Embark on a transformative journey through the narratives of scripture as we dissect the monumental choices of biblical leaders that echo into our present-day spiritual battles. Uncover how Joshua’s call to the Israelites to choose whom they would serve can inspire our decisions today. The rise and fall of kings like Saul and David aren’t just ancient tales; they represent the ever-present clash between the kingdoms of darkness and light. Our conversation traverses these storied paths, challenging listeners to reflect on whether they’re building their legacies on fleeting shadows or everlasting radiance.
As Adam and Eve’s fall stripped humanity of God’s intended glory, we investigate the profound impact of this loss and the deceptive allure of outward appearances. True allegiance to a kingdom is not a mere showcase of goodness but an embodiment of kingdom principles—a reality brought to life by the Holy Spirit’s guidance. This episode promises not just a historical recount but a personal call to align with the divine, a choice that defines each moment of our faith journey. Join us, with no guests holding back the revelation, as we confront the critical decision that shapes our destiny: which kingdom will you serve?
Key Takeaways:
- There are two kingdoms: the kingdom of darkness and the kingdom of God.
- Choosing to serve God and aligning oneself with His kingdom is crucial.
- Being a good person is not enough to be in God’s kingdom.
- The Holy Spirit and the Word of God are essential in experiencing the fullness of God’s kingdom.
- It is important to differentiate between serving oneself and serving God.
Where To Dive In:
0:00:00 Introduction to the podcast and book promotion
0:00:29 Scripture from the book of Joshua about choosing who to serve
0:01:27 King Saul and King David as two parallel kingdoms
0:03:35 Choosing between the kingdom of darkness and God’s kingdom
0:05:15 Understanding the concept of the glory of God
0:09:04 Choosing between serving Jesus and Satan
0:10:54 Good people can be in the wrong kingdom
0:12:04 The goal is to experience the glory of God
0:12:49 Attributes of people in Jesus’ kingdom vs Satan’s kingdom
0:14:10 Choose to be filled with the Holy Spirit
0:15:14 David played music for Saul and demons left
0:16:16 What’s driving you matters more than what you drive
0:17:31 Make a choice to serve the Lord, not just believe
0:19:10 People create a Jesus in their own image
0:20:32 Choosing to be a good person doesn’t guarantee God’s kingdom
0:21:27 Experience the kingdom of God through faith
0:21:58 Choose which kingdom to serve; darkness or God’s
0:21:59 The kingdom of darkness will eventually be done
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, and My Absurd Religion.
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Transcript:
0:00:00
I can’t wait for you to hear today’s podcast. We’re going to talk about the kingdom, two kingdoms, the tale of two kingdoms, and which one you’re in and how to choose to be in the right one. Hey, hey, I’ve gotta stop right here and remind you about the book. If you only knew. You can get it now on https://morefaithmorelife.com or at https://stevegrayministries.com. You need to get it. It’s going to help you understand things that are happening in our country and the world right now and what you can do about it.
0:00:29
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another podcast of more faith, more life. Today we’re going to talk about a tale of two kingdoms. But before we talk about that, let’s talk about a scripture from the end of the book of Joshua. Joshua led the people into the promised land, the Israelites into the promised land. And towards the end of the book, he says, choose this day who you’re going to serve. Whom you’re going to serve. Now, it doesn’t work to say choose if you don’t have a choice.
0:00:58
So if we have a choice, there must be one more thing to choose, just beside God. We all know we should serve God, right? But there’s another choice. And so he says, choose this day who you’re going to serve. And then he says, he’s already chosen, though. As for me, in my house, we’re going to serve the Lord. So there must have been another choice that he’s saying don’t choose. Okay? So when we talk about two kingdoms, King Saul, he was king and chosen by God.
0:01:27
He was anointed by the prophet Samuel, and he was a great king because he looked like a king and he was tall and he was a head taller than anybody else. So when he’s coming, you know, Joshua’s, you know that King Saul is here. And it should have worked out perfect, but he didn’t follow the directions, all right? He didn’t follow the directions that God gave him. He almost followed the directions. There’s an old saying, it’s a carnival saying for Carneys that work in carnivals, saying a long time ago, said, close, but no cigar.
0:02:03
Close but no cigar. And that was, they’d throw the darts at something and you had to hit the target perfect to get a cigar. Now, some, a few years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to even tell that in church. They would think a pastor shouldn’t even say the word cigar. But there, I said. So King Saul got close, okay? He got close, but he didn’t get a cigar. Or he got close, but he lost his position of kings because with close, it doesn’t count with God, right?
0:02:37
Close doesn’t count. So Samuel the prophet had to tell him and break the news to him, you’re no longer going to be king. Well, it didn’t happen overnight because he’s going to still be king. Like, he still lived in the palace. He still controlled the army and taxes and all that stuff. And so he keeps being king. He doesn’t resign. Okay? But at the same time, Samuel knows there’s a new king coming, and that’s King David. And so David gets anointed.
