From Doubt to Destiny

0:00:00 – (Steve Gray): Hey, is God with everybody all the time or is he just more with some people than others? Tune into the next More Faith, More Life podcast and I’ll explain that to you.

0:00:10 – (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 and their life. I’ve spent many years as a worship artist, minister, nonprofit leader, bold truth speaker, and most importantly, father and spouse.

0:00:35 – (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.

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0:01:22 – (Steve Gray): Hello everyone, and welcome again to another More Faith, More Life podcast. So glad we could be together. I’m Steve Gray. I got my wife Kathy Gray together. We’re together today and we’re going to talk about basically anything we want to, but. Well, guess what? We want to. Kathy has brought in a new book that I wrote along with my son in law and it’s called Mighty Like Gideon. It’s out in the stores. You can get it, but we really want you to get it from us. I’ll tell you at the end of this podcast why you should get this book right from us. But anyway, Kathy, you wanted to talk about it. We’ve been talking about the book.

0:01:56 – (Steve Gray): What’s on your mind about the book?

0:01:58 – (Kathy Gray): Well, I love it because it does tell the story of Gideon, how mighty he was. But all the principles in it are just related to us plain old ordinary people. He was a plain old ordinary Israelite hiding out. He thought he was ordinary, but God turned him into something powerful and extraordinary. I like that.

0:02:17 – (Steve Gray): Well, the book starts right where it starts with Gideon. So let’s start. Where’s the story of Gideon open? Where is he and what’s he doing?

0:02:23 – (Kathy Gray): Well, he’s hiding out. He’s hiding out in A wine press. And he’s getting a plan from God and strategizing. He’s asking for help and rescue. But I’ll tell you what. Nothing happens till God. God comes on the scene.

0:02:38 – (Steve Gray): Okay, so we say he’s hiding in the winepress. We’ve talked about other people this before, that hiding doesn’t necessarily mean you’re afraid.

0:02:47 – (Kathy Gray): Right?

0:02:47 – (Steve Gray): He might be clever. In other words, he’s winnowing, he’s getting grain or whatever, and he’s hiding it because he wants to do it. So if you take it that way, he’s not hiding cause he’s a coward, but he’s hiding because he’s clever. Then you get a whole other story. Because then the angel of the Lord shows up and says, the Lord is with you, mighty warrior. So that’s not how you talk to a coward, right? You know, coward, you want to say, get with it, buddy, or fear not, or whatever.

0:03:18 – (Kathy Gray): Pick up your head.

0:03:18 – (Steve Gray): Don’t be a coward. But that didn’t happen, did it? It was, the Lord is with you, mighty warrior. So immediately we have an identification of Gideon from God’s point of view. Now we know it turns out not to be Gideon’s point of view. And that’s why the book is so powerful. And it starts there is. Because obviously, if we’re going to get everything done that God would like us to do with our lives and produce the fruit that we should and all the things that we need to do, we’re going to have to have something going on inside of us.

0:03:50 – (Steve Gray): And a lot of us don’t have that view of who we are and what we can do. I talk to people too. A lot of people never get anything done, Kathy. Cause they’re waiting for something else to happen.

0:04:02 – (Kathy Gray): Ooh, that’s right.

0:04:04 – (Steve Gray): Now, notice Gideon, he’s hiding in the winepress. Of course, we just talked about that. Doesn’t mean he’s a coward necessarily. But he doesn’t have to do anything else to go do what he’s supposed to do. The angel announces to him, yeah, mighty warrior. The Lord is with you, mighty warrior. And eventually he’s going to say, now go and save Israel. Nothing about his past, nothing about his sins, and nothing about his weakness.

0:04:32 – (Steve Gray): Apparently, he is in the shape that God wants him to be in. He just doesn’t know he’s in that shape.

0:04:38 – (Kathy Gray): You know, I do that. I’m just like that.

