If You Only Knew

0:00:01

Don’t miss this special edition of More Faith, More Life. I’m going to tell you how to get this book if you only knew, absolutely free.

0:00:07

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, nonprofit leader, bold, truth speaker, and most importantly, father and spouse.

0:00:32

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

0:01:07

So if you’re ready to do more, subscribe to More Faith, More Life and hear an unfiltered biblical truth every week. It’s time to be and experience more.

0:01:20

Hello everybody and welcome to this special edition of More Faith, More Life podcast. We’re so glad you’re with us today because it’s special because of what you’re going to get to do at the end. I’ve got a brand new ebook that just came out and I want to offer it to you for free. And in the end of this podcast, I’m going to tell you how you can download the ebook. We hope to have regular hard copies soon.

0:01:44

And this is not a book that we had time to go to a publisher and say six, nine months from now. We hope we can publish this. We do have a book that we are working on like that, that will be in the bookstores, but it’ll be a while. And so with all the things happening in the world today, not expecting everything that did happen, particularly in the Middle East, this was actually written before that, and it was finished possibly maybe a week or two weeks before all the activity in the Middle East has been taking place, which depends on when you hear this podcast or what is taking place.

0:02:17

It could escalate, it could end, whatever. But anyway, I’ve got this for you. Let me hold it up. It’s called? If you only knew. If you only knew. And then the subtitle a Guide for the Clueless Generation. I want to tell you why this is so important and why we’re getting into the hands of politicians. You’d think the first thing I would do is get it in the hands of pastors, denominational leaders, but I wrote this specifically with the idea that it is going to help those pastors and leaders.

0:02:50

But I wanted to get in the hands of politicians because one of the main messages, if you only knew, was we must combine the spiritual with the political or the political with the spiritual. And that’s one of the themes as it opens because if you do know your Bible and you do know the Bible stories, then you realize that’s one of the things that Jesus was trying to get them to do towards the end of his ministry, he was talking to him because he wanted to preserve the nation.

0:03:21

He’s going to leave and he wants to preserve the nation and he knows that know they’re occupied by Rome. He knows that Rome is eventually going to attack and destroy the temple because why? Because the Jewish leadership and some of the zealots, the real RA Jews, believed they could win a war with Rome because they are the chosen nation, the chosen people. They won some big wars, right? They were able to take on Pharaoh while they were slaves and win because God was on their side. And that you get know, David Slew goliath in your head and all of a sudden they get the idea that we can beat Rome because of who we are and we better start stockpiling swords and spears and all those weapons. So that was going on at the time of Jesus and he’s trying to tell them, you’re making a big mistake, it’s not going to work, that you’re waging a war, you’re going to lose.

0:04:23

Okay? Now, the reason is because he’s trying to say if you only knew. That’s why the title if you only knew what would make for peace. And it didn’t mean just to live cooperatively with Rome because that was not peaceful for them to be occupied is not peaceful, right? But how you can get peace, which is where we get the word, of course, shalom, if you know that word, which means complete peace, safety, kept from harm, prosperity, all those great things we all want to live with and have, and God will help us get it. But he said, if you only knew how to get there, but you don’t. It’s hidden from your eyes.

0:05:03

Therefore your enemies are going to come throw you to the ground, you and your children. So he’s basically saying if you try to do this without making the spiritual move you need to make they’re making military moves, they’re stockpiling weapons, they’re doing political things, which was a little corrupt, but just trying to get along with the Romans was part of it. They were doing all that, but they were neglecting the spiritual side that Jesus was there to bring them, to save them from annihilation and they didn’t pay attention.

0:05:36

In fact, you know, it’s not the Jewish people we’re not talking about here, we’re talking about the Jewish leadership. And that’s different, isn’t it? That’d be like today talking about all Americans and then all of a sudden say, no, we’re just talking about some of the politicians over the Americans, right? Certain ones. And so they had certain ones that wanted to stay in power. They were corrupt because they had agreements and they were making a lot of money. The pharisees, sadducees, etc.

0:06:04

Makers of the law, they were not all of them, we can’t say all of them, but there were enough of them in control that they cooperated with Rome while at the same time believed that God was going to send a messiah or a military leader to defeat Rome. And so they had all these plans, all these strategies that they were going to do. And Jesus says, well, if you only knew what it would take to make this work, okay?