0:03:06
Now we have two kings going at the same time. The first kingdom is King Saul and his kingdom. You can think of it this way. His kingdom’s going out of business, but they’re still active. It’s still active and going out. So it’s on the way out, but it’s still in. At the same time, though, David, his kingdom is coming in, and he’s eventually going to be the only king. But these two kings have two kingdoms. They have Saul and David.
0:03:35
And some people stayed with Saul, and some people went with David. A smart person realizes which to go with, because what do you do? Do you align yourself with the king that’s going out of business, or do you go join the one that’s just getting started that’s going to eventually rule the whole kingdom? Well, the smart people went with David, and he was a great hero, and he wasn’t perfect, but he’s a great man in God.
0:04:04
And so while these two kingdoms, they ran parallel, as a Jewish person then, right, you could choose between one kingdom or another kingdom. There were two of them. Well, that’s a picture of how we have things today. All right, so today we first had, as you know, the kingdom of darkness. Maybe you don’t know, first of all, was the kingdom of darkness, all right? And, you know, the devil and Satan and those words like that, and his kingdom. Now that came about, though, because Adam and Eve chose, they made a choice to follow him. There was God’s kingdom in the garden. You know the story of the garden probably fairly well.
0:04:47
In the garden of Eden, we have Adam, we got Eve, you know that. And they fell into sin. And by locating who the king was going to be, it wasn’t God anymore, it was Satan. And so they went his way. Well, sure enough, they got out of the kingdom. They chose that kingdom, and out they go now, God didn’t forget them, and God hasn’t forgotten us, but it’s been a long, long journey of bringing this thing back around again.
0:05:15
Now, one of the things you might find interesting, and if you do, I hope it really helps you because you’re not going to hear it. Hardly any place but here. And that doesn’t mean that I have a private revelation. It’s just people, they just are so dipped in the story of Adam and Eve that they can’t figure this. So, okay, so Adam and Eve, you know what happened? They sinned. And as soon as they sinned, then they knew they were naked.
0:05:43
Okay, so we over spiritualize it and make it something else that it shouldn’t be that they were naked the whole time, but when they sinned, like a switch went off and flipped the switch and now they know they’re naked. But I don’t think that’s what happened at all. It doesn’t make any sense. And let me tell you why. Because the Bible says all have sinned and fallen short less of the glory of God. Now, thousands and thousands of sermons are preached every year that all have sinned, but they don’t tag on and fallen short of the glory of God because they don’t understand the glory of God.
0:06:26
So I’ll just give you what I think. I wouldn’t argue with anybody about it. It’s not. I have a strong, strong belief in this and I’m going to start a denomination built around what I’m about to say. You can think whatever you want, but I don’t think that makes sense. Here’s what I think. They were created in God’s image and so they carried similar. And sometimes we get mixed up how people think God’s image is. He looks like us.
0:06:53
And so they had the big debate about evolution that they started thinking, well, we came from monkeys. So therefore they argued, well, that means God must be a monkey then, because we’re in his image. Oh, man, the whole thing was ridiculous. Okay, so he created them in his image and he shared his image with them. And guess what he shared? He shared the glory of God. They’re like God and they got to walk in his glory.
0:07:22
All right, you know the Christmas story, you know about the shepherds and the angels of the Lord. They appeared to him and the glory of the Lord shone round about them and it really was frightening to them. So they saw the glory of the Lord. It’s not invisible. It can be invisible, but it doesn’t always have to be. So they saw the glory of God and it’s shining round about them, and it was frightening because they could see it.
0:07:48
All right, so my idea, I think, is a good one, is that when Adam and Eve were created and the creation started and they walked with God, that they carried the glory of God with them. They were clothed in God’s glory, and you would have been able to see it. So were they naked? Well, yeah. There’s a comedian lady that wrote a funny little book called naked underneath my clothes. Yeah, of course they were naked underneath their clothes, but they were clothed in the glory of God.
0:08:26
Okay, then when they sinned, what died? Well, they didn’t fall over dead, but the relationship with God, the spirit of God and the glory of God faded off of them. That’s when they saw they were naked. Uh oh, we’re naked. The glory of God has left us. God didn’t leave them. He still loved them. But the glory of God, what they were supposed to be, left them. So it makes good sense when the Bible says all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. In other words, none of us here, most people have never experienced it.
0:09:04
And you’ve got to really step into the deep things of God to experience it. The Israelites experience it sometimes we have times in history when people would experience it to some degree, but most of us, what we’ve experienced sin. And so we need to get that straightened out and forgiven and taken care of. Experience sin, but we still have not experienced the glory of God. Okay? So we do our best. That should be one of the goals of a church, is to bring people as close to the glory of God as they can so they don’t feel naked in themselves, naked, lonely, you know, depressed.
