Join us as we explore the profound impact of unity within our faith journey. Discover how aligning with biblical principles can open the door to God’s blessings, giving us an edge in life that goes beyond mere morality. It’s not about achieving perfection but about fostering a relationship with God that naturally cultivates a desire for a moral compass. Our conversation reveals how this approach can transform our lives, as we understand that true productivity and blessings are within reach when we walk in faith.
Key Takeaways:
- Unity is a powerful force that Jesus desired for his followers. It involves thinking alike and walking in the unity of the spirit.
- Conformity, often associated with religion, should not be confused with unity. Conformity focuses on external practices, while unity is about aligning one’s mind and spirit with God’s teachings.
- The Catholic Church has successfully achieved unity through consistent practices and rituals, allowing Catholics worldwide to worship in a unified manner.
- In contrast, the Protestant Church lacks unity, with numerous denominations and varying beliefs and practices. This lack of unity can lead to confusion and a lack of clarity in faith.
- To experience true unity, individuals should study the teachings of the first-century church and understand the principles that guided their faith.
Where To Dive In:
0:00:00 Introduction to the More Faith, More Life podcast
0:00:47 Importance of applying faith to biblical principles
0:01:14 Understanding the blessings of God through faith
0:02:26 Christianity’s focus on morality and maintaining a relationship with God
0:03:30 Misconception of coming to Jesus and then focusing on self-effort
0:04:09 The gospel of the kingdom and starting with God’s blessings
0:05:23 Power of unity and the desire for oneness in the Bible
0:06:24 Differentiating between unity and conformity in religion
0:07:00 Examples of conformity in different religious practices
0:09:27 Unity and familiarity of Catholic church practices
0:10:58 Territoriality of churches and lack of unity in some cases
0:12:03 Abundance of Protestant churches in comparison to Catholic churches
0:12:39 Differences in worship styles and practices among Protestant churches
0:13:00 Description of a lively and enthusiastic church experience
0:14:06 Challenges in understanding different church customs and practices
0:15:36 Lack of unity and conflicting beliefs among Protestants
0:16:42 Personal experience of facing resistance for beliefs in a Protestant gathering
0:18:56 Importance of unity and understanding the first-century church
0:20:30 Encouragement to seek transformation and support the message
0:21:15 Emphasizing unity of the spirit over conformity in worship
0:21:49 Summary and conclusion
About the host:
Steve Gray is the founding and senior pastor of Revive Church KC. He has been in the full time ministry for over 40 years and was launched into national and international recognition in the late 1990’s as the leader of the historic Smithton Outpouring, and again in 2009 when he lead the Kansas City Revival which was televised nationally on the Daystar television network. Steve is also a veteran musician, songwriter, recording artist and published author. His books include When The Kingdom Comes, Follow The Fire, My Absurd Religion, and If You Only Knew.
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Transcript:
0:00:00
I can’t wait for you to listen and watch today’s more faith, more life podcast. I’m going to help you understand the power of unity, that we all be one and what that would do for your life. Hey everybody, welcome again to the more faith, more life podcast. Glad we could be together. And you know, I’m here to help you get more life out of understanding how to operate in faith and applying your faith to different principles in the Bible, all because I’m not trying to coddle you, I’m not going to feel sorry for you, I’m not going to talk to you about, well, it’s not your fault, so feel better about yourself. I’m not here to build your self-esteem, anything like that. I’m here to get you into the blessings of God, get you out of the doldrums, stop making mistakes, not understanding how you can get ahead with the things of God.
0:00:47
Well, not just the things of God, how God can help you get ahead in things. And a lot of people, they don’t even know that. They have no idea that God will bless them with things if they follow the pattern of the Bible. So I’m going to help you understand, have more faith, to apply yourself to biblical things, spiritual things and prayer and all that, reading the Bible and just those kinds of things, until you understand how it will produce for you.
