In episode 97 of the No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast, host Greg