0:09:43
I’m naked in this world in that respect, spiritually naked and all the other. Then when that happened, then the glory of left and they went out and they served then Satan’s kingdom because they chose it. It was their choice. And that’s what the scripture we started with. Choose this day who you’re going to serve, because you got two choices. Just like the Israelites could have chosen King Saul or King David, but you can choose to serve Jesus and his kingdom, or Satan still is here, just like just Saul and David. Remember, they were there at the same time, both ruling, both calling themselves king and people calling them king. Okay?
0:10:25
But you had to choose. And so here we have a choice. All right? So it says, choose who you’re going to serve, meaning there’s more than one way to serve. There’s Satan’s kingdom of darkness, and there’s God’s kingdom of light and glory. Okay? Now you got to choose it, though it doesn’t happen automatically, you have to make a choice. Now, one of the things that will help you, I hope, is how do you know you’ve made that choice?
0:10:54
Well, most people, maybe not you, but most people, they make choices that they think are good choices. And so those that we think belong to God’s kingdom. Well, what are they like? Well, they’re easy to get along with. They love. They. They try to be honest. So the problem with that is you can be in Satan’s kingdom and still be a good person. You may have the root of your father’s, the devil, as Jesus said to some of the religious people, but you can behave good, you can be a good person and still be in the wrong kingdom.
0:11:34
And so it’s deceptive to us because when we find what we consider to be good people, we automatically think they’re in the kingdom of God because they’re good. Okay. And the problem is, though, people in Satan’s kingdom can be good, too. They can be generous. They can be loving. They can love their kids. They can be honest, right, and be good people in the wrong kingdom. Not everybody in King Saul’s kingdom was a bad person.
0:12:04
They just didn’t see another choice. That’s the choice they made because they thought, well, he’s the king. You just live like everybody else. So people live like everybody else and don’t make that choice. So a choice for the kingdom of God is a choice for another king. That’s Jesus. King Jesus, which you need to do. Right. But in that come kingdom, principles that are not in Satan’s kingdom. All right? So you want to move on. The goal to change this and get this experience of the glory of God in your life and your family is you’ve got to get beyond just trying to be a good person and making that a Christian. Okay?
0:12:49
You should be a good person. But there are attributes of people who serve in king Jesus kingdom that are different than in Satan’s kingdom. A kingdom of, you know, in King Saul’s kingdom, as he was losing his kingship and dwindling, he had big problems. He tried to murder David, so he was an attempted murderer. He got tormented by demons through his life. And so there’s some bad things. Well, people that choose Satan’s kingdom, they can try to be good people. It doesn’t make them bad people, but they might be tormented by demons or darkness or anxiety or fear.
0:13:34
And none of those things belong in the kingdom of Jesus. Okay. And so it’s a whole new set that you begin to realize, oh, I need to have some things happen in my life. I need to believe in Jesus, obviously, and that’s your place to start. Get your sins forgiven, obviously. But after that. What? What after that, then do you just try to be a good person? Yeah, that’s what most people try to do. But in the kingdom, there’s also the work of the Holy Spirit, and you need to get as much of the Holy Spirit as you can get, because that’s what separated people from which kingdom they were in.
0:14:10
Not that people in Jesus’ kingdom didn’t make mistakes. David made mistakes, but he said, don’t take the Holy Spirit from me after he sinned. Don’t. He asked God, don’t take it away from me. Because that was the trademark on his life, that he had the same spirit as God. Adam and Eve, same spirit as God. But when they chose the wrong kingdom that left and the glory left and all that, God intended them to be left and they had to go out and live a hard life.
0:14:44
It was a hard life and heartbreaking sometimes. So when you choose the kingdom of Jesus, you need to choose to be filled with the Holy Spirit. You need to choose the word of God purposely. Right? Because it’ll open up to you, the way God thinks, how he moves by his spirit. All right? And again, being a good person is good, but it’s not good enough because there’s a whole kingdom that delivers you from all the torments of Satan.
0:15:14
Just like David. He didn’t have that problem. David played music for Saul. King Saul and the demons left. When you’re like all the darkness, all the bad thoughts, all the past mistakes and all the regrets and all the bad things that happened to you and disappointments that happened to you that are still working you around and knocking you around, I had a guy that come to me one time, and he was really upset. He’s trying to serve God, and I think he was, but he drove a clunker of a car.
0:15:49
It was just an old clunker, and he felt that he should be beyond that by now. And so he’d prayed and he’d prayed and he’d pray and he’d try to be a good person, and he’d try to give even some money to the church and things, trying to do good things, but he never got another car. And he still drove the clunker after he thinks, hey, I’m serving the Lord. Why do I drive? People are driving better cars than me.