0:01:14
And God always intended his people to be productive and to be blessed and to have an advantage over all the other peoples on the earth. A lot of people don’t know that. I can teach you how to do that. And you can argue if you want and say, well, I don’t think that sounds fair, that God helps some people more than others. It doesn’t matter whether you think it’s fair, it’s just, it’s justice. And if you do the right thing, you get the benefit of doing that right thing that pleases God.
0:01:45
It’s not that hard. It’s more of a habit and an understanding. Don’t look at it like, well, you have to be a perfect person. That’s not the point. We’re not even, hardly even talking about being a moral person. We’re not going to talk about morality, even though Morality does have something to do with it. But that’s not the place to start. And if you’ll read the Bible and you’ll read the history of things or listen to people who know, you’ll understand in the first century when Christianity was just getting its start, and it was getting its start by Jewish people, Jewish people started Christianity, I’m sorry that it’s gone so south over the years, but that’s the truth.
0:02:26
And they didn’t start out with, are you a moral person? Do you know you’re a sinner? That’s not where they start. And that’s where Christianity starts today. And it falters there. They started with the presence of God. You’ll get to know God, you’ll have the presence, the knowledge of the presence of God, the presence of God will operate in your life. Then why do you become moral? Why do you want to be honest?
0:02:51
Right? It was not because that’s the end in itself. That was not the end. The reason they became moral is to maintain the blessing that they had by serving the Lord, by paying attention to him, by giving the attention that he deserves, by talking to him the way he needs to be talked to. So you maintain the relationship by how you act. Be a good person. Yeah. Be a moral person, yeah. But that’s not the end of itself. And so Christianity has failed, especially the Protestants in that giving the idea that it doesn’t matter what you’ve done, it doesn’t matter what you are, just come to Jesus.
0:03:30
And then after you get there now, they’re going to tell you what you need to do. You need to be moral, you got to stop this, you got to stop that. And then it ends. So you spend the rest of your life doing self-effort, calling it the spirit, calling it God. The spirit of God’s helping me, but it’s basically self-effort. And you’ve already done that before and know how that turns out. So if you’ll listen and get on board and listen every week to these podcasts, I’ll help you understand the gospels, the gospel of the kingdom, how it works and how we have it flipside. Yeah, we’re supposed to be moral people, but that’s not where it starts. It doesn’t start with you.
0:04:09
It starts with Jesus. It starts with God. It starts with the blessings of God that he offered his people. And he said to them, if you’ll do what I say, follow what I say, do that, you will be a blessed people. Right. Then you maintain it by watching your morality. So the first thing you do is make sure that you start from the beginning. You don’t have any other gods, right? Not serving other gods. Get rid of all your loves and all that kind of stuff and turn to the Lord with all your heart.
0:04:41
Okay? So today I want to talk about something that’s really strange and that’s unity. We don’t really have the unity that we should have in religion. Unity is powerful. Did you know that? Did you know that in the Bible, one of the heartfelt desire of Jesus was that we would be one? One. Right. One. Not two, not three, not four, but one. And then the unity of the spirit. When we would walk, the other writers of the Bible would talk about how important it is to get that unity of the spirit, that we might be one, that we think alike.
0:05:23
And that’s where we want to start with the family. Right. That’s where we start with marriage, is the two shall be one. Now, I know that’s faltered a little bit in society when the two can’t get along as one. But the goal, when you get married, the goal is you’re saying, we’re going to be one. Now, everything, it’s us. Not them, not you, not me, but us. And that’s what God wants. Well, we don’t have very good history of that.
0:05:51
Let’s back up. First of all, I need to tell you that when we talk about unity, it gets strange in religion because religion mixes it up with conformity. Right? You know what that is? Conforming. And that’s where people get, like, they get, oh, it’s a cult or whatever, or it’s a weird religion, or they’re going to get me doing weird things because they wanted me to conform to them. Okay. The only conformity is the Bible says, don’t conform to the pattern of the world because it doesn’t work. It won’t work for you.
