Live Life To The Fullest, Through Christ

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.

FREE Listener Community

• Weekly spiritual encouragement
• Edification from like-minded, bold Christians
• Community with young leaders who want MORE from life and their relationship with God

Transcript:

TRANSCRIPT:

0:00:00 Steve Gray: What would your life be like if you didn’t have fear? What if all the decisions you made in this life were faith decisions? Well, we’re going to explore that and a whole lot more in this episode of more Faith, More Life, 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.

0:00:34 Steve Gray: I’ve spent many years as a worship, artist, minister, nonprofit leader, bold, truth speaker, and most importantly, father and spouse. 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.

0:01:05 Steve Gray: 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. 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. Hey everybody. I’m so glad we could be together today and talk about having more faith, more life and what it means to you.

0:01:37 Steve Gray: How it can help you get more life out of your life. And that’s one of the problems we have today is people live in disappointment. There’s so much disappointment, so much regret, and they don’t know what to do about it. They well, I just didn’t know. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to do that. So I want to talk to you and help you understand. I think you’re a lot smarter than you think you are. Now, I know a lot of people think they know everything. You probably know that person who’s a know it all. But even that person is a lot smarter than they think because there’s areas that we collide with life. It doesn’t work out, we get disappointed, it doesn’t happen the way we wanted to. And then we just adapt to it. We just live with it, right? And I want to help you get out of that into More Life and learn how to walk by faith to get that life. So here’s the deal.

0:02:25 Steve Gray: I think you’re smarter than you think you are because you know you can learn things first, but what about the things you didn’t learn? Okay, so you learned things. You went to school, you learned math, you learned social studies. You learn all these things and then go on. Maybe you learn computers or business or maybe you went to college or maybe you went to a school and you learned how to fix cars, whatever, so you’re able to learn.

0:02:51 Steve Gray: But why is it that so many people fail at life? See, they need to learn about life. Well, here’s the deal, is we learn things. We know how to do things, we know how to function in things, but we don’t know how to live. Now, why is that the case? They don’t know how to live. We struggle so many times we’re talking about how can I be a better husband or I’m a failing wife or I don’t feel like I’m loved. And all these things, we struggle, struggle, and it’s all life questions.

0:03:19 Steve Gray: Most of the people, they go to work, they do their job. They might like to make more money, but they do their job. They feel good about that. Then they come home and they have to face husband, wife, neighbors, friends, relationships, mom, dad, whatever it is. And so I want to help you understand why that happened. Because most of us, if you think about it, grew up learning in school, learning in college, learning at a job, whatever.

0:03:46 Steve Gray: But there’s one thing we didn’t learn, and that is about life. Because we maybe without knowing it, made a decision that we were going to be independent. So when it comes to learning jobs, education or things like that, we’re open, we’re ready to learn. But listen, when it came to life, most people are closed down. They don’t really want to listen to anybody. And you think about it, how many people you know? And now you turn to yourself, okay, maybe that’s me.

0:04:15 Steve Gray: So most of us made a decision we’re going to be independent when it comes to life. And we made that up our minds that I don’t need anybody to tell me what to do with life because I know what’s right for me. And so we’re wide open to go learn a skill, go learn how to be in business or sell real estate. We learn that. But when it comes to life, I know what’s right for me. I know what I’m comfortable with. And in fact, then most of us marry and grow up into comfort.

0:04:45 Steve Gray: Or if we don’t get married, we surround ourselves with people that make us comfortable, not those that teach us or challenge us, because we just want to be comfortable with our lives. And so much of the time in religion today, in church today, we go find a church that makes us comfortable, that fits who we already are. And we miss the whole thing about life and faith and adventure and that energy of God because we’ve actually sought out to be more comfortable. A lot of people marry people that make them comfortable, but don’t challenge them to be who all they can be and working together. So you get the point. We get this independent idea that I need to go to school, I need to go to college, I need to learn a skill. But when it comes to life, I know what’s right for me. So here’s the bottom line of that.

0:05:35 Steve Gray: The reason then people struggle in relationships and family and adjusting and just the things of everyday life. I got to pay bills. How am I supposed to feel about that? And the reason is because you just weren’t taught life. You’re taught everything else. But who teaches you life? Well, unless you follow a good example, maybe you had a good example, and you purposely said, I’m going to be like that person.

0:06:02 Steve Gray: Then most of us grow up, and we become what we were all along. I remember I had a 7th grade teacher that came in. She taught math, and all us boys were in there, pretty rowdy boys. And she’d say, you know what? What you are now is what you’re going to be. She didn’t say, oh, someday, you know, someday, someday. We were like, what? Yeah, this is who you’re going to be. And you may make some changes in schools and jobs and people, but this is who you are. And if you don’t like who you are, if it’s not working who you are, then you need to follow something else. You need to learn something else.