0:04:40 – (Steve Gray): Yeah, people do that all the time. And we’ve have to get a view of what God says about us. And so. But now that’s God’s. View. And then we see Gideon’s view. He said, yeah, but I’m the least, and I’m the least in my father’s house and my clan is the weakest. Or is it the other way around? I think it’s least and weakest. But anyway. And he immediately identifies how he sees himself. So he says, so because of that, how can I go save Israel? And so there we go.

0:05:13 – (Steve Gray): There’s the daily battle of all of us of actually creating a Christianity that is self-motivated, self-strength, self-improvement. There’s a lot of that. And we call it Christianity because we back it up with Scripture. So I could do the same thing here. I could back this up and say, the Lord is with you, mighty warrior. And then I could go into another one like, well, he was scared and he didn’t see himself and that.

0:05:40 – (Steve Gray): But you know, God’s going to do a new thing in him. God’s going to do a new thing. And you hear those sermons all the time. God wasn’t going to do a new thing in him. God wanted to get up exactly the way he was, which is what he’s saying to most people, which they won’t do because they’re waiting. They’re looking at themselves saying, I can’t, I’m not, I shouldn’t. And they never do anything because they’re waiting for something new where this says, God, the angel of the Lord is saying, go in the strength that you have, you have something, you’re just either too afraid.

0:06:13 – (Steve Gray): But I don’t think so. I think it’s just he never put it together that he could do anything.

0:06:19 – (Kathy Gray): And that’s so many people are like that. They immediately disqualify themselves right where they are. But you’re saying God sees us right where we are and he wants us to do something through him with what we have right now.

0:06:34 – (Steve Gray): Yeah. And he also could look at the misinterpretation that he could have had too. I probably would have. If God said to me, the Lord is with you, mighty warrior. I immediately would like, how can I do it? I don’t see myself as a mighty warrior. Apparently we have no background of Gideon being a mighty warrior.

0:06:54 – (Kathy Gray): Right.

0:06:54 – (Steve Gray): He doesn’t say, well, I guess it’s time for me to get that rusty sword out now and I’ll shine her up for you, God. And we’ll go, and we’ll go do it. Because the way God’s going to win this, he’s not going to be a mighty warrior in the traditional sense. He’s going to be A mighty warrior. Cause he does what God tells him to do, man. He does what he can do. Everything God asked him to do to save Israel, he could already do.

0:07:23 – (Steve Gray): God did not ask him to do one thing that he could not already do. And that’s where so many, like I said, miss it. Because they see. Well, they see the deficiencies or they see them weak or stupid or.

0:07:35 – (Kathy Gray): I don’t know, or not trained enough or not rich enough.

0:07:39 – (Steve Gray): And so they say, keeps them enough. But if God would touch me and give me a ministry, a healing ministry, or I could be a prophet, if God would just. Or I am a prophet and nobody recognizes me, stuff like that. Frustrating. So there’s where the halt is. We need everybody to be able to do what they can do on the level they can already do it before we graduate to another level. And so you need to. How scriptural is it, Kathy? Be faithful in little and you’ll get more. And then you can be faithful in much.

0:08:10 – (Steve Gray): So, Gideon. That’s exactly what Gideon had to do. He had to accept the title first mighty warrior. And then he had to do what God was going to tell him to do next, which was not what you’d expect a mighty warrior to do. Expect the mighty warrior to go cut the king’s head off or something, you know, or slay Goliath, you know, with his own sword or something like that. It’s not going to happen that way. Now, what I’d like to do, though, is stir up a little more, be a little more disruptive, because we usually. Look, he’s hiding. We make him a coward, Gideon. But then mighty warrior.

0:08:48 – (Steve Gray): So now he knows he’s going to step into that. But not too many people talk about the line, the Lord is with you. And I want to ask. I guess I’ll put you on the spot. You don’t have to have all the answers. I mean, I’m asking a question for everybody. Okay, but if it says, if the angel appears to him, and of course, they’re in big trouble. Midianites are stealing everything. There’s no food. There’s famine, there’s killings, there’s capturing slavery. It’s a mess.