0:06:24
It’s not set up to work for you. But in religion, we’re not trying to get people to conform. We’re trying to get you to be unified. One mind, one direction. Okay. So what happens then is it gets to conformity. So maybe you haven’t been around enough, let me just tell you. So religion will pick it up and conform. Without being critical. One of the great examples that you can understand is if you look at the Amish, right? Amish have a lot of things going for them. They’re good in a lot of ways at what they do.
0:07:00
But one of the things is why I’m not Amish and why you’re not Amish, maybe even though there’s a lot of good that they can do, is because you have to conform. Right. There’s different levels of Amish. There are different things they believe. But pretty much you’re going to see them in a buggy and a horse and no electricity and wearing clothes that are different than anybody else’s. That they wore, what, 150 years ago or whatever, and you have to conform to that.
0:07:29
I don’t want to conform to that. I don’t mind being unified in great ideas and talents. I’d love to be able to build a great barn and do construction work like they do. I’d love that. But I don’t want to conform to their ways. All right, but other religions have done it, too. Now, the Catholics have done a good job with conformity in that they don’t make the people dress and conform. But all the nuns and the priests, they all have their garb.
0:07:57
They have their dress up. They conform to it. So when you see it, I don’t know the levels, but other people, Catholics will probably tell some of them what level this person is by what they’re wearing. And so everybody wears something, right? And they conform to it. The people don’t have to, but they do. But then there’s been others religions. Like, I got around a religion where all the men had to wear black and all the women had to wear skirts.
0:08:25
They just happened to be black, too, maybe, I think. And they couldn’t have anything shiny because Shiny was like an idol, shiny idol competing with God. So they go out and they would buy a car. I don’t know if bumpers are shiny anymore, but they used to be. You get a shiny bumper, and they would go out and spray paint. Usually they bought a black car anyway and spray paint the bumpers that were shiny so they weren’t shiny.
0:08:55
And you had to do that to be a part of them. You had to conform. You got to get some spray paint, got to paint your bumpers. That’s conformity. Okay? Unity is different. Unity is that the spirit of God touches us till we all begin to think how God thinks, in a prosperous way, a positive way, a way that works. Okay, now back to the Catholics again. We’ll give them some more credit. I’ve been to a lot of countries, and I was in Mexico quite a bit.
0:09:27
And they have some cities there and some of their towns. They have catholic churches that are open 24 hours a day, and they have mass every single hour. So 01:00 in the morning, they’ve got mass. And so we’re walking across this huge open air thing, big, square, open air, and there’s the big catholic church, and it’s 11:00 at night, and all of a sudden, the bells start ringing. So I think, let’s go in. They won’t mind. Let’s go in and see.
0:09:58
We’re down there ministering anyway, so we did. We went in, and it was amazing that we’re in another country. But there were some other tourists there from America, from the United States, and they were catholic, so we went with them. And when they got in there, they’d say the stuff. A bell would ring. This would say that would happen. And all the Catholics from Mexico knew exactly what to do. At the same time. They knew when to kneel, when to stand up, everything.
0:10:29
But the Catholics from the United States, they knew exactly what to do, too. They knew when to stand up and kneel down and do all this stuff. I didn’t. I don’t know anything about it. I’m just watching, doing the best I can to be respectful. Right? But they knew the Catholics had done a great job of unifying Catholics so that you could go to any, practically any catholic church in the world. And even if you don’t speak the same language, you know what to do.
0:10:58
They have some unity. This is what we do. This is how we have church. Okay. And another thing, a story I can tell you. So I grew up in a town of about 20,000 people, or at least that’s where I went to. I was going to high school. 20,000 people. And in that town, they had two catholic churches. One was on the east side of town, one was on the west side of town. If you lived on the east side of town, you went to that church. If you went on the west side, you went to the other church.
