0:00:00 – (Steve Gray): When you go to church, are you going to group therapy, learning how to cope with who you are and what’s going on in your life? Or are you being transformed into a new creation and walking in the power of the Kingdom of God? I’m going to hit it hard in the next More Faith More Life podcast.

0:00:16 – (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, no- profit leader, bold truth speaker, and most importantly, father and spouse. When I was in my early 40s, I was craving more.

0:00:44 – (Steve Gray): 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.

0:01:16 – (Steve Gray): So if you’re ready to do more, so subscribe to More Faith More Life and hear an unfiltered biblical truth every week. It’s time to be and experience more.

0:01:27 – (Steve Gray): Hello everyone and welcome to another More Faith More Life podcast. Your voice for revival. We’re going to talk about a subject today that might be a little difficult for some of you to swallow, some of you to get a hold of. It’s going to shake you up a little bit. You know, Jesus would go to the believers, they were God believers. He would go to the Jewish people that believed in God, wanted to serve God. That’s why they’re following him around.

0:01:51 – (Steve Gray): They’re not just following him around as rotten people who need to get saved, so to speak, and die and go to heaven. They had a whole other culture of what it means, eternal life that we don’t even hardly understand in the non-Jewish world of the gospel. But these were God fearing people following him around, wanting God, wanting to hear things. But at the same time, Jesus would put them in a crisis because he’d say, this is what you think, this is how it is. This is what you’ve heard.

0:02:23 – (Steve Gray): Now I’m telling you something else. This is what the Pharisees teach. This is what I teach. And they get caught in between that and they’d have to go, you know what? I think Jesus is making good sense. Or a few of them would rise up and say, hey, you better be careful, Jesus. The. The Pharisees know you’re talking about them. But he didn’t be careful. He went ahead and said it anyway. So we’re going to do that to you today. I’m going to put you in that kind of a Jesus crisis mode, because I’m going to take something on that needs to be said.

0:02:54 – (Steve Gray): I don’t know if I’ve heard anybody else say it. I’ve coined a phrase that I don’t know if anybody else. Maybe somebody else has said it somewhere, but you’re going to hear it. Cause today we’re going to talk about the gospel, but we’re going to put it the way it is, not the way it should be, but the way it is. Okay? And the way it is. I’m going to call it the therapy gospel. It’s therapy. It’s the gospel that includes therapy in it. Now, if you go to therapy.

0:03:20 – (Steve Gray): I’ve never been to therapy. Kathy had her knee surgery, and so she. She goes to physical therapy. But when people ask me, where’s Kathy? I always play. I said, oh, she’s in therapy. And I look at their faces, they’re like, what? So I have to say, no. I mean physical therapy. Cause therapy, you get a picture, you lay down on a couch, and what do you do? You talk all about you, especially your past, right?

0:03:46 – (Steve Gray): Mostly about your past. There’s not much future. It’s all a little bit now. What’s going on now and why is it going on now? And then we go back to our past and analyze the past to figure out why in the past is now affecting my now and maybe my future. But you don’t go to therapy and pay whatever an hour so you can talk about somebody else. You’re not. I mean, unless it’s your mom, dad, or whatever in the story.

0:04:13 – (Steve Gray): But you don’t go to talk about Jesus. You’re not going to go and talk about a friend you had that was such a great friend to you and. Or the influences, the great influences. But you’re not going to talk about Jesus. You’re not going to talk about the kingdom. You’re not going to talk about God. You’re going to talk about you. You pay money to go in and talk about you. Okay? So when we go to a church, that’s not all churches everywhere, but it’s really a general theme across the board, is it’s therapy gospel. We’re going to have a sermon today that basically talks about you and you and you and you. So it’s sort of group therapy.

0:04:50 – (Steve Gray): But we’re going to talk about us. We’re going to talk about our feelings. We’re going to talk about why. We’re going to talk about being a victim. We’re going to talk about how we should cope with our lives. I’m going to help you cope. So when we get done, you’re going to feel better about you. That’s what therapy is. We’re going to feel better about you. Now, that’s not what’s supposed to happen, but that’s what is happening. We’re going to help you cope with life.