0:09:17 – (Steve Gray): And then God says, the Lord is with you. And he goes, how can that be? Look what’s going on around us. Okay, but that’s not where I think we should look. I think we should really discover that line, the Lord is with you. Okay, now, if I were to go to anybody else and ask all pastors, churchgoers, is God with everybody?

0:09:41 – (Kathy Gray): Well, I mean, he’s omnipresent. So he’s, you know, he’s everywhere, I guess, with everybody, but not necessarily he’s not with the people that are with him.

0:09:50 – (Steve Gray): Well, yeah, because it doesn’t make sense for the angel of the Lord to say the Lord is with you if it’s obvious God is with at least his people, the Israelites, at the time. If the Lord is with everybody all the time, then it’s a little bit silly to say the Lord is with you. I would say, I know, I know, but he didn’t know. Okay, so here’s my point. Yes, God is everywhere, and God is with everybody all the time.

0:10:15 – (Steve Gray): But God. First of all, people throw. The scripture says, but God is no respecter of persons. So we look at it like the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. All men are created equal in God, so we’re all equal and we all get treated equal and God is equally with everybody. That’s a mistake.

0:10:38 – (Kathy Gray): That is a mistake.

0:10:39 – (Steve Gray): I get it. Because of our minds here in this country at least, and some other countries too, we think we enter, and in a way, we do. We all enter by faith, right? But you see, God is no respecter of persons. And by that, by the way, that scripture is not a positive, that’s a negative. He’s saying, when it comes to judgment, God is no respecter of persons. That’s what it really says. So if you want to argue, oh, boy. Yay. God’s no respecter of persons. You’re really saying

0:11:08 – (Steve Gray): He’s going to judge me too. Okay, So I would quit saying that, gang. I don’t know if I’d go there, but anyway. But it is true. God is no respecter of persons, but he is a respecter of faith.

0:11:20 – (Kathy Gray): Amen.

0:11:22 – (Steve Gray): And so that’s where everybody starts by faith, with Jesus, right? But not everybody stays on the level of faith. Paul even says some people are weak in the faith.

0:11:32 – (Kathy Gray): Right?

0:11:32 – (Steve Gray): Paul says, walk by faith. We’re called to walk. Some don’t exactly. Some won’t, some can’t. Some are afraid, some are weak. So at that point is when the race really gets interesting. Because if Gideon does not step out in faith based on what God said, he’s going to be Gideon hiding the rest of his life. Now, God will raise up, as we know, Queen Esther was a deliverer. But he says, if you don’t deliver and do this and go to the king, God will raise up somebody else.

0:12:05 – (Kathy Gray): He will.

0:12:06 – (Steve Gray): But you’ll miss your opportunity. I would say most people are missing their opportunities. They have preconceived ideas. I told you. And I was talking to somebody yesterday, we were having with another pastor. One of the difficulties in churches is that idea of new things, new converts and antsy people and frustrated. So right in front of them, they have a child or two. There’s a place. Sometimes churches call it a nursery or whatever. There’s children, diapers need to be changed during church, and there’s people parking cars.

0:12:39 – (Steve Gray): And it’s really hard because all of a sudden, people get saved. They get filled with the spirit, they get excited, and immediately they turn away from spiritual things to humanitarian things, calling it the spirit. Because traditionally, religion has been a human. Christianity has been a humanitarian religion through the Catholics and other religions and even many of the secular Jews. Today, I would like to have a spiritual upheaval among the Jews, you know, but they’re not opposed, obviously.

0:13:11 – (Steve Gray): They call themselves secular, but they’ll help the poor. And that’s really humanitarian, which we should be. But so many people here, God’s trying to make them a Gideon, and they’re going to skip what’s next because they want to skip out. And next thing you know, they’ve got Gideon with a soup kitchen or out handing out tracks or else down at the park trying to lay hands and get people healed or delivered or telling them about Jesus or whatever and going outside.