0:06:31

And they didn’t. It was hidden from their eyes because they had their own plan and they were neglecting the spiritual side. So what they needed to do was combine exactly what I’m saying to you. And you can read it in this book. It’s only five chapters, by the way. I wrote it short on purpose because it’s not like I’m going to get some theologian or scholar that wants to dig in for hour after hour after hour. This is quick reading for, like I said, politicians, leaders, yes, Pastors, and for you, it’s quick reading. You’ll get the point.

0:07:03

And we’re going to talk this podcast and maybe the next about why this is so important you get this and how we’re sending it around. So he said, if you only knew. And they didn’t they did not understand that they needed as much upsurge of military as hard as they were working to get spears and shields or whatever they were doing and hiding them in caves. And as much as they were doing, they needed to put that kind of effort into their spiritual walk to stay absolutely connected with God in his favor, in his grace, in his favor, in his power, right?

0:07:38

So they could get this accomplished. Well, they didn’t they didn’t pay attention. Obviously, you know that. And in 70 Ad, the temple was destroyed. A million Jews a million Jews were killed. And today in the Middle East, they throw out numbers like 1000 or 2000, 3000 were killed or whatever. And how terrible that is. But imagine a million and so a million Jews were slaughtered, including the children.

0:08:09

So Jesus was trying to prevent that, but they didn’t pay attention. Now, one of the things that we have a problem with in religion today, as you know, is I hope you know, if you’ve read my absurd religion book, that book, you’ll understand this better, okay? But Christianity, particularly the Protestant side of Christianity, because I’m a Protestant, technically, is based on a guilt ridden, anxiety driven, guilt ridden, anxiety driven system.

0:08:41

And you can tell that if you’ve ever had the traditional way of somebody presenting the gospel, what they call the gospel. And by the way, Jesus didn’t preach that gospel. It says Jesus went about preaching the gospel of the kingdom. And that’s a whole nother thing than just to talk about your sins or how does keep you out of hell or get you into heaven. It’s the gospel of the kingdom is here. How do you operate and walk in this kingdom? All right? But anyway, so they started it and caused it to be a sin conscious religion. I’m talking about the Protestant side. I’m not going to talk about the Catholic side since I’m not a Catholic, I know some about it.

0:09:20

So if you ever traditional way, let’s just picture this for a moment, right? It happens all the time. But it’s a Saturday night, the bar is open or whatever, and you can hear the music blaring. And people are walking around like, I don’t know if they do that in our state or your state, but Las Vegas, they’re out in the streets with drinks in their hands and you can picture that. And there’s always going to be some Christians there and they’re going to stop the drunk people or semi drunk people or the ones that plan to get drunk people go drinking people and they’re going to try to get them saved, right?

0:09:50

And so the way they get them to it is they trap them. You get trapped by answering certain questions. And one of the favorite if you’ve ever had it done, or done it maybe, is if you were to die today, do you know you would go to heaven? And that now you have to say yes or no. And all of a sudden now we’re sin conscious because we have to go, okay, do you know you’re a sinner? And that’s one of the lines in the sort of script ideas of how you get people saved. Do you know you’re a sinner?

0:10:22

Okay? And so it’s all based not all, mostly based on sin consciousness, how you recognize you are a sinner so that now you can be a saver, right? You can get saved. And so when you take that angle on it, it throws you completely off of everything because, listen, God has never had a problem taking care of sin. It happened in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve and in the Garden of Eden, and they sinned.

0:10:52

And God had a plan, and it’s a long term plan, but we go through all the things of animal sacrifice. The blood was shed so they could have forgiveness of sins and then up to Jesus forgiveness of and so God has always had a system to take care of humans sinfulness, right? But did you know there’s one thing that there’s no cure for, right? No cure for by just even if you confess all of your sins, you’re still not safe.

0:11:22

You know why? Because our Protestant religion of Christianity is based on recognizing your sinfulness, but it does not cure your cluelessness. And that’s the problem we have today. See this says a guide for the Clueless generation. We got plenty of preachers talking, letting us know we’re sinners or sinful. And most of us, if we are and we’ve gone through some things, most of us know that we’re able to accept it. We know we’re not perfect type thing, right?