0:05:13 – (Steve Gray): So you’re going to feel better about you and you’ll come back next week and we’re going to hit something else and you’re going to feel better about. Now the gospel of Jesus Christ is not feeling better about you. The gospel of Jesus Christ is what? Losing you, Changing. Transformation, right? New creation, all things become new again. This new you, that takes whatever. And the power of the Holy Spirit takes the you, and you get transformed. You become new, you become different.

0:05:44 – (Steve Gray): Peter was a coward. He denied Christ three times. He gets filled with the Holy Spirit, and on the day of Pentecost, he goes out and he becomes the most powerful preacher on the face of the earth of that day. Whoa. That’s a transformation. Just think, that could be you. Maybe not exactly like Peter. Maybe you won’t go and preach to all the Jews, but he did. And he was the coward, became the preacher.

0:06:11 – (Steve Gray): What about Paul, the persecutor, the became the preacher. What if that’s you? Well, you say, I don’t know how to get there. Well, you’re not going to get there because you’re getting therapy in church. You’re learning how to cope with who you are rather than be changed from who you are. And that’s the gospel. Change, resurrection, power, right? Reviving us, you know, renewing us, Renewing of the mind, all those kinds of things.

0:06:39 – (Steve Gray): Okay, so the therapeutic gospel, I want to take you through it a little bit here. And we’ve already said that it teaches you how to cope with you, okay? So you’ll feel better about you. So picture yourself. You go to church and you’re going to lay down, everybody’s going to lie, lie down on Jesus therapy couch, and we’re going to get a sermon that makes us able to keep going and feel better about who we are, what we are, or what we’re going through.

0:07:05 – (Steve Gray): Okay, maybe you don’t go to that church. But that is generally what’s being done across the country and around the world. Probably copying our ways. Okay, so when we have this now at the very end, in some churches, not all evangelical churches, we have the therapy gospel that makes you feel better about you. And at the end, then it’s going to really make you feel better about you because. Because now it’s going to say, whatever you’ve done, we’re going to pray a prayer.

0:07:36 – (Steve Gray): And then you don’t have to worry about what you’ve done because you’re going to be forgiven, and we’re going to offer you forgiveness. And then you know that if you were to die today, you’ll go to heaven and spend eternity in heaven. Okay, all right, you’re going to die and go to heaven. So now you’re going to really feel good about you because you don’t have to feel bad about your past. You feel good now that your sins are forgiven. And.

0:07:58 – (Steve Gray): And you feel good because if anything does happen, you’re going to spend eternity with Jesus. Okay? That’s kind of the system you agree with that you should, because that’s kind of the plan. So the whole thing is therapy to feel better and about ourselves. Now let’s back up to when John the Baptist started his sermon and when Jesus started his preaching. Okay? Both of them start at the same point. And I get it, because the.

0:08:25 – (Steve Gray): This mindset of today, of repent means. Repent means you’re supposed to repent that you’re a sinner. You’re supposed to repent of your sins, which is right. And you do need to do that. We do need to repent of our sins. But is that the place to start is immediately talk about ourselves? Okay. It doesn’t mean that we don’t repent of our sins, but where’s the starting point? Who are we starting with? Well, Jesus didn’t do that. And. And neither did John the Baptist. When they said repent, then they identified why.

0:08:59 – (Steve Gray): It’s not what we repent of, it’s why are we repenting. And we don’t get that in our churches today. He said both of them said repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. The kingdom of heaven is here now. So when we heard repentance in a church service, we’re going to do what? Repent and look right backwards, maybe even backwards to last week. Maybe you’re going to think, okay, I need to repent. What did I do wrong last week? Oh, yeah, and now I’m going to go backwards again.

0:09:30 – (Steve Gray): But Jesus and John the Baptist threw us forward. He said you need to repent because there’s something here and you’re not ready for it. There’s something here that holds you here when I want to move you forward. There’s a kingdom here and I want to get you active in, in the kingdom forward, which is a transformation. It’s an empowerment. It’s a new way to think, it’s a new way to live. You do your finances, you love, you care, you forgive, you do all these things. That’s kingdom living. And I want to throw you in it because Jesus is doing, he’s bringing him kingdom living to people.