0:13:42 – (Steve Gray): And Gideon was. And that’s the people. All of a sudden, they’re outside, they’re attending church, but they got to have a ministry outside. See? Well, there was no inside, right? And so people need to get the inside ministry first in your church, in your group, get on that level first till you go out and try to save the drug addicts, right? And the reason I back that up is when God says, you’re going to save Israel, obviously from the Midianites, right?

0:14:09 – (Steve Gray): Well, he didn’t go do a warrior thing. He went and did a spiritual thing. In order to become that warrior, he had to pass through the spiritual side and pass the test of it. So God, instead of saying, okay, here’s your sword, go fight the Midianites, and I’m going to get right behind you. God says, well, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to do something very, very spiritual. I want you to go tear down that idol altar of your dad’s, your family, the Asherah pole God, tear down your father’s religion in order to break free of the bondage of that and build me, the true God, a real altar, an acceptable altar.

0:14:50 – (Steve Gray): So, see, the mistake people make, they would have Gideon Leave the thing. And they’d send him right into the Midianites camp to maybe talk to the poor people or go pray for the guys who got conked on the head and they’re, you know, let me. Can I pray for. And they. But they. People need to spend time getting the spiritual altar in their life. Correct. There are things we’ve learned in religion that need to be broken. There’s things that need to be reinforced.

0:15:18 – (Steve Gray): These things we always do. Some things we never do. But it’s hard because people are ready immediately. They want to go out, out, out. Do, do, do. They want to start teaching our teenagers. And they just say, you remember the person. But we’d been in the ministry like three months, or a pastor’s like three months. And one of the guys, very zealous young guy. I don’t even know if he was 30 yet. He was trying to.

0:15:42 – (Steve Gray): He’d just been saved and filled and he was trying to set up. I’m going to go to my relatives, churches and preach. I got to go. And he said, so you help me get. I want to go preach. And I said, why? You don’t know anything. And he just. What we feel like we can just ad lib it because it’s all God, but it’s not. Gideon had to go through reestablishing his identity from hiding in the winepress to Mighty warrior, but he had to also establish his identity that we don’t want to take for granted.

0:16:16 – (Steve Gray): The Lord is with you now. God’s with everybody. If you want to go there, okay. But it doesn’t stay there. There are certain people and certain estimates and times and circumstances where God puts an extra God is with you in there. And we need to find those people. If we’re not too prideful. Do you know, after everything, Joseph, when he was thrown down the well, then he was accused of being with Potiphar’s wife, which was a lie.

0:16:44 – (Steve Gray): He ends up in prison all those times, but he ends up getting out of prison because he’s so, you know, he’s such an unusual character that stands out. But then this is what it says. After he got out, then Pharaoh put Joseph, who is not Egyptian, in charge of everything because he saw the Lord was with him.

0:17:08 – (Kathy Gray): Wow.

0:17:09 – (Steve Gray): We need those men and women.

0:17:10 – (Kathy Gray): Yes, we do.

0:17:11 – (Steve Gray): Sure, sure. God loves us all. He’s with us all. But you know that some people are going to choose to go and do what God tells them to do. They’re going to become a Gideon. Even if you don’t feel like you’re a Gideon, and you’re going to do the spiritual thing first. Then after he did the spiritual thing, then, you know, he had to go do the actual. Go through the actions. But like I said, as soon as he gets called a mighty warrior and the only thing he’s had in his hand is a.

0:17:40 – (Steve Gray): Oh, wow. Yeah. But it doesn’t matter. You know why? Because he is going to be a mighty warrior. God is going to use what he can do, and God asks him to do the silly things. Right?

0:17:50 – (Kathy Gray): Yeah.

0:17:51 – (Steve Gray): I noticed you pulled a scripture out here. You were talking to me about that.