0:11:31
Okay? They did exactly the same thing, but they had their territory, right? And so there was only two. And there was two when I moved there. There was two when I moved away. How about that? Now, on the other hand, I’m not a Catholic. I would be considered a Protestant. On the other hand, if you look through the. Well, way back, you could look through yellow pages. But now you just google it, start googling churches in that particular town.
0:12:03
I did that not a couple of years ago, just trying to figure out how to get some of this facts together. And I think there were probably 150 protestant churches in a town of 20,000, maybe 150, maybe 200. I just quit when I got up to 150 churches. How can that be? How can the Catholics have one, two on each side of town, and that’s it. And then you’ve got all these 150 or more, 180 protestant churches.
0:12:39
And if you go to them, you don’t know what you’re going to find. You know what they’re going to do. Some of them might just sit on their hands, some of them don’t play instruments. Oh, you can’t have instruments in the church. Others have a lot of instruments. Others will have drums, others will have guitars. Some will raise their hands, some will sit on their hands. Some will be loud, some will be quiet.
0:13:00
You got to know what to do here, because there’s no unity, right? You can come to our church. It’s lively. It’s sort of like going to a Chiefs game for Jesus. Maybe not that loud because we’re not that big, but people, they like to be enthusiastic. They enjoy it. So they go and we clap, we sing. We’re not afraid to try to tell a joke. We’re not afraid to laugh, enjoy, smile, hug. It’s just wonderful. It’s just a great, great time together.
0:13:37
But that’s not like every church. I could go across town to another church and I walk in and I’m just like, here, I’m for Jesus. I got my Jesus, everything on, and I’m enthusiastic and I’m ready to clap and I’m ready to sing. I’m ready to raise my hands. And if I do that in their church, you know what they’re going to do? They’re going to ask me to leave, get out. We don’t do that here, but yet they got a cross on their church.
0:14:06
They got a Jesus sticker on their bumper or whatever, and it looks religious. They might have stained glass windows or not, but I don’t know what to do when I go there. I have to figure out as I’m walking into the, what kind of place is this? Let’s see. Okay, they got an organ. They got that. And then I don’t know when to stand up. Sit down. Some of them hand you a piece of paper, a bulletin, right?
0:14:34
Kind of a guide to say, you say this and then you sit down, then you say this and you stand up. That helps. But most churches aren’t using those so much anymore. So I don’t know. The other thing that’s tricky, too, is a lot of these churches are getting, like, contemporary. And so they sing the same songs at their church that we sing at our church. But they don’t sing them like we sing them at our church. They sing them like statues, right? They’re like a pillar of salt.
0:15:03
Nobody is just singing. If you sing like we sing, if I start raising my hands and enjoying just being there and being alive, they’re going to be embarrassed by me. So in that respect, what happened? Well, the Protestants can never agree on anything. They don’t have a unity. Some believe the power of God is for today. Some believe the power of God is of the devil. Some believe the power of God was real, but it quit when the last apostle died.
0:15:36
And it just gets over and over and over, all these confusing teachings and it’s not that hard to figure out. You just have to be a good student. You go back and you study. What did the first churches that were built by people who met Jesus and followed him and had Jewish roots, what did they believe? What did they do? Did they dance around? Did they raise their hands? Did they speak in tongues? Which is one of the things that just frightens people today because they’ve been scared by it.
0:16:10
Do they speak in tongues? What’s the problem? Let’s unify ourselves. The Bible says that you be one. Well, let’s get to that first church of the first century and figure out what they did. What did they do? How were they taught? Because these are the guys that know what they’re talking about. So that’s what I’ve tried to do and to get rid of the fears and all the prejudice and all this stuff. And so the problem with the Protestants is if you do something in a protestant church that somebody doesn’t like or agree with, what are they going to do?
0:16:42
They’re going to go start another church and then another church, and pretty soon you got 100 and 5180 churches that are all different. All things circle around, you know what is, it’s Burger King, right? It’s have it your way. Is that right? Did I get the right? Yeah, have it your way, Burger king. It’s a, you know, it’s not a Jesus church, it’s have it your way church. And so you keep searching and searching and searching till you find a church that’s like you instead of like God, like the Bible, teaching those things.
