’t know who it is by faith–let’s be positive about that. There’s got to be somebody. There’s an old song called “Somebody Prayed for Me” and it means that legacy long time ago. I’m where I am today because somebody that I don’t even know prayed for me, so believe that with us. Go to https://stevegreyministries.com and get this literature, get these books, get this legacy be a part of this legacy that I’m passing on now to others, and then believe for your legacy It’s a blessed legacy. Somebody’s prayed for you, so believe it with us.

0:25:21 – (Steve Gray): Bye-bye.