0:10:06 – (Steve Gray): And so we’re not going to repent and look backwards because we don’t need to. We’re going to repent of who we are right this minute, which includes backwards. We’re going to repent and we’re going to go forward. We’re going to repent of who we are as a person. Okay. That has no room to move forward. We’d have no moving forward. We’re stuck. And so that’s why we don’t want every week to have the worship service.

0:10:30 – (Steve Gray): You know, I don’t want at our church, the music starts and people start worshiping God and immediately people start repenting because it’s a repentance service. Like I failed again. I know I’m not who I’m supposed to be. I, I know I should do better. I’m going to worship you and praise you and then you hear some song about it and you go, oh gosh, now I feel bad again. I feel bad about myself. I got to repent.

0:10:51 – (Steve Gray): So I feel better about myself, I think. I hope you’re getting it. Okay, so it wasn’t repent of what it was repent of. Why? Why? Because there’s a kingdom here and you need to get it going in your life. You need to get it going. You need to quit focusing on yourself. You need to get up off the self-centered, all about me couch and talking about your past and what everybody did and what you did and all this stuff about you that just goes on and on and on.

0:11:21 – (Steve Gray): Get up and focus on who Jesus is. Okay, we’re going to talk about more of that in just a minute. Well now on top of that, we lose the why we repent. Cause now we’re repenting because we are sinners. So we have a sinner’s prayer which we’re going to read in a minute. Okay, now we have go back to 1517, the year 1517 and a guy Named Martin Luther. He started what is called the Protestant Reformation. He’s reforming.

0:11:50 – (Steve Gray): We need more than reform, but that’s what he did. And he did good. But he didn’t do good enough. He’s a Catholic. He says the Catholic ways aren’t getting it. We have too much works, we have too much earnings, we have too much that. And so he started thinking like, I don’t feel free. So Martin Luther was guilt ridden about sin, about sin, about sin. Because he kept trying to do Catholic things to get rid of that feeling of guilt that something’s wrong with me. And he never got it.

0:12:23 – (Steve Gray): So he comes up with a great scripture, which is true. So he says, aha, we’re justified by faith. That means walking on glass or going without or depriving yourself of something or hating yourself and feeling like a worm or whatever. He was guilt ridden. And so he finds justification by faith to help him. The problem is he was guilt ridden and anxiety driven. He had anxiety about his guilt, about his sin, and, and anxiety.

0:12:55 – (Steve Gray): How do I get God to love me and care about me and walk? And then came up with the answer by faith. So all that is good, but what it did was then we took where he started, not where he ended. Okay, where did he end by faith? Justification by faith. Okay, okay, okay. But we’re talking not about the ending. We’re talking about how do you start with people? Where do you start? Because we’re talking about a sinner’s prayer.

0:13:22 – (Steve Gray): We’re talking about the sinner’s life, we’re talking about therapy. How do you start with people? Do you start with justification by faith? No, that we should, but we don’t. We don’t start with the kingdom of God. We start with the sinner part. And since he was guilt ridden and anxiety driven, we start our gospel prayer and journey dealing with our guilt and our anxiety. Okay, so we know that. I mean, the first line. We’ll read it in a minute again. But the first line of what we call the sinner’s prayer goes something like this. Lord Jesus, I know I’m a sinner. I am a sinner. Okay? That’s where Martin Luther started.

0:14:03 – (Steve Gray): He got through some of it, but he didn’t get through all of it. Cause he didn’t go too far. But now we take everybody into his guilt, into his anxiety and say, we’re going to pray for you. And guess what they say? We’re going to pray for you, for Jesus to come into your heart. Okay, I know, I’ve prayed it too. And I still do it because it’s so traditional that if you don’t say it, people out there don’t get it. And even people who prayed it before, they want to pray it again, they rededicate their lives. You have to say some of these phrases to help them out.