0:17:19
So I would give the catholic church in this respect, trying to keep unity. I give them an a, I give the protestant church an f. They completely flunk, but we can’t agree on anything. And I went to a coffee thing for pastors and they sent out an invitation, come join all the pastors from all the denominations are going to be there. And then it had a little note on it at the bottom. Please do not bring up controversial things, subjects.
0:17:51
Okay, so we do coffee and that and people talking and visiting and everything like that. I had a moment, introduce myself, told him about our church and how exciting. Just introduced myself and I brought up speaking in tongues. I said, we still believe in speaking in tongues. We believe it’s the Bible. And it was in the first century. And Paul of the Bible said he wanted people to speak in tongues.
0:18:18
What’s happened? Well, afterwards, they came up to me, we said, hey, didn’t you read that? We told you. We said, we don’t want anything controversial mentioned in these meetings because we want to have unity. First of all, I said, telling us what to say, what we can say, and what we can’t say is not unity. That’s conformity. And secondly, I didn’t bring up anything they said, you brought up a controversial subject. I said, speaking in tongues. Is that what you’re talking about? I said, well, pardon me, but it’s not controversial with me. It’s scriptural. So that’s why I brought it up.
0:18:56
So we have to understand the power of unity. All right? You got to stop being confused, right? Got to get your head on straight. That’s why. Let me just stop a minute and remind you of the book. If you only knew. It’ll get your head on straight. You can get it on the more faith, more life get it, and you have to pay for it. Now, you can download it and buy it, but either way, you need to get that. You know why. It’s going to help you understand exactly what’s going on in religion, in the country, in politics right now.
0:19:31
And it’s a book, a guide to the clueless generation. So you won’t be clueless anymore. Right? And then you ought to also try to decide, is it time to make a donation? Is it time to donate? Because read the book and then go like, what is everybody else saying? Everybody else is feeling sorry for you. Everybody else is trying to make you feel better about yourself. So you’ll just keep going in yourself.
0:19:56
I’m trying to change you. I want to see you transform. And so you need to support this message. It is a life changing. It is not feeling sorry, looking backwards. It is going to make you powerful and blessed, living with faith until you get the abundance of life. Consider that. And then lastly, also consider, is there anything that you’d like to have discussed, you’d like to know about? What do you want to know about more money, children, relationships, God, heaven, hell, whatever.
0:20:30
Most people want to know about the end times, if you’re ready for that. But just email us, right? Send us a note, let us know. Say, hey, I would really like it if you could talk on this subject. This is something I’m really interested in. Maybe I’ll talk about for a couple of weeks just for you. All right? Would you do that? So I want to get you unified in the spirit, right? So there’s one spirit. One.
0:20:52
And we need to get that one spirit. We need to hear what the spirit is saying. And if you do that and apply your faith to it, then your life is going to get better and better, and you’re going to get more life, more blessings. You’ll get stronger in yourself. Your families will get better. So it’s just, you cannot go to a church that’s just scatterbrained. You don’t know what they believe. All they know is they want you to be quiet, conform.
0:21:15
Don’t raise your hands. Don’t speak in tongues. Don’t make a ruckus. Don’t get up. Just conform to everything they’re doing. In our church, there is unity, great unity, but there’s not conformity. Some might be raising their hands. Some might be bowing on the floor. Some might be jumping up and down. Somebody else might be crying because they’re hurting. There’s not conformity. But there is unity of the spirit. Because we all know the answer is the spirit of God. Through Jesus, the power, the kingdom, our father in heaven, is going to make our lives better and stronger.
0:21:49
Not just a better me, but a spiritual me, so I can stand up against anything in this life. Are you glad you got to hear that today? I’ve enjoyed sharing that with you. I hope you got it. Till next time. Bye.