0:06:37 Steve Gray: I know I’ve mentioned to people many times of how they do this. I get with some people, maybe they’re struggling in their marriage. They might even brought up the subject, oh, we talked about divorce. And then you examine their life and look who their friends are. Their friends are all people that are struggling in their relationships. Or how about people that struggle financially? Financially, okay. Who are their friends?

0:07:01 Steve Gray: Well, all their friends are people struggling financially. And you don’t think, I need to go find out how other people are married that are happy in their marriage and succeeding. I need to find out how people are doing their finances, what do they do. And so we need to learn about life, and we need to learn how to get it. So that’s what I’m going to help you with. We’re going to talk about life, and I want to help you get more out of life, pull more out of life, and help you understand maybe what you can do in your faith in your life to get more.

0:07:32 Steve Gray: Is that good? Yes. So let’s start with this. Jesus. That’s who I want to start with. Jesus said, I came that you might have more life. I came that you’d have life, abundant life. And what does that mean in practical ways? It means if you can believe this, he’s basically saying, I’m going to help you get more out of life through me than other people are going to get without me. Some of us haven’t been very good examples of that or haven’t been around very good examples. And yet people go to church and they’re worried and they’re beaten down, but that doesn’t change the truth. The truth is, if we get a hold of this, jesus says, I want you to have life to the fullest measure.

0:08:15 Steve Gray: One of the things I teach is, I say sometimes is, God wants you to be fully human. I know you’re human, but are you fully to the full extent of what God intended? And so he starts off, I came to give you life, and so we can accept that. But here’s what people do when they see that it’s not quite working out. They begin to put off life, the real life, the fullness of life, and they find ways to do that.

0:08:43 Steve Gray: One way that people do it is they get into doldrums of life and marriage and home and church or whatever, but they keep themselves going by thinking, well, we’re going to go on a vacation. When I go on vacation, when I get a holiday, we’re going to go on a cruise, and it’s going to be great. And so you do that. You go on your cruise or whatever, and you relax, and you don’t think about anything, and you’re living life to the fullest. You could pull everything out of that vacation as you can, right?

0:09:11 Steve Gray: And then what do you do? Then you go back. And then other people, they go to work, and all day long, they’re not thinking about work. They’re doing their work, but they’re not getting any life out of it. No, they’re doing their work, thinking about something else. So they do it, but they’re thinking about, I just can’t wait to get off work. So all that time that you’re living, you’re not living because you’re not living in the moment. There’s nothing now happening, right?

0:09:35 Steve Gray: There’s nothing now inside of you. You’re just waiting to get finished. I can’t wait to get off work so I can go home and do nothing. How many people that’s that, oh, I just can’t wait. I want to go home and do nothing with my life. I just want to sit. And so they think that’s where they are in life. So all day long, they’re throwing away their lives. All those hours are thrown away by progressively looking forward to another time. Oh, I’ll get some life out of that. I’ll get some life out of my vacation, my time off, my day off.

0:10:08 Steve Gray: We’ll go out to eat. We’ll go to the movies. We’ll watch movies tonight at home and eat popcorn or whatever. But they try to pull life out of things, and yet then they have to always go back to their real life. We want to help you. I want to help you get beyond that and help you understand faith and life and how to pull life out of life. And it’s okay to do it, and it’s okay to think that way, especially if you’re a believer. You go to church sometimes.

0:10:38 Steve Gray: We get that religion on us that we’re supposed to be down. And if we live life to the fullest, maybe we’re not being humble or whatever. So we want to change all that and get you to thinking correctly about life, about God, about who you are and who God is and all the truth. Get rid of all the things that we get taught. It’s not a foolish things about God that you’re not sure about God. He might be wanting to help you, and he might want to hurt you. He might want to bless you, and he might want to take from you. And you got to make your mind up who is God, who you’re going to be, and settle that.

0:11:12 Steve Gray: Then also now we want to add faith to it. Now, faith helps you to see the unseen. I know that’s kind of tricky to think through, but it helps you to see the unseen. There’s. The unseen around you right now is a whole world, in fact, universe of what you cannot see. The fact that you cannot see it doesn’t mean it’s not real. It’s real. It’s there. The Kingdom of God. Jesus said, it’s near, it’s here, it’s around us, but we don’t see it.

0:11:44 Steve Gray: But by faith, it gives us the evidence. We start responding through faith. And faith makes that unseen world alive to us. So when we make decisions, when we think how we feel, when we look at other people, we look at the world, there’s that unseen energy by faith that’s opening our eyes to seeing things that cannot be seen. And we have a whole world that other people don’t have. And it’s an abundant life of energy, of energy coming from the world of the Kingdom of God.