0:14:41 – (Steve Gray): But let’s think about it a little bit. The wrong direction. So now it’s still about you. We’re going to get Jesus to come into your life. Whoa, that’s not the gospel. The gospel is you going into his life. It’s all about becoming in Christ. If any man be in Christ, he’s a new creature. Well, if you’re just going to get him in you, which I get it, it’s a great thing, I’m not going to argue about that.

0:15:08 – (Steve Gray): But still, the, it’s not just the religious side of it, it’s the mental and emotional side and the theological side and the doctrine side that I’m getting God and Christ into my life, into my heart. But what we need to do, the kingdom is here. We’ve have to get you into his heart and to his life. And nobody teaches you how to do that. They don’t even bring it up. Cause we’re going to keep it all about you. So it’s all about you still.

0:15:36 – (Steve Gray): We’re going to get Jesus into your life, into your heart. It’s all about you. And you’ll see that in a minute. So it’s backwards, okay? It’s backwards. All right. So let’s look at the sinner’s prayer for just a minute. This is the traditional sinner’s prayer. Everybody does it. I try not to do it like this when I pray it in our church. I have an element of forgive me of my sins. I have an element of declaring that Jesus is the Messiah or he is the savior of the world.

0:16:07 – (Steve Gray): Right. But it’s still, I try to keep it forward, moving. I want to serve you, I want to follow you. Right? So we may say, I might say Jesus, come into my life, but the idea is you’re coming in my life so I can serve you. Go after you. Go after you. Okay. All right. So this last weekend I had news on and a couple of channels and just catching up on some stuff. And on two different channels, some but not the same person broke in. They paid for an ad and they said, I want to tell you the gospel.

0:16:40 – (Steve Gray): And do you know if you were to die today, you go to heaven. Okay. So that makes me, if I don’t know that I might get anxiety, right? And do you know You’re a sinner. Okay? Okay. There’s the guilt. There’s the anxiety. Now, have you ever noticed how hard it would be? And I know it because it happened to me. I had a guy knock to my door and try that on me. And he said, do you know if you’re to die today that you’d be a sinner?

0:17:09 – (Steve Gray): I’m just going to take the time to tell this story, okay? I don’t like this story because it makes me look kind of bad. But I’ll just tell you the truth, okay? And it’s a funny story, really. Okay? So I live in a dorm. At the time, I think I’m a freshman or sophomore. And a guy knocks on my door. I happened to be a singer, and that and music, so people knew who I was on campus. And he knocks on my door, and I answer it. And he says, then I’m here. He had a tie on, a white shirt and tie.

0:17:35 – (Steve Gray): And he says, I’m here to talk to you. Do you know if you were to die today, you would go to heaven? Now, get this picture. When I answer the door, I don’t know who’s out there. And so I answer the door. Unfortunately, I know you’re going to get condemnation out of this. I smoked cigarettes. I was a smoker, okay? So I opened the door. I’m a freshman and probably a sophomore. I open the door, I’ve got a cigarette hanging out of my mouth. When I open the door, big old ashes, smoke coming up. Here’s a guy in a white shirt saying, do you know if you were to die today, you’d go to heaven? You know what I did?

0:18:11 – (Steve Gray): I reached in my pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. I said, listen, read the side of this pack of cigarettes. The surgeon general says, these cigarettes will kill me. All right? I am smoking right now. Do you think that I am concerned about death and dying and go to heaven? I don’t think I’m going to die today or tomorrow. What if I don’t die? What if I wake up tomorrow? What do you have to offer me if I don’t die and if I’m not concerned about dying? Cause obviously the surgeon general says, these will kill me, and I’m smoking them right now.

0:18:48 – (Steve Gray): He had nothing to say. If he couldn’t get me to feel guilty as a sinner, if he couldn’t get me to be anxious about my future eternal life, he had nothing to say, and he just left as it out. He had nothing to say, nothing to offer me. That taught me a Hard lesson. And I didn’t. And I went years, till I was 23, till somebody offered me life and said, how would you like to be one of these people in the Bible?