0:16:16
So he came and talked to me and he said, told me how disappointed and how upset he was that he’s still driving a clunker car. And I listened to his story and after he finished his story, I said, listen, you’ve got this all backwards. It’s backwards, right? Because God doesn’t care what you drive. He cares what’s driving you. Snap, right? Because he was being driven. Now, I didn’t ask him, whatever’s driving him, I don’t need to know. Maybe it was pride, right?
0:16:52
Maybe it was embarrassment, okay? All legitimate things. You could be embarrassed about an old clunker, couldn’t you? But it was beginning to drive him. And what he need to be driven was look and say, that’s what’s driving me. So the problem was not what he was driving, the problem was what was driving him. And he had gotten off the mark of wanting to serve the Lord and being driven by the Holy Spirit, the word of God, love, patience, kindness, the fruit of the spirit, right? But just even the power of the spirit to where God’s power and God’s presence is active in your life.
0:17:31
It’s not cold, dead church. And then you go back to life on Monday and work all week or go to school or whatever you do, and then you go back and try to step into God’s kingdom on Sunday. It doesn’t work that way. You make a choice. Joshua said, choose who you’re going to serve, not just who you’re going to believe in, right? And so you say, well, I believe in God. Well, that’s not good enough because the Bible says the devil believes in God, but he doesn’t serve him.
0:18:09
Oh, big revelation, right? Boy, we got a lot of people believing in God, but they don’t serve him. They serve themselves or they serve the other kingdom. They’re on the wrong side and it fools them even. And it could fool us because they look like good people. And so you’ll hear the phrase, well, I just think you need to be a good person. And I’ve also heard it said, you just need to be a good person and keep the commandments. Keep the ten Commandments, right?
0:18:39
Well, you already messed up. When ten commandments starts, God says, don’t have any other gods before me. So if you go the other way and serve the wrong kingdom, you broke the commandments anyway. You’re already a mess before you even get down to the list of them, right? And the other problem we have today in our culture is that people make a God of themselves. I was writing some articles the other day and discussing how we have created a Jesus in our own image.
0:19:10
See, that’s why everybody’s so comfortable. Like they say, well, I’m comfortable, and I think it’s okay with God and I’m comfortable with this and I’m comfortable with that. But they didn’t get it from the Bible. They got it from themselves. So they created a Jesus that likes what they likes, watches what they watch, maybe eats what they eat, I don’t know. But they’ve created a Jesus that’s like them.
0:19:32
So that, of course God loves me. Of course he loves me. We’re just alike. But that’s the mistake they make. You’ve got to go to the word of God and find out what this Jesus is like. And I’m telling you, he is the superhero. He is so powerful, he is so over the top that we as human beings, we need the help of the Holy Spirit to move into a deeper place with God. And you can do that, but it starts with understanding. There are two kingdoms and there are two kings.
0:20:04
And you can make the mistake of serving the wrong one by serving yourself. Because the devil is very, very selfish. He serves himself and the people in his kingdom, they serve themselves. And those in the other kingdom at least try to choose to serve the kingdom of God, to serve the real lord. Don’t get mixed up and serve the wrong one. So it’s a choice that you need to make, and you need to help your family make the choice, or your friends make that choice.
0:20:32
Trying to choose to be a good person might be a good thing, but that does not make you in the kingdom of God, because good people are in the kingdom of darkness too. They try to do good, but they’re serving themselves and they’re serving the plan. And the pattern of the kingdom of darkness, where we have a different pattern, says that we no longer follow the pattern of this world. It’s got a pattern.
0:20:57
And we follow the kingdom of God. We follow the word of God, we follow the spirit of God and the presence of God. We run after it. So I just wanted to talk to you about that because there’s so many people that, how do I say this to you? They’re not experiencing the kingdom of God, right? It’s not manifested in their life, but they’re good people and they even believe in God. But there’s a place for you.
0:21:27
If you use your faith, like we say, more faith, you will get more life. You’ll get the blessings of God, you’ll get God’s help. You might even be able to get to hear God. Right? And God, you see God activities in your life, making life better to the fullest measure rather than in the other kingdom that’s actually on its way out. Right? Because eventually the kingdom of darkness will be done, Jesus will come and the kingdom of God will rule the earth, heaven and earth together.
0:21:58
So isn’t that so much better? So that’s my scripture for today. My idea for today is make a choice. Make a choice. Don’t make a choice to be a good person. Make a choice of who you’re going to serve and then you will be a good person. You’ll be a better person. But the choice is who you’re going to serve and choose which kingdom is going to be yours. Good stuff today. I think so. I hope that helped you get started in a new journey with God. Till next time. Bye.