0:11:53

And we’re able to accept it. And we also want you to accept that God has a plan for that and you can get forgiveness. And the wonderful, you know, as far as the east is from the West, I’ll remember your sins no more. And if we confess our sins to Jesus, not necessarily somebody on the street, to Jesus, he is faithful and just to forgive us of our sins. All right? If you follow that pattern, the Bible pattern, you’re going to have the sin problem dealt with on one level and then continued sin will be dealt with on another level until we progress in this and start walking in the kingdom life. Okay?

0:12:32

But the way religion does it today is they teach you forgiveness, how to get forgiveness of sins. So now you feel like, oh, well, if I die, then I’m going to go to heaven. And there it stops. It stops. And so thousands, probably millions of people will go to church this week and they’ll hear sermons and things and they’ll hear about sin and they’ll hear about being a better person and all that thing, but they’ll still walk away clueless because they have no idea what to do about what is coming.

0:13:05

See, that’s exactly what Jesus was saying in his generation. Something is coming. Disaster is coming. And you have no clue what to do, because even in Jesus’day, yes, the Romans did overtake Jerusalem, but it wasn’t inevitable, it was preventable. And so when you walk with God in that and you follow God’s way, and you follow the pattern that Jesus said, there is a way for peace, there’s a way to deal with this, but you don’t have it figured out, not because you’re so sinful, but because you’re so clueless.

0:13:39

And so if you’re only new it’s for the Clueless Generation and it opens up and talks about America, how to save our nation. And that’s just about a page and a half or two and just give you the introduction. America is waging a war it cannot win in its present condition. There you have the premise of this and what we need to do, but I don’t want you to stay clueless. So I’m going to tell you as we go through this what to do.

0:14:07

But then we come to the first chapter, make sure I get the right title of it in the first chapter, The Coming Disaster. And there again, we compare the disaster that was coming to Jerusalem 40 years. 40 years they had a chance to fix this and they didn’t. And I don’t blame the God fearing Jewish people that were there at that time but they weren’t in charge. Just like today you’re not in charge. You can be God fearing and trying to do it right and praying all the time and understanding yeah, we need spiritual and political and military right. We need it all.

0:14:48

But that doesn’t mean some politician is going to start serving God and walk in the kingdom and read his Bible or her Bible. That doesn’t mean they’re going to do anything. And so the coming disaster now the coming disaster which you can read about and you better because it’s true but the reason you need to read about it is it’s not inevitable. In other words, it can be stopped. It is preventable. It is preventable.

0:15:15

And so we want you to understand how to get your head together and your life together and your family together, your friends together, whatever and start taking this seriously. And that’s basically all it is. It’s trying to get our generation, this generation to take God seriously and just really care. Care wickedness is not necessarily running out and doing all kinds of sins. Wickedness is I don’t care.

0:15:47

Wickedness is having no regard for God’s opinion. You may know God’s opinion, you may hear God’s opinion, you might read God’s opinion and it’s not just on sin. The problem is today the church doesn’t teaches us how to recognize that we’re sinners but it doesn’t teach us how to live, how to pay our bills, how to get the blessing of God, how to stay healthy. All those things that they’re in the Bible, god taught it all and that’s his opinion. Do it this way, do it this way, think this way, don’t think that way and bless this way and how to have church and all those things are in there but nobody pays attention. They have their own opinion and their own way of doing religion.

0:16:29

That’s why we’ve got so many denominations. People strike up a new church here, there, whatever because they’ve got their opinion of how it should be done. But we have to get God’s opinion, get God’s opinion. So the coming disaster and I give you some background that I’ve just told you from Luke 19 and the Romans coming and destroying Jerusalem and all that. And it’s interesting if you catch this, if we followed the pattern of today’s pulpit preaching about a lot of things and I’m not saying that we shouldn’t ever preach about sin or anything like that, but our Christian culture is so dipped in it that we live in anxiety. Am I a sinner? Am I sinner?

0:17:18

And how many of you experience this if you’re a churchgoer type person, if I ask you if you believe in the forgiveness of sins you’d say yes. But how many? When you go to church and the music starts or the sermon starts or whatever, immediately you start feeling guilty about your sins as though you’d never done anything about you’ve never talked to God about it, and all of a sudden you’re sin conscious again rather than God conscious, right?