0:12:14 Steve Gray: And so you have to realize there’s a whole life out there waiting for you that’s surrounding you. But if you’re closed off to it and you don’t know it, you don’t even try faith. Most people try faith in emergencies, right? It’s an emergency faith, or they go by blind faith. I’ll just go wandering around and hopefully it’ll work out. And I’ll believe in God. But you don’t have to have blind faith. When the Bible says faith gives us evidence of the things that we cannot see.

0:12:43 Steve Gray: And so all of a sudden, the evidence is our faith is showing us there’s much, much more out there and around us. And I need to walk by faith, and that’s going to spill and energize, spill into and energize your life. We want to grab hold of that and get a hold of it and see and where even the Bible says we can begin to speak the things that we don’t even see yet, the things that have not manifested themselves yet, we can talk with confidence.

0:13:13 Steve Gray: Yeah, we can start calling those things that are not we don’t see them yet, but we know they’re going to come because by faith, we have seen them and we’re responding to them. So if you’re going to have more faith, then you’re going to have to deal with something else. And I want you to think about something. What would your life be like if you didn’t have fear? Now, I know we have the fear that we got to have, like crossing the street or trains coming.

0:13:40 Steve Gray: I remember my sister was driving one time when I was about 15. She was 17. And they didn’t have the lights going on that train. We were just driving along and all of a sudden she slams on the brake and the train she yells out, train. And we almost got hit by a train. So that’s something. You know what? That was scary. We could have been hit by a train. But what about fear? That gets a hold of your life and it starts making decisions for you.

0:14:06 Steve Gray: How many people you think make decisions according to fear, or they make it. Like I said, they’re comfortable and they’re fearful to go step out of their comfort zone and so they make those decisions. What if you didn’t have any fear and think about it. Would you be where you are today if you hadn’t had any fear in life in the past? You just do things by faith. You do things with confidence instead.

0:14:30 Steve Gray: Maybe people make a decision to take a job because it’s easy, right? Or they’re afraid. They’re fearful of going to school or getting more training. Maybe I’ll fail, right? So fear is not a good decision maker. Fear is not a good decision maker when it comes to money. A lot of people money decisions are made through fear and anxiety. And that’s not a good decision maker. Faith is a great decision maker, but we want to get out of that and what your life would be like if you didn’t have fear. And I had to deal with that years ago. I mean, it’s been years.

0:15:08 Steve Gray: I don’t know how many. Then I made a decision. I’m going to figure out fear and I’m going to see how much fear I can get rid of. Can I live a life almost fearless? I don’t think we can totally, obviously like the train story. But then there’s other things you can get anxious about at times, and we need to get rid of that too, and trust God. But I start thinking, how much fear can I get rid of and not have fear? What would my life be like if I wasn’t living in fear, if I wasn’t making decisions out of fear, if fear wasn’t gripping me to move forward, if fear of other people, a fear of what people will think of, fear of failure, all those fears, what if you didn’t have them?

0:15:52 Steve Gray: What would you be like? See how free you would be? You’d just be so free because you’d be able to have then more life because of more faith. You’re going to have more life free to make those decisions. So that’s what I want to help you do. I don’t want to treat you like a failure. I don’t want to treat you like a fearful person. I want to treat you. I want to talk to you through these podcasts. I want to talk to you like a person who can succeed, a person that wants more out of life, that knows that it’s out there, but they need a little bit of help getting there.

0:16:27 Steve Gray: And I don’t want to talk to you like you’re a victim of something, like you failed and you’re barely hanging on. And I know I listen to other people’s sermons online and see what’s being preached other place because I do so much preaching. I like to see what’s going on. And I sort of get the hint that we’re sort of enabling people to stay where they are in their fears or anxiety or their failures, because we talk to them like failures. Like, I know you’re hurting.

0:16:56 Steve Gray: I know you’re out there and you’re hurting and you’re miserable and you feel deserted and you feel like nobody loves you, but I’m going to help you get through that and help you hang on another week. I’ll get you through till next week, and we’ll get you through this week or next week or whatever. And I’m not going to talk to you like that because that’s not going to do any good, because it only enables you to last longer in whatever you’re in. And I’m going to get you out of it, out of it through faith and life and get you more to that, okay?

0:17:26 Steve Gray: So first of all, we’ve got to understand that you need to start thinking in terms of greatness, all right, and get out of that victim or failure or fear, right? Greatness. Now here’s what religion will do to you. So you got to watch this religion, whether we know it or not, puts sort of damper on us that there’s something wrong with us. It’s not very Christian e, I might say, if we want to do great things, if we want to be great.

