The Church Doesn’t Know Its Strength Is Gone

0:00:00 – (Steve Gray): Hey, I’m going to teach you how to protect yourself against the onslaught of America spiritually. On the next More Faith, More Life podcast. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another More Faith, More Life podcast. Your voice of revival. And we are going to talk about revival to start with. Because I want to start with the new book, Revival or Ruin – And you have to get it. And I’m not selling books. I don’t care. I didn’t do this to sell books.

0:00:26 – (Steve Gray): I didn’t write it to sell books. I didn’t write it to be a writer. I wrote it because it’s a prophetic book of where we are in this country, in America. It’s basically. I mean, any place in the world could read it because they’re facing a lot of the same demonic things. But it’s mainly for Americans or people living in America, in the United States, to understand what’s going on in government and what’s going on in like socialism, communism and left and right and all the things happening. And it takes it from a spiritual point of view and gives us the cure. And the cure is revival, a move of God, the presence of God.

0:01:06 – (Steve Gray): Early in the book, I try to give some idea of what is revival, because at least to me,  I’ve experienced it and historically it’s written in books. It’s not me. I’m not saying it all about myself. I’m saying it’s been written in books. I’ve read it myself. Some of it about the historic Smith and outpouring and the Kansas City revival in 2008 and touched the world. And both of them did. And amazing. And the Smithton outpouring seems to be the more interesting story because it’s so out there that in a town of 532 people, you’d have a quarter of a million visitors come into that church over a three year period.

0:01:49 – (Steve Gray): You just can’t. You can’t do that. It has to be a God thing. And it was a God thing. And so I know something about revival. And I mentioned that in here. I mentioned other revivals that came before that. And so you need to get it, but you need to get it because it also talks about our country and the direction it’s going and helps you understand that we’re not. If we don’t stop what’s happening, the direction our country is going, it’s going to get us. Okay?

0:02:17 – (Steve Gray): It’s just going to get us. It’s too powerful. It’s being led by other religions, it’s being led by other ideologies. It’s being led by people that are bringing ideas from other countries here and trying to change our government. And there are people that absolutely want to change America, okay? It’s a revolution already started to change who we are and how we operate. And if you like your life and you like the way things are going now, then you need to get on board.

0:02:48 – (Steve Gray): You need to help us get a move of God, because we cannot stop this on the lame side of Christianity. We cannot stop it with nominal Christianity because other religions are absolutely dedicated. And I was talking to somebody the other day and from another country, and he was talking about these religions. And you know, those religions, they all are the same. I mean, if you’re. I don’t know which one to mention. I’ll mention a bunch, you know, but the main one we talk about mostly today is Muslim, you know, but if you’re a Muslim, you know what it means to be a Muslim.

0:03:32 – (Steve Gray): You know what’s expected and you know you need to do it. But if you mention Christianity, what’s that like? Well, you could go to churches all over my own city, Kansas City, and you never know what you’re going to get. It’s like the old line, like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get. And you don’t know. They could raise their hands. They could say, speaking in tongues is of the devil. They could speak in tongues or they could say it’s of the devil.

0:04:00 – (Steve Gray): They might sing old time worship, new time worship. They may say, drums, you can’t have any drums in church. The others, like, they got all kinds of drums in church. You never know what you’re going to get when you call it Christianity. And so we have to get back to get rid of the outward and get back to the biblical principle of what was the early church like in the first century that made them so powerful.

0:04:23 – (Steve Gray): And it’s because they would have one church, for instance, the church at Ephesus, right? It’s the church at Ephesus. And if you fell out of fellowship with the church at Ephesus, you couldn’t go across the street and go to the. It wasn’t the first church of Ephesus. And then you go across the street or down the street and you went to the second church of Ephesus. There was only one church. So you had to stay good with that church. You had to stay good with the word of God. You had to stay good with the prophets and the teachers and that.

0:04:54 – (Steve Gray): You couldn’t go and have a falling out and say, well, I Don’t like them anymore. And. And now you go find another church that suits your personality better or that you can maybe be in charge of. But that’s what we have in America. We’ve got churches, Protestant churches everywhere. That’s one. There’s a positive thing about the Catholics, right? I mean, if you go in the town where I went to high school and that they had two Catholic churches. Just two.

0:05:19 – (Steve Gray): They had 100. Well, maybe more than that. 200. Something like 200 Protestant churches in a town of 20,000. But you only had two Catholic churches. You had one on this side of town, one on the other side of town. But you know what? You could go to the one on this side of town and you could go to the one on the other side of town. They were the same. They just were in different locations for, you know, convenience.