0:17:42

And so that’s because it’s drilled into our culture to have guilt ridden, anxiety driven religion. But anyway, so you get into this and start realizing what you can do, and it starts to get you out of that anxiety guilt thing because you start realizing, as I said, that God can deal with sin. All right, what we want to do is turn this to where when people go to church get this, when people go to church, whatever. Church, okay, one thing you should leave with, and that is you have a clue of what to do.

0:18:21

And it’s not just what to do, like repentance or quit doing this or quit doing that. Maybe that’s true, but it’s so much more in that what should you do to get the favor of God, the blessings of God, the safety of God, just the mental freedom of God, all that. The kingdom living, it’s kingdom stuff, right? And that’s what Jesus taught them. And they didn’t want it. The leaders didn’t want it. They didn’t want it. They didn’t want to change. They did not want to give up Rome because they’re serving Rome, but they’re getting rich on, you know, there they are, caught in the middle.

0:18:59

Now, those leaders weren’t anti Messiah, and they weren’t anti Jesus. Listen, they weren’t you know what they were anti? They were anti of being the problem. Just like I’m talking to you today. You could tell if I was at a denominational conference of a bunch of pastors and leaders or whatever, and I started saying, you know what? The way we’ve been doing things is the problem. We’ve lost the favor of God, and you can see it in our country, and we want to get it back, but if we don’t get it back, we can’t presume that, yay, we’re America. God’s going to shed his grace on us, and we can win every war. We can beat anybody. We’re the strongest in that because that’s what Israel was doing, and they found out that’s not true.

0:19:44

And we’ll find out the same thing because the call today yes, I don’t mind building up the military and good politicians, good legislation, I believe in everybody should be able to worship the way they want to. We have our ways, but I don’t want to force anybody else to do it that way. And we want to keep our freedoms, but at the same time, we need to wake up and realize we were created to be not just humans with emotions and personality and feelings and then a body. Of course, we’re more than that. We’re spiritual, and we’re living spiritually in this country.

0:20:27

Very dry. And I know there’s a big mega churches and all that, but listen to what’s being said, okay? They are not giving you a clue of how to live in the kingdom and how to get the favor of God, the protection of know we’ve got nations right now wanting to destroy America. I read an article just this morning about secret talks going on among politicians. Whether it’s true or not, I don’t know that they believe that a nuclear war is almost inevitable, that we’re going to eventually experience it in our country.

0:21:04

Okay, well, that’s what we should be talking about, because our job is if you have children, family, mom, dad, you know, you love the people that you love is to keep them safe. And through Jesus Christ and through the kingdom of God and through the Bible, there are many, many ways that you can help get the favor of God moving, and we can keep each other safe. But to be laxadaisical and middle of the road and then people go to church. Millions, like I said, will go to church, but they will not hear about God.

0:21:37

They’re not going to hear about how to serve God. They’re not going to hear clues. All right? What they’re going to hear is let me tell you that you’re not as bad as you think you are. You’re loved by God the way you are. You don’t need to make any changes. You just keep going and trust that God’s forgiven you of your sins and that you’re going to go to heaven if you die. And it’s just so shallow. That’s not giving us any clues and we should come out being the generation has a clue that we can tell the other generations and other people that maybe don’t go to church. Let me give you a clue to how we can keep ourselves safe as nations are rising up.

0:22:18

There’s a scripture says nations will rise up against nations. Well, that’s easy to say, but no, say it this way now. Nations will rise up against our nation. Nations are rising up against our nation and they are increasing their ability to attack without making coming across the ocean or whatever. And they can do it by rockets and missiles and they’re getting closer and closer to it. So the first chapter is the coming disaster.

0:22:46

And it’s just a lay down historically how it happened in other places and other times. And then it’s not a real long chapter. I just thumb through it and get over here to chapter two. And chapter two then, and we’ll just have enough time to talk a little bit about it is called the Current war. So the first chapter, the coming disaster, got to get a foothold of that, right? So you get your bearings on what are we talking about, why do we need to do anything?