0:17:54 – (Kathy Gray): God often chooses the foolish things to really. To shame the wise. And he chooses weak things or weak people to the strong people that think they’re strong, not in the Lord that put them to shame. So thank God, there’s hope for me.

0:18:12 – (Steve Gray): Well, and Gideon then would have been the perfect person because God saw him as wise and powerful and warrior, but he didn’t see himself. So he would probably quote that scripture, even though it’s a New Testament, and say, yeah, how’d you get where you went, Gideon? God chose the weak things, but he wasn’t really weak. He was only weak in the way that people see themselves weak. He didn’t see where he was strong.

0:18:38 – (Steve Gray): And so when they defeat the Midianites, you know, God asks him, like, he didn’t need to be a mighty warrior in fighting. He needed to be a mighty warrior in obedience.

0:18:47 – (Kathy Gray): Yes. And in being, becoming who God is telling him he is through obedience and faith and trust and doing what he could each step at the time.

0:18:59 – (Steve Gray): And the scripture says what? And God chooses the foolish things of the world? Well, how foolish is it when he says, okay, time to defeat the Midianites, we’ll talk another time about how he only did it with 300 and why. But it was only 300 by the time they got down to 32,000 to 30,000ish. And down to.

0:19:18 – (Kathy Gray): That’s amazing.

0:19:18 – (Steve Gray): 300. But anyway, I would have wondered, if.

0:19:22 – (Kathy Gray): I was him, is God really with me right now?

0:19:25 – (Steve Gray): And I would also, if all those people were there and so many left, 9,700 were sent away. Do you think there were some mighty warriors among them? Maybe some fighters. Maybe they weren’t the best fighters because they got beaten by the Midianites all the time. But there were some good fighters in there that were walking away because, yeah, all Gideon had to do was find people that would obey. Didn’t have to be the best fighters.

0:19:53 – (Steve Gray): So Gideon, what’s he do? He Hands out a torch and a jar, trumpet and says, shout when I tell you to shout. Break the jars, wave the torches, blow the trumpets. Well, he just sent away 9,700 people. But God doesn’t need them to do it because he’s going to use the foolish things out of a supposedly weak who sees himself as weak. All he had to do was what he could do. Can you break a jar? I have a feeling you could blow a trumpet if you had to.

0:20:25 – (Steve Gray): Might not be pretty, but 300 people doing it together would be quite a sight. The 300 torches and the Midianites turned on each other. It’s a great book.

0:20:36 – (Kathy Gray): That’s powerful. I love the book.

0:20:37 – (Steve Gray): And just even in these moments, Kathy, that we’re right here, look how many little jewels popped out about things that people don’t think of. Oh, I never thought of that before. Maybe I’m that person. I’m hiding in the winepress waiting for something else to happen. And it did happen. The angels came. But nothing happened in Gideon like we expect it to. To be the mighty warrior, he just had to go be who he was and do what God told him to do.

0:21:03 – (Steve Gray): So, you know, Kathy, if they go to https://stevegreyministries.com they can get the book Mighty Like Gideon. I think it’s the same price most everywhere, except for very little, like a dollar, something like that. Well, you can hold it up.

0:21:16 – (Kathy Gray): All right.

0:21:17 – (Steve Gray): Can you get her on that? Yeah, you go. There’s a Mighty Like Gideon Workbook that goes along and it’s like so cheap that you can get it, but you can only get it at https://stevegreyministries.com or go through J.D. king or myself, and get this workbook. So get that. Go to https://stevegreyministries.com and it’ll come right up. Get it. It’s really going to help you. There’s a lot of great books out there, but some of them just kind of. Kathy, just repeat, no surprises.

0:21:44 – (Steve Gray): This got a lot of surprises that you’ll go. “That is something I needed to hear.” All right, so tell your people about More Faith, More Life. Subscribe, follow, become friendly to us, send us a note of encouragement, whatever, but get the book Mighty Like Gideon. Until next time. Bye.