0:05:43 – (Steve Gray): But you go to all these Protestant churches, you just don’t know what you’re going to get. And you try to tell anything, you try to say anything, you. You’re going to be met with pride and ego and rebellion. It doesn’t matter what scripture you find. It’s not accepted. So you have to get this and say, where do we need to go to save our nation? What do we have to do? And we’ve have to get the unity of the spirit, the power of God back in our churches as it was in some of the revivals and particularly as it was in the first century. So. Revival of ruin. The choice before America. Be sure and get that.

0:06:17 – (Steve Gray): Go. Go to stevegreyministries.com or you can go to revivaloruin.com and get it. So you just got to. There’s not another book like it. Cause it’s not here to make you feel good about yourself. It’s here to save our nation. And so you have to get that. Anyway, I’ve had Samson on my mind the last couple hours, and I asked her guys here, and apparently six weeks ago or sometime I talked about Samson from this book. Because I have a chapter in here called Asleep in the Lap of Delilah. And I think that’s where the church is. Now.

0:06:53 – (Steve Gray): The church appears to be radical sometimes, but they appear to be radical by preaching to people that are not sitting in front of them. All right? So they might hit hard, you know, bang. I’m a. I don’t like abortion. Neither do you, probably. I don’t like abortion, okay? But I don’t get the feeling that I have people sitting in front of me that are about to get an abortion. But I do have people sitting in front of Me as we, as our talking about that are about to compromise.

0:07:23 – (Steve Gray): They’re going to compromise their faith, they’re going to compromise their life, they’re going to compromise their marriage, they’re going to compromise as parents or as singles or whatever, and they’re about to compromise. And so I want to talk about that. If I think they’re all. If I think I’ve got an audience of people about to get an abortion, I’ll talk about that, okay? If they’re, I got a whole audience of alternate lifestyles that are, that are promoting that, maybe I’ll talk about that, but I want to talk about the things that are facing the people in front of me, which is compromise and alternate Christian lifestyles and the loss of the power and presence of God in our churches where they’re just nominal, lazy, lukewarm services.

0:08:07 – (Steve Gray): So anyway, I want to talk again about Samson a little bit, but as I was before we came on, I was reading it from judges and I forgot how interesting it is the birth of Samson or what was going on before Samson was born, and I kind of got stuck on that. But anyway, his parents, they didn’t have a child and his mother wanted a child, of course, and she was barren and childless. But an angel comes and says, but you’re going to have a son.

0:08:40 – (Steve Gray): And so the angel tells her that you have to live like a Nazirite and really doesn’t use that word with her. But don’t drink wine and don’t all that stuff and keep yourself separate, okay? But she said the child though has got to be a Nazarite, which won’t drink wine, won’t cut his hair, lives that lifestyle. And so that’s that story. Well, then the woman goes, the mom, Samson’s mom to be, goes and tells her husband and you know, he doesn’t get to see any of it.

0:09:14 – (Steve Gray): And she says, you know, the angel looked like God. It was like he looked like an angel of God. Very awesome, my Niv says. And so they decide, hey, maybe if we ask God, he’ll send the angel again so her husband can, you know, see the angel too. And it happens. And the angel comes and when the angel comes, then they decide, hey, we need to give a gift. We need to make an offering to the Lord and to you. So give us time to cook a goat.

0:09:47 – (Steve Gray): And you know, goats were valuable. So this is a big gift and we’re going to cook a goat and we’ll eat it. And they do. But then the angel says, no, I’m not going to eat it. I don’t know exactly what that is about. But when he says no, then the fire of God comes down. So the angel’s there, the mom and dad are there. The mom to be and dad to be are there. And fire of God comes down. And. And then when it comes down, it takes the angel back up.

0:10:18 – (Steve Gray): That’s pretty outstanding. And I don’t know if I really had the idea that how dramatic these moments were just for the parents. Cause I just, you know, like everybody, we study Samson, who did all these things, this strength. And he was so strong. And he, you know, he killed a lot of Philistines. And God made him his warrior. You know, he was a warrior for God and stood up for God against the Philistines.

0:10:43 – (Steve Gray): And then, of course, then we get into the story. So he gets married. And right then we know that there’s a problem. Because he should know better. He should know better. He’s a Nazarite. Separate unto the Lord and holy unto the Lord in his lifestyle. Don’t cut your hair. And he marries a non-Israelite, I guess I should say so. A non-Jewish. And so he marries a pagan. And I don’t know why. I mean, he’s already showing the spirit of compromise. But anyway, he kills a whole bunch of Philistines.

0:11:19 – (Steve Gray): They get mad. Philistines do. And they decide they’re going to burn his house down, burn his wife and family. So they burn them all up. And she’s dead now. Now he’s single again, I guess you should say. Cause he married her. And that’s when he meets the famous Delilah. And so Delilah is not being true. Delilah is a representative of what happens to all of us. Okay? She represents the devil, Satan, or the powers of darkness.

0:11:48 – (Steve Gray): Because she is continually trying to get him to compromise and give away where his strength comes from. And he’s not supposed to, but she works on him. And that’s what happens to us, right? The devil just works on us. Spirits. Work on us, our own minds work on us to compromise, to give ourselves away. To not live out the faith that we are supposed to live out. And we know we should, but we don’t. And so the same thing happens to him. He gets around her, and she tries over and over to get him to say, what’s the source of your strength?

0:12:23 – (Steve Gray): And I always remind people, it’s not his hair, it’s his vow. And to not cut his hair is. He made a vow to do other things too, but that’s one of them. But then she finally. I think I was reading over here. I had to ask the guys, I think she gives him some wine or something and he gets tired and sleepy and falls asleep on her lap with his head on her lap. But before he does, he gives a secret. He says, the secret of my strength is in my hair. I can’t cut my hair.

0:12:53 – (Steve Gray): And of course, while he’s asleep, she’s going to get a pair of scissors, right? So. Or some kind of razor of some sort. And she cuts his hair. And now he’s compromised. And when he wakes up, then he says, I’m going to go get the Philistines again. And the Bible teaches us that he does not know that his strength has left him. And I think that’s where we are in the church today. We sing the right songs. Some of us sing even different kinds of churches, but we sing the same songs.

0:13:31 – (Steve Gray): We might sing them differently, but either way we sing a lot of the same songs in different churches. Old hymns and new hymns, songs, spiritual songs. But something is universal, okay? So as I said, you never know what you’re going to get from that church over there. There’s one over there and there’s one over here. And, you know, there’s one over there. There’s several churches. Really. I can think of four churches within less than a mile. It’s less maybe a half a mile of this church, our church, Revive church.

0:14:02 – (Steve Gray): And they don’t do. I know they don’t do things the same, but I know one of them is more like us, more charismatic, Pentecostal, independent. Another one, I don’t know what it is. Used to be Presbyterian. I don’t know what it is now. Somebody else bought it. Another one over here, guys, I think is based in Russian community. It’s Russian, I think. I don’t know. I think. And then the other one over there is what we call. I hope they wouldn’t mind this, what we would call more old line Pentecostal, where you have to wear.

0:14:38 – (Steve Gray): The women have to wear dresses and they can’t cut their hair and they have to wear hair up, all that stuff. So they’re very, very different. Okay? And so we sometimes want to celebrate our differences while we overlook our sameness. Okay, So I could visit all four of those churches. I hope the one that’s friends of ours over here, that’s more like our church. I hope it’s lively and good. I think it probably is. But the others, I’m not sure. And even though if they’re Russian or they’re Presbyterian or they’re Pentecostal roots, there’s going to be kind of a Sameness. I’m going to go in and there’s going to be a calmness, you know what I’m saying?

0:15:19 – (Steve Gray): Or other churches around a calmness where it’s quiet or calm. We don’t participate much at all. And so there’s a sameness in Protestant churches, and that is lukewarmness, calmness. I guess we could call it reverence, but it’s not. It doesn’t follow tradition of the early first century church. They were louder. They came from churches that were loud. Oh, they came from the Jewish temple, which was loud.

0:15:51 – (Steve Gray): You’ve ever heard me teach on that. It was loud. People prayed out loud and shouted out loud and sang out loud and worshiped out loud. And there were thousands of people there. And so that’s the roots. Then became the. The churches that. Like Ephesus or the one in Jerusalem or wherever. And so that became that. And so they had that. Now we have a sameness. And that is dullness. Pretty dull. Even churches that raise their hands and sing songs, I’m glad for that because I remember when some denominations didn’t do that, they didn’t raise their hands. They didn’t raise their hands and sing songs. But some denominations that used to not do it some years ago, they do it now. That’s better, isn’t it? Yeah, I’m glad they do it. But it’s still pretty calm, right? It’s still calm. They end the song and everybody just sits down.

0:16:48 – (Steve Gray): And if you say, let us pray, everybody puts their head down. I think we were laughing at our church the other day. Maybe I was preaching and I made mention of that. And I said, you know, every kid knows that if. Where’s heaven? And they point up and where’s hell? And they point down, say, let us pray. And everybody looks at hell. You never thought of that, did you? Everybody looks down, right? And I thought, why? But Jesus looked up.

0:17:16 – (Steve Gray): I don’t think he would have imagined saying, I’m going to look down to the direction everybody believes hell is at least. And I’m going to pray that way with my eyes closed, of course. But Jesus with his eyes open, lifted up his eyes and looked into heaven and. And gave thanks and prayed. So there’s a lot of things that have happened over the years to us, and one of them is we’ve lost the power and presence of God to where Protestant churches are all similar on that level, they may not be similar.

0:17:45 – (Steve Gray): One might have an organ player and one might have drums. And, you know, who knows? Who knows what you’ll get but you’ll all have about the same level of embarrassment to talk about God with regular folks. Regular folks. So they go to the. Before the church service starts in the foyer or whatever, everybody’s visiting, drinking coffee or just visiting with each other, whatever. But they’re not talking God, they’re just talking.

0:18:14 – (Steve Gray): And so I grew up in a church, too, a more traditional church for a few years that I attended before I quit. And they would have. They would have these dinners after church, you know, fellowship dinners. And everybody brought food. They don’t do that so much anymore. People are afraid to eat food from somebody else’s house. Ever since we had Covid, I think. But anyway, they all brought food. And then they would pick a guy, a man out.

0:18:45 – (Steve Gray): And back then, almost all the men wore suit and ties to church. And they pick a man out and say, brother or brother, would you say the blessing or say the prayer or whatever. And of course, Christians bless food, right? Say the blessing. Even in restaurants, you go and you can tell who the Christians are if they hold hands and pray a blessing. But that’s not. That’s purely Greek and pagan. Because the Jews did not blessed the food.

0:19:18 – (Steve Gray): The Jews thanked the Lord for the food because they said, this comes from God. It’s already blessed. We as humans don’t need to bless what God has created. We need to thank him for it. But anyway, so what happens in that restaurant or wherever, they all bow their heads, look down, close their eyes. Maybe they’ll hold hands and somebody blesses the food to make it blessed. Because I guess they don’t think it is blessed already.

0:19:43 – (Steve Gray): Well, in the church I grew up in, then they would ask some man to pray, and he just. My memory. Maybe there was a difference, but it seemed like the guy was always. Whoever they picked was always embarrassed. And everybody bowed their head and stood there like this and waited to see what this other guy is going to come up with. And he’d pray some prayer, but he seemed like he didn’t know what to say. I mean, whichever guy.

0:20:08 – (Steve Gray): And all of a sudden, he. He spoke like he was reading Shakespeare. It was thees and thous, and thou dost heaven, you know? And I thought, what is going on here? Let’s make this real. Let’s pray like it’s real. Let’s not turn into Shakespeare or Elizabethan English and say thee and thou and all that. If you don’t talk like that normally, don’t talk like that to God. Talk normal, okay? So all of a sudden, these things change, and we. We’re Putting on something that is not real.

0:20:42 – (Steve Gray): And that’s where Christianity is in the Protestant church, which is where, you know, where I am. And that’s why I preach. And so I like to preach to the people in front of us and make it real for you to make it real. I’m really not even getting to talk about Samson much today on this one. I talked about the parents and they made it real. They made it real. But Samson did not. Samson did not. He compromised from the beginning and then he compromises with Delilah and then his compromise, eventually they put him to death or he dies pushing the pillars, you know.

0:21:21 – (Steve Gray): But he does say one more time, God, remember me one more time. And you can do that too. You can say God, remember me and make it real. Talk real to God. Don’t speak Elizabethan English, talk like you talk to other people or to talk when you’re making it real. Talk real to God and get the compromise out of your life, right? Get the compromise out and just talk normal and mean it. Because this is the thing that we’re going to be able to push back the powers of darkness that are trying to take over our country now.

0:21:55 – (Steve Gray): It’s happening now. It’s not happening someday. This is not a story of monsters and 666 and all that stuff. This is now, okay, now happening. And we need to be able to push it back. And if your church won’t do it or your pastor won’t do it, then you do it. Be real and it’ll bring a protection and a power in your life, at least without compromise like Samson did. So anyway, get the book, Revival or Ruin.

0:22:26 – (Steve Gray): Go to https;//stevegrayministries.com or https://revivaloruin.com and get it. Read it, share it, give it away to somebody else and buy another one if you have to or just remember it. But it will speak to you of how as Christians we are probably deceived and thinking that we’re going to escape everything. And I don’t think that’s true. Do you think you’re going to escape? I don’t think so. We’re all in this together and we need to pull ourselves together.

0:22:52 – (Steve Gray): So be sure and check us out. You know, you can, I never say this much. You can also go to https://revivechurch.com and stream our services so you can get messages that are revival type messages. Get the book and get your life on track. Get out of nominal, lukewarm, half hearted, dull, dark religion and get on fire for God. Get on fire for God and let him do something in your heart today because that’s what it’s going to take to protect you and your family for what’s trying to get here.

0:23:25 – (Steve Gray): And the Christianity can push it back, but we’re not doing a very good job of it. That’s why I need to read this book. All right. Till next time, bye-bye.