0:17:53 Steve Gray: And so we feel like even if we want to be great, we wouldn’t tell anybody. I want to be great at something. I think I’ve been called the greatness. Well, how does that sound to everybody else? But you know what? You probably are being able to be much greater than you are today. But we have to understand that it’s okay. First of all, it’s okay to think about greatness. You see, Jesus talked to them, and they were a member of the Disciple. They’re talking about who’s the greater one?

0:18:21 Steve Gray: And he didn’t say, hey, you’re wrong to talk greatness. They were talking, who’s great among us? Who’s the greater? And he didn’t correct them and say, well, you know, you’re not being very Christian here. You shouldn’t be talking about greatness. You shouldn’t be thinking about greatness. No, he didn’t do that. He didn’t say greatness was bad. What he did was he taught them how to be great. He said, if you want to be great, he didn’t say, if you want to be great, there’s something wrong with you. You’re too prideful, you think too highly. No, if you want to be great, he taught us how. He says, I’m going to teach you how to enter the door of greatness through serving.

0:18:55 Steve Gray: Start out serving. Greatness starts by serving, by seeing the needs of other people, by realizing what’s going on around you, serving and helping. That’s how greatness begins and continues on in a lifestyle of serving. So if you want to be great, he said, become the servant. Serve people. What do they need? What do they need from you? What can you give them that they don’t have? And you step into your greatness by seeing the needs of people and the other hurts. Instead of being the hurt, instead of being the victim, you step in as the victorious one, saying, I’m here to help other people.

0:19:31 Steve Gray: I’m here to make other people feel good, right? I’m here to serve other people. And greatness then begins. And so a lot of us also don’t know what to do with ambition because people are there’s. The Bible talks about selfish ambition, right? And so there is that. And that’s not good. Self and ambition don’t go well with God, don’t go well with life. It hurts you and it hurts other people. But there is, get this, there is Godly ambition that God puts things in your heart. You can read about it. That there’s people in the Bible that says, and God put it in his heart.

0:20:09 Steve Gray: God put it in their heart. Give you the desires of your heart, that psalmist said. And so there’s Godly ambition that God puts things into your heart that you should want to do. And you maybe put them in the back of your head and just forgot about them. Because now I’m married or I’m too old or I’m just locked into my job, I got so many bills to pay. No, it’s not too late. Godly ambition is great, and it was put there by God.

0:20:36 Steve Gray: Now you need to cultivate it greatness by thinking in terms of I’m here to serve as much as I can serve. Everywhere I look, I want to serve, even at the job. I want to be the best worker because I’m not only a worker, I’m a servant worker, and they pay me. And so I’m going to be the best employee. I’m going to serve this job well and develop greatness right, by being a servant. So this is how we can get it right, because God wants you to succeed in everything you do.

0:21:07 Steve Gray: But more people I meet along the way, especially today, they feel like they’re failing at life, even though they might be good at their job. And that’s what’s dogging us down. That’s what’s producing divorce and dysfunction and all the crazy things going on in the world. Even just the anger that we see today, such anger. And we’re angry at life, right? We’re angry at our life. And other people are angry about their lives, and that’s not God’s intention. Even church people, people who have a Bible, they read it occasionally, pray, occasionally go to church, they sing songs, can get into that to where life has escaped them. And I want to help you get more faith and more life.

0:21:49 Steve Gray: Get your faith going. Understand? There’s a whole world out there that you can capture. And God wants you to succeed. He wants you to have life. He wants you to start living life, because that’s why he came. I came that you might have abundant, complete to the fullest humanity, to its fullest life. Well, we’re going to have to step out of that then. We don’t need to hear any more people tell us, right, that we’re okay. Poor old you. You’re okay, and you’re loved just the way you are. No, we want people to say, you can be great and let me help you be great. And that’s what I want to help you get more out of life.

0:22:25 Steve Gray: So I’m really, really hoping that everybody says, I want more. I want more of life. I want more faith. I want more life. I want to get more out of everything in my life. Then that’s who I’m speaking to. And that’s how I hope you’ll get a hold of this. Every podcast as we go through this in segments of how to get more faith, more life, and become great and fulfill the will of God in our life. So that’s why I want you to do this and put Him right in the center. You know, that’s what I’ve done. I try to put God in the center of everything and make Jesus Lord of every part of my life, and that’s what I’ve done. That’s what you should do, too. And with me, then you can join me and say, I’m going to put Jesus in the center, and I’m never going to back down, and I’m never going to change my mind.

0:23:09 Steve Gray: Till next time. Bye bye.