0:19:14 – (Steve Gray): How would you like to be filled with the spirit and have the kingdom of God and serve him and do all these. You can do all these things. I said, I can. Yeah. And they didn’t start with a sinner. I already knew I was a sinner. They started moving me forward, out of it by promising me things that God promises to people who can be transformed. You can be changed. You can forget that past. And you don’t have to be guilty all the time. You don’t have to be anxious about your future. That’s true. Cause I do have a home in heaven.

0:19:41 – (Steve Gray): You do, too, if you’re a believer. But that’s not the place to start. Starting with it. So here’s the sinner’s prayer. All right. Lord Jesus, I am a sinner. Or they say, pray. Do you know you’re a sinner? So, okay, I’m in therapy now. Okay. Lord Jesus, I. Cause therapy is about me. I am a sinner. I am sorry for my sins. That’s good. But it’s still, I. I believe you died for me and you rose again for me.

0:20:15 – (Steve Gray): It doesn’t say for me in this prayer, but it understood. You died for me. You rose again for me. Come into my heart. No talk about me going into his. His kingdom, his heart, his life. Losing myself and finding myself not there. Forgive me. Okay. We need to get forgiveness. I believe in that. But do you understand forgiveness was available to people in Israel, particularly before Jesus ever came. Yeah. They had forgiveness.

0:20:48 – (Steve Gray): He wasn’t the sacrifice. Jesus becomes the sacrifice. And that’s the one we believe in as the Savior’s sacrifice. But there was forgiveness before Jesus. So if we make it all about. Forgive me now, we really haven’t moved past or moved much past Judaism before Jesus. Right. We want to move beyond that with Jesus. Okay. So anyway, come into my heart. Not his heart. My heart. Forgive me and save me. I trust you to be my Savior. Amen.

0:21:25 – (Steve Gray): All right. Is it terrible? No. But it’s not the place to start. See, you’re starting with you. You’re in therapy. You want to feel better about you. You want to know you have a home in heaven if you die. So it’s all about you. It’s about my sin. It’s about my heart. It’s about saving me. It’s about me. And then you try to turn that person into A disciple to follow Jesus, sacrifice, give tithe, attendance, you know, die to yourself, you know, forgive everybody else. And you can’t get them to budge because they didn’t get in this to serve.

0:21:59 – (Steve Gray): They got in this to be rescued from hell, to save themselves. They’re doing it for themselves. And so that’s the hook. So is it, how terrible is it? Well, it’s bad enough I’m going to end it in a minute. Cause I’m giving you too much probably anyway. And some of you, there’s probably steam coming out your ears because you’ve prayed this prayer so many times with so many people. But would you please just consider what kind of converts we’re making. We have trouble getting to serve, to go to be, to change the world.

0:22:30 – (Steve Gray): We be nominal, middle of the road, lukewarm, half-hearted Christians, right? And we have that problem in our churches. And why? Because it started with them. And so they keep it on them. And when are we going to cross over? That’s why we need revival. We need revival of crossing over. To make this no longer about me and my salvation, but me and the kingdom of God. To exalt the Lord. We need to learn how to love God with all our heart, right? Soul, mind, strength. We need to learn how to worship him and we need how to restore his honor in the earth.

0:23:03 – (Steve Gray): We have a mission. And none of that’s brought up in that. It says now you can be at peace, now you can be happy if you die. And whatever, you’re saved. Okay, I get it. Okay, so there’s a term we need to correct and then we’ll move on. Who are the lost? Go to anybody in church. Who are the lost? They’re the unsaved. Go to any pastor. They’re the unsaved. They’re unsaved people. Go to the Bible. Who are the lost.

0:23:28 – (Steve Gray): They’re not the unsaved people. No, they’re not the lost. The lost, when it’s first brought up, especially in the gospels, the lost are the people who are already covenant people, Jewish people who got lost in a religious system that doesn’t work for them. And they get lost. And so out of that were terrible things. Jesus says, I have been sent his first mission to the lost house of Israel. It’s his house, but there’s lost people in the house.