0:23:17

And then the other is the current war. Now I’m talking about a minute ago about nations rising up against our nation in an actual war. Yes. And I think unless we make changes, it’s inevitable there will be a war, okay? There’s going to be one. We just don’t know when. Unless we follow God’s example of what to do, stop being clueless what to do way before it happens. And then God puts such favor on us.

0:23:53

He gives us such favor and ability technologically able to build weapons and military and ships way beyond what anybody else has. You know what that does? That stops a war because nobody’s going to want to fight a war that they know they’re going to lose, right? So they want to attack us when we’re at our weakest and smallest and confused. So the current war is not about the military war. The current war is about the war that’s within people.

0:24:20

It’s a war between people. There’s a war going on inside of people. They’re unhappy, they’re angry. You know, that crime way out of whack, senseless shootings and school shootings and just arguments in parking lots and on and on it goes. Because there’s a current war inside of people. And there’s a current war between people, between generations, between different orientations. Rather than letting other people be who they want to be, there’s a war going on between forcing their lifestyle on me or their fear that I’ll force mine on them.

0:25:00

But we want to keep it free. So the first current war that we need to win is our personal current war that’s in us and then win the war between us and then win the war and realize that the one we’re really fighting is not our neighbor who’s different. We’re not fighting someone who’s a different color. Although that’s the symptom of it, right? What we’re fighting is we’ll realize we’re fighting God.

0:25:25

That’s who we’re fighting because we don’t want to do things God’s way. See? So we’re fighting god’s opinion. We’re fighting God’s sway that he’s trying to put over us, sway us to his way. And when we do, just like I said, the blessings of God comes. We start being able to be a stronger nation, a unified nation. Nobody wants to attack a unified nation. I mean you look at of Kansas City is kind of known for football right now, obviously the Kansas City Chiefs.

0:25:57

And so if you live here in Kansas City, you get to hear a lot of stories and hear from the coaches, hear from the know during the week on radio, TV or whatever. And this team is unified. This team is unified. And that’s one of the strengths that’s why you win, is the unity. And we do not have that unity in our country now, but there is something that will unify us and that is I found this to be true.

0:26:22

The Spirit of God. The Spirit of God. And when the Spirit of God comes in, it changes you and it gets you on the same page with other people. Not that we agree with everybody else not that we have to be like everybody else, but there’s a certain amount of agreement that we won’t cross a line and shoot somebody, right? We won’t cross a line and take your freedom away because the spirit of the Lord is telling us, don’t do that. And we’re spiritual people. We are spirit people, and we need to feed our spirits. And we’re so dry, we’re so divided.

0:26:55

The only thing we ever hear is about everybody’s hurt feelings and everybody’s offended, but God loves us anyway. Rather than how do we change? What do you do if you don’t like yourself? What if you don’t like the way you think? You may act like you like it, but you really don’t. You want to be different. That’s the kingdom of God. All right, so the first one is the coming disaster. The second is the current war. There’s three other chapters. They’re not that long.

0:27:21

It’s called? If you only knew. And for this special edition, I’m going to tell you what to do. You go to the website morefaithmorelife.com, morefaithmorelife.com. At the very top, you’re going to see this red banner. It’s red, red. And you just hit that banner, okay? And it’s going to take you to something that looks like this here. See that? And when you get that and it says, if you only knew, then all we want you to do is you just give us your name and email so that we kind of know.

0:27:53

We want to know how many and who’s getting this, and just fill that out. It’s just three lines, I think. And then hit Get your book. And you will immediately be able to download this book, this ebook, for free. Like I said, we want to get hard copies. We want to get it to other people. But right now, I’m in a big, big hurry. You’ve got to get this now. Just look at the world, and if you’re unsure, then just it’s free. Get it. And when you read it, I’ve had people tell me I couldn’t put it down because it’s answering and helping me know what to do in this clueless generation.

0:28:26

All right, so go do it. You’ll be so glad you did. I think that our next podcast. Don’t miss that either, because I’m going to go and go through a couple more chapters with you and allow people, at least for now, you can get it free, right? If we add to it or make hard copies, it might cost money, but right now it’s free. Take advantage of it. Please read. It won’t take you along. It could change your life, and it could change the life of our nation. Will you do that? I hope so. Till next time. Bye.