The Revival We’ve Been Avoiding

0:00:00 – (Steve Gray): Have you noticed that our nation has two opinions? And both opinions, they’re fighting each other. It’s vicious. Well, we’re going to talk on the next More Faith, More Life podcast, how to get out of that and save a nation.

0:00:11 – (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.

0:00:36 – (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 of 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 to another More Faith, More Life podcast. Your voice of revival. Telling about revival. We’re going to talk about revival today of why revival matters, why revival is important, why we need revival. Any of those, any of those, any of those topics work, any of those introduction things work that we need revival now. We need a revival of a real true revival of true religion.

0:01:50 – (Steve Gray): Because religion is in some circles is a more of a negative. A negative. I had it said about me one time, a reporter came. This was during the Smithton outpouring, which I know I’ve told you about before, but if you’re new or forgot about it where that’s how I, I didn’t get my start there, but that’s how I got my start nationally and internationally and got to travel the world. In a little town of 532 people, this power of God, a true revival broke out. And you say, well, everybody has revival, thinks it’s a true revival. Well, if you study revivals, they went on and on and on every single day and they just went on and on. This went on for three and a half years.

0:02:31 – (Steve Gray): We had five and six services a week for three and a half years, packed the place out. People lined up to get in the building. It was full all the time.

0:02:40 – (Steve Gray): It was.

0:02:41 – (Steve Gray): It roared, it rocked. You could hear the roar of the crowd five miles away. Now, that’s a true revival. The people that worked the revival, too, and myself show up at 6 and leave at midnight. And they had jobs. All our kids came. They had homework, and we just worked it out. And they asked one buddy, they said, one of our church folks, how do you go to church five days a week? And, you know, you get off work and have five services a week.

0:03:15 – (Steve Gray): And the person answered, the great answer, says, how do you do that? He says, you don’t do anything else simple. You don’t do all the other things that you do five days a week. You just do this. And so that really shook people. Like, if we have true revival, do I have to go to church five or six times? It’s not the point. And if you have a true revival, you may want to go to church every day. You know, you read the Bible.

0:03:40 – (Steve Gray): They went to church when the new believers, they went to the synagogue and they met every single day. They got together. Well, we’re certainly not in that revival yet, are we? We’re just. We’re still. At. Most people go an hour, one hour a week, and that’s it. So we got a long way to go. But true revival is different. And. Oh, I was going totell you. So a reporter came after. He met me and listened to me preach. And he saw how these people really moved about. And it was so different.

0:04:09 – (Steve Gray): The power of God and the people are coming and nobody wants to leave. And they stay even past midnight. And people would be so struck by the power of God, they. They couldn’t even drive their cars. They had to sit there, like, kind of recover. It was so powerful. And so this reporter came and he print it somewhere. I don’t know if it’s in a book or it was in a magazine or whatever. And this is what he said. He quoted Steve Gray, I’ve never met a man with less religion.

0:04:35 – (Steve Gray): Now, when they quoted that, some people got angry. They thought he was being negative. To me, it was positive. He meant not strapped by religion with freedom and joy. And that’s not strapped by this religion gripping him where when he gets up and speak, he has a voice change. Or when he prays to God, he turns into Shakespeare with Elizabethan English, thou’s and this and that. When he talks to you, he. He just talked. When he talks to God, he’s got to Talk in Elizabethan English, King James English. Right.

0:05:10 – (Steve Gray): Ridiculous. And that might upset some people, but it’s ridiculous. Why would you change your language to these and thou’s when you talk to God, but when you talk to everybody else, you talk normal. Be normal. Don’t be so religious. That’s what he meant. Okay, so we need a true revival. And revival matters. Here’s why. Right now we’re in an unusual situation in our country. I’ve never seen it before, and I’ve been around a while, seen a lot of things.

0:05:42 – (Steve Gray): Remember the division we had and when the Vietnam War was going on and I. I was. I almost went. I almost was drafted into Vietnam, really close and. But I had friends that were from friends that died, and I also had friends that died of drug overdose who didn’t go, who protested Vietnam War. So we had protesters in the streets, campus. I was in one. I don’t know if I was joined. I joined the riots, but only just to be a rioter.

0:06:17 – (Steve Gray): I didn’t have an opinion on Vietnam that much, and I was more of a loyalist. Loyalist. I tried to have a little bit of loyalty to the country, but, you know, I had long hair and played in bands and was a college kid. And I just joined the riot. And I think a lot of times that’s what we have today. We have riots going on and people just join a riot sometimes just to belong to something that seems important.

0:06:39 – (Steve Gray): I don’t know what. I don’t know if they’ve really thought through why and what they’re doing and what it means to everybody. I don’t know. But anyway, you know, I saw all that and lived through assassinations. After assassinations were John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, all these and others just an assassination. Attempts also put people in wheelchairs, put presidential candidates in wheelchairs. So I’ve seen a lot of strange things and changed the world and I saw the culture change, but I’ve never seen anything like this before. This is a much harder, rougher group on both sides and clashing together and so divided that they refuse to agree on anything.

0:07:37 – (Steve Gray): You can tell certain issues come up or certain situations come up. And it’s not people sitting down, weighing it out and then deciding, oh, I don’t agree with you, and I don’t agree with you. They’re not weighing it out. They’re already on the side of whatever side before anything happens. So no matter what happens today, what happens tomorrow, this group is going to be on this side. It doesn’t matter. They’re Going to find some reasons this side’s going to be on that side.

0:08:01 – (Steve Gray): So there’s such a gulf between us, you know, in the story in the Bible where the rich man and Lazarus, rich man ends up going to the place of the dead, Hades, and. And the poor man who’s sick with sores goes to be in the bosom of Abraham. And their culture, in Jewish culture couldn’t understand that. They felt like the rich man automatically would go to the, you know, with Abraham because you were rich, because God blessed you, and God blessed you because you were good.

0:08:31 – (Steve Gray): And. But he wasn’t that good. And then if you had sores and dogs were licking your sores, that means something happened, somebody sinned, somebody’s cursed something bad. So now you’re paying. Maybe you didn’t do it, maybe your grandfather did it, but it came down through the line. So they had a. And so when the roles are reversed and the poor man goes to Abraham and the rich man goes to the place of the dead burning, and like that, it said a great chasm or a great gulf was between them. And that’s what I see today. There’s a great gulf between and the two people. Two.

0:09:05 – (Steve Gray): Two sides are so, so different. They’re as different as the poor man who. The dog’s licking his sores and the rich man who’s just oblivious to the poor man. And they just lived apart, worlds apart. And that’s why we have worlds apart right now. Well, and while our nation is struggling to figure out what’s right and wrong, other nations have already figured it out. That’s why we have some rioting in other nations that feels favorable to us because they’re rioting against things that have made their lives worse.

0:09:43 – (Steve Gray): And they’re poor and it’s been tough, and they’re ruled with an iron fist. And so those kind of riots are going on today, too. But there’s such a division in our country that I’m just going to tell you, there’s no natural way that I can see that this great chasm, this great gulf, Grand Canyon, between the two groups is going to ever get them together because they’re decided not to be together. They’ve allowed ideas to take over morals, let ideas come up, common sense or ideas to never involve the kingdom of God, biblical things.

0:10:27 – (Steve Gray): And so their ideas are decided. If people have decided ahead of time, there’s no reason to try to sit down and change their mind or even reason with them. I’ve had people come to me and they’ve decided, oh, had family come. They had a bunch of kids, five or six kids, you know, and great family, great, beautiful family. But there was just. Things just weren’t working out, I guess, and they. There was a drive for something more. The family wasn’t enough, and they decided they were going to leave their kids and the two of them would travel and they were going to teach. And they were complimenting. And we can teach all the great stuff you’ve been teaching. Pastor Steve. We can take it because we’ve been good students and we could take it to the world.

0:11:11 – (Steve Gray): And I could tell as I’m listening to him, so I tried to reason with him and say, listen, your first ministry is to all these kids. You, you decide to have kids, minister to the kids.  That was your choice. And you decided now that’s your ministry. They didn’t want to hear that, but that’s what I said. That’s your ministry. Then when they grow up, they get married or they leave home or they go to college maybe, and they’re not at home.

0:11:38 – (Steve Gray): Go, go do whatever you want. But right now. Well, they didn’t like to hear it, but they, they, they did kind of adhere to it for a while, but they got itchy. And then they must have been itchy for a lot of reasons. But anyway, they eventually got divorced anyway because there was some kind of itch in them that was getting at them, you know, And I guess I think they were trying to solve it, but going on, going traveling around, trying to preach and do that’s not going to solve it. It would have just made it worse.

0:12:06 – (Steve Gray): But their minds were made up. They didn’t want to hear what I had to say. And when you realize that’s what’s happening in our country, because then you realize that there’s no reason we can’t get together and discuss it. Because one finds nothing good, the other finds nothing, right? And so the only way to heal our nation, which is these two groups are going side by side. One’s. Well, they’re both pretty loud.

0:12:34 – (Steve Gray): They’re both pretty loud. Now, what’s in the middle? If they got this side, got this side, right, what’s in the middle? The middle is the kingdom of God. The middle is the church that holds and has held nations together and our nation together. But we got the voice here on the left, right? I don’t want to say left and right. We got two voices, and they’re both very loud. And we’ve got the quiet church silence.

0:13:03 – (Steve Gray): There’s no voice that can unite us because even the church is not united. We can’t, we can’t agree. We, we. We’re not in agreement of what, what is right, what’s wrong. I preached on that a week ago where I said, maybe even last week. I brought it up about in the end of Book of Judges. There was no king in those days. Everybody did what was right in their own eyes, and that’s what we have right now.

0:13:31 – (Steve Gray): And that meant there was no king. God wanted to be their king, and they didn’t want God to be the king. So they did what was right in their own eyes, and that’s what’s going on. But living like that turned into disaster because the powers of God, the powers of God, the many powers of God that were on those supposed to be on those people, to give them what we call in our country, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, to give them liberty, to give them freedom, to give them prosperity, to give them so that they would not be overtaken by their enemies. It just goes on and on and on. All the benefits that they have by being in a covenant with God and restoring the things of God.

0:14:16 – (Steve Gray): A revival of the things of God, placing that. Well, the church is silent on it and it’s still talking about hurt feelings and come. And it just teaches you to keep going in your mess rather than to get out of the mess, rather to be transformed from the mess. And so a true revival of religion, if you want to call it that, a renaissance of faith, a revival of the spirit of God, the things of God happening. And there are some signs that it’s trying, but it’s trying mostly in a younger generation, in homes, campuses, high schools even.

0:14:55 – (Steve Gray): But the church, you’re not hearing about a church that’s all of a sudden exploding with the things of God. And we’re all going, wow, wow, let’s go see what this thing is. Let’s go see. Like Moses said, there’s a burning bush. Let’s go see why it’s not being burned up. Let’s go see what this fire is. You don’t hear that today. A silent church, and they can’t agree on anything. It says everyone did what was right in their own eyes. They.

0:15:22 – (Steve Gray): That’s why the Protestant churches have a church here. Church here. You go through any town, even our own neighborhood, where I am, there’s churches all over the place. Why? That doesn’t even make sense. You know why? Because we can’t agree on anything. Because we all want to do what’s right in our own eyes. And Then they, A group splits from that church and they go start another church. Why do they start another church? Is it they’re more talented? We don’t have enough churches? They’ve got a message that’s so unique that we need you to start a church. No, they go start a church just like the church they left, only they’re in charge.

0:15:54 – (Steve Gray): That’s all it is. They don’t have to agree with those people anymore. They’re going to get people that agree with them. And so now it’s not a case of we need another church. It’s that we want to do our own thing and do what’s right in our own eyes, unless we decide we’re going to do something different. So when I started a church way back in the 80s, 1984 is when I first started pastoring. And I felt God wanted me to open that country church I told you about.

0:16:23 – (Steve Gray): And I asked God then, I said, why? We already had. In that little town, there were already two churches. That’s not much compared. But in a town of 532 people, you got two already. Now you need a third. Why? And that’s when God said, listen. And I said to God, listen, if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it differently. I want a church. This is what I said. I want to have a church that God attends first.

0:16:52 – (Steve Gray): Because you, you’ll know this, though. You’ll hear it. God’s in the house all the time. And you go like, well, if he’s here, he ain’t doing anything. He’s not doing much. Can you imagine God being in the house and zero, zero evidence that anything’s going to change or do it be different? So we started a church that we wanted, a church where people wanted to be there. I want a church that people want to go to church.

0:17:14 – (Steve Gray): I don’t want a church where people are looking at their watches. They love God. We’re going to have a love God church. We’re going to teach them about loving God. I want a church that worships, really worships, and you study worship through the ages. You know, religion got in, but the early church of the first century, they would go. When they would go to a time of prayer, it was loud and people prayed loud.

0:17:37 – (Steve Gray): And then when they moved in, they sang loud and strong with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. The people erupted. You know, that’s the kind of church I want to go to. I want to go to a church where there’s enthusiasm and there’s love and the power of God, as you say, God’s in the house. Okay, how do we know that? Because he’s changing us. He’s doing things. He’s the active God. So here we got this great gulf happening, this great, you know, chasm that some Bibles call it the Grand Canyon of religion.

0:18:13 – (Steve Gray): You know, is in religion’s right in the middle. How do we fix that? Because if we’re. These two are going to collide forever. So we’ll still have government shutdowns and it’ll take forever to fix it. We’re going to have one trying to control, the others trying to control. And we’re stuck in the middle. Religious people, but all people in our country trying to decide what’s right. And rather than thinking through it, most people just pick a side and they don’t think through it. They can’t explain why they’re on that side.

0:18:41 – (Steve Gray): So if we’re going to heal the nation and we need healing, if we’re going to have unity, it’s going to have to be by the spirit of God. Not by might, not by power, but by the spirit of God. People change when they encounter the real, living God, not when they start going to church, just church. They’ve got to encounter the living God. And one of the. There’s some great examples in the Bible. Do you realize that the guy who wrote most of the New Testament name is Paul, but his real name before that was Saul and he changed it to Paul?

0:19:14 – (Steve Gray): Do you know who this guy was before he started writing the Bible and traveling around preaching? This guy was a murderous guy. Now, he didn’t. I don’t have evidence that of course, he didn’t actually go out and kill anybody. He didn’t have to. He was so powerful in Judaism that he could order a killing. And when Stephen was stoned, you know, the first guy that was the martyr in the Bible, so his name was Stephen, he was there giving his approval.

0:19:41 – (Steve Gray): He made. Now, listen, not everybody agrees, but he may have been the instigator of let’s stone him, let’s kill him for what he’s saying. And he held the people, gave him their cloaks, he held the coats and everything of everybody that showed approval, too. And they killed him. Now, this guy went about allowing and pursuing Christians and having them killed or imprisoned. So this terrible guy, he’s a rotten guy who’s very, very religious, who’s having people enslaved and murdered.

0:20:15 – (Steve Gray): We forget that sometimes and he decides to go to Damascus, okay, on the road to Damascus. And when he gets there, guess what? He’s going to do beat him up, hit him, beat him up and get him imprisoned, okay? Maybe even killed. All right? He’s got murder on his mind. And he’s going to go have these Christians thrown into prison. Probably beaten, beaten up and thrown into prison in Damascus. There he goes, all right, this is a pretty rotten guy.

0:20:45 – (Steve Gray): And we forget that. If we don’t remember that, then what’s about to take place doesn’t mean so much. And there he is, minding on business, walking on the road. Some have him on a horse, but I don’t think it says he was on a horse or a donkey. But anyway. And the power of God came and he encountered the power of God. Now, he was such a rotten guy. I guess he had to have a lot of power because it knocked him to the ground. Bang.

0:21:12 – (Steve Gray): And. And, and. And it was that bright light, was so bright. It was a blinding light. Now, it’s not going to blind him forever, but for several days he was blind and he didn’t know what it was. He said, what is this? Who are you? What’s going on up there? Cause he believed in God. Okay, what’s going on up there? That’s my phrasing, okay? And he hears this voice say, I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. Whoa, whoa. He’s on his way to persecute people.

0:21:43 – (Steve Gray): He didn’t know he was persecuting Jesus. In fact, the Bible tells us, sometimes when you’re fighting people, you’re actually fighting God. Cause God’s leading them to tell you things and teach you things and lead the way. And anyway, this rotten guy encounters God in a twinkling of an eye, and he realizes that I’m Jesus, whom you’re persecuting. And Jesus says to him, go to the town, meet somebody, and I’ll tell you what you got to do.

0:22:17 – (Steve Gray): And he did it. He was so changed. And people got frightened when they heard he was coming to preach. They got frightened cause they thought, maybe this is a trick. It’s a trick. Cause people don’t change. But they do. That means some violent people out there, criminals, people fighting the police, people throwing rocks. Guess what? I can’t go reason. I can’t go reason and say, well, you shouldn’t be doing that. They’ve already crossed the line. They’re already there, okay? They’re already at it. They’re already fuming. Some of them are getting, I think getting paid to do it, even.

0:22:54 – (Steve Gray): So they like the money. That’s not going to do it. They’re going to Need a real encounter. If they were to encounter the living God, the real thing, like people did in the Bible, then they would see the world differently. And they’d stop throwing rocks, they’d stop shooting people, they stop robbing people. You get it. They stop selling drugs or doing drugs. That’s the story of the kingdom of God. That’s lacking.

0:23:20 – (Steve Gray): We don’t have churches like that. Well, we do, but we don’t have very many. And the ones that we hear about that people emulate and copy what they’re doing. This is not where they’re at. They’re all about feelings and making you feel good about yourself as you are. So if, If Saul, who became Paul, were to go to one of those churches, somebody would preach a sermon that he would go away thinking, feeling good, instead of feeling rotten about himself, he’s going to feel good about himself saying, well, you know, they. They may. I guess I’m okay then.

0:23:54 – (Steve Gray): Guess I’m okay, and let’s go. I’m going to go get some more Christians, you know, or whatever he’s going to do. I’ll do more drugs. I’m okay. It doesn’t matter. But he encountered the living God that changed him forever. And so now all of a sudden, and people showed up, but they were pretty nervous about it. What if he’s really going to send us to prison? Cause he could. He’s a powerful guy. And all of a sudden they say, what is this?

0:24:16 – (Steve Gray): The persecutor is now the preacher. That’s the kingdom of God. The rock throwers, the screamers, the fighters, the prejudice, the angry, the criminals. On and on the list goes, become the preachers, become the people of God. And suddenly there’s something in the middle that we have that speaks to us, that builds a bridge across this great divide, that we can agree on something. Because the spirit of God is now teaching us spiritual attitudes, spiritual approaches, how to deal with trouble, how to deal with hurts, how to deal with anger. And now we have a unified way that we all are dealing with our anger.

0:25:01 – (Steve Gray): The same way we’re dealing with what hurt us, the same way we’re dealing with things that are not right, things, laws that need to be changed. But we’re thinking it out through the spirit. Not by might, not by power, but by the spirit of the living. God has unified us to where we can think clearly and start having God in the center, where God wants to attend our lives and be a part of our lives. So the same thing, one more example, and I’m going to quit.

0:25:28 – (Steve Gray): Is when we had Jacob, Jacob in the Bible and Jacob, the word Jacob, it’s Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, you know, you heard he’s third in line, so he’s got a great family line. But the word Jacob means trickster. He’s a trickster. You can’t trust him. He’ll fool you, he’ll trick you. He’ll move the pieces around for himself. And he did. Okay. And one day the angel, he encounters an angel and it says that he wrestles with the angel.

0:26:00 – (Steve Gray): That’s such a great thing because he’s not just wrestling like we think a wrestling match, like headlocks and flips and bear down on somebody’s shoulders, pin him to the ground. That might have happened, that might have been a real wrestling match. But he’s wrestling with who he is, with an angel of the Lord, with the power of God. And finally the sun comes up and the angel says, I have to go. And he says, no, I will not let you go until you bless me.

0:26:30 – (Steve Gray): Ah, what does that mean, bless you how? He was already pretty rich. He had a rich heritage. He, he was one of the great families, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. You know, he’s got blessed by his father. He tricks his father into blessing him. What else is there? Well, he’s been blessed by his father, his dad. But he says now, I want you, the Lord’s angel, to bless me. And he says, you want to be blessed, then I’ll bless you. Here’s your blessing. You are no longer Jacob the trickster.

0:27:01 – (Steve Gray): Bang, bang. That’s the kingdom of God. You are now going to be called Israel. And the nation starts, that’s the prince of God. There’s kind of different names for what Israel means, but that’s a good one. A prince of God, the man of God. If we want to say that you’re no longer the trickster, that’s what the power of God does. We need to wrestle out who we are in the presence of God. We need churches to open the heavens for, by their praise and their worship and really want to be at church and not be just going to find out. And your first question is, what time does this get out?

0:27:36 – (Steve Gray): What time does this get over? Come on. We need a revival of the spirit of God, a renaissance of good religion, pure religion that’s based on biblical principles of how we live, how we think that we’re willing to. We love God with all our hearts. We don’t mind sacrificing for it. We’re committed, we’re loyal. This is our life, this is our love and this is our future. That’s the kind of thing that draws the presence of God in. That people that need that presence, that need to be no longer the trickster, but a prince of God or a princess of God, if we want to say that.

0:28:17 – (Steve Gray): And no longer the persecutor, the angry man. The angry man, the angry woman. No longer. Now you are the preacher of the righteousness and the goodness of God and helping to rescue other people get out of their anger, their problems, their poverty, whatever it is. But we do it God’s way. Not by might nor by power, but by the spirit of the Lord. So that’s why we need religion. That’s why we true religion. That’s why we need revival.

0:28:46 – (Steve Gray): We need a move of God that’s true and genuine. And we can’t just have it on the college campuses, which is good. But those kids are going to graduate. And when they graduate, where are they going to go? Go sit in a church that’s talking about their feelings and how it’s. You’re okay. I’m okay. You’re okay. God loves you the way you are when. Say that to Saul, who’s murdering a murderous in his mind at least, getting Christians persecuted and thrown in jail.

0:29:10 – (Steve Gray): He’s not okay. He’s not okay. He needs help. He needs the kingdom of God. And he got it by the power of God on the road to Damascus. Maybe that’s what you need, but that’s what our nation needs to unify us and save us until we just. Until, if we keep going, we destroy ourselves. Well, hope that was good for you today. Perfect. Message for you today. Go to https://stevegrayministries.com and join in. We have to get this message out,  and you have to help.

0:29:37 – (Steve Gray): You have to join in support, tell your friends, maybe send some money. I don’t like to push you that way. Like everybody’s kind of pushing for money, but, you know, you should support things that are really saying how we can save our nation, save your family, this is how you save your marriage. This is how you save your kids—you have a revival of the spirit of God in your home. All right. So thanks for listening today.

0:30:00 – (Steve Gray): Till next time, Bye-bye.