0:24:03 – (Steve Gray): When you look at the woman who says one of the lost is, she lost her coin. Where in the house? In the house. Where are the lost in the house. When the prodigal son, you know, the crazy son that wants his inheritance. And he goes off and lives riot life. Where did he live before he went crazy? In the house with his father. And yet we’re going to call him lost? No, he was lost not because he didn’t know what was lost. The relationship to the father was lost.

0:24:34 – (Steve Gray): Okay, but he lived in the house. And he decided, I don’t want to live in the house. People do that all the time. They know God, they’ve said prayer. They don’t want to live in the house anymore. They going to live stupid lives. Okay? But he came to his senses and said, I will go back to my father’s house. Well, you got a problem here. Because we make unsaved people don’t know the father. We’d say unsaved people aren’t in the family of God. Unsaved people don’t have father. Oh, now you get saved and make him your father. But. But the lost son already had a father. The coin was in the house.

0:25:09 – (Steve Gray): Jesus was sent to the lost sheep of Israel. And remember the lost sheep. He leaves in 99 and go get the lost one. The sheep was already in the fold. It makes no theological sense. He’s already in the fold. Now we’re going to make him lost as though he never was. But it’s people, religious people in their day and ours, that are lost in a system that doesn’t work. It didn’t work for them. There was too much corruption.

0:25:38 – (Steve Gray): The leaders love money, they love to be seen, they love power, they love prestige, they love the nice neighborhoods. And it corrupted the religion to where people got lost in it and they couldn’t get free. And they got demonic. They became demonized and they became sick and they couldn’t repair their lives. And yet now the kingdom of God has arrived. Now you have a future. Right now you have a forward motion.

0:26:05 – (Steve Gray): And so it was corrupt. Now we live in a day. The gospel doesn’t work for us either like it should. It keeps us in bondage. It keeps us still, still feeling guilty, still in anxiety because we don’t know how to cope with it. God’s way, but only the therapeutic way. God wants to get us out of it and transform us and make it no longer all about us. That prayer is all about us. We need a prayer that says, I am going forward.

0:26:32 – (Steve Gray): I’m going to lose my life. I’m going to get into your heart. I’m going to become your servant. Thank you that I have eternal life. Thank you. If I were to die today, I know I’d go to heaven and have a home in heaven and all those good things. But that’s not what makes the Kingdom of God active. And that’s not what changes the world and really saves and rescues the world that needs to be rescued. Because most of us who go to church are lost in a system that doesn’t transform us, but only teaches us therapy and how to cope with our problems and make it through the week to another sermon.

0:27:12 – (Steve Gray): That’s my sermon today. The therapeutic gospel has infiltrated and it’s no gospel at all. There is no other gospel, but it’s like a gospel that now is therapy instead of transformation. Instead of the kingdom of God is here. Let’s live it and move forward rather than constantly looking backward. I hope you can swallow it. I hope it gets to you. I hope you go, ding. I got it. Whoa. Wow. I’m going to read my Bible. Completely different now and look up some of those scriptures. Do we need to still repent of our sins? Of course. Of course. Of course.

0:27:44 – (Steve Gray): But the biggest sin of all is somebody who’s in the kingdom or has said they’re in the kingdom and has no room for the kingdom. They’re too busy. They have no interest and they have no time to be walking. And a servant of the kingdom of God. That’s what we need to repent of. That’s what Jesus got them to repent of. The kingdom of God is here, and you have no interest and no time. Repent and walk in the kingdom of God that’s here right now. All right. I hope it meant something to you. Go to https://stevegrayministries.com if you still like me and tell people about it. Tell people about this message.

0:28:17 – (Steve Gray): Realize how freeing and and powerful a revival message this is. If we would change the direction of our starting point. Are we still going to repent of sins? Yes. But don’t start there. Start with who Jesus is. Start with the kingdom of God. Start getting. Say, I’m going to go into his life, his heart, and I’m going to serve him. It’ll change your life forever. So tell people about it. I hope you liked it and I hope it helps you. Till next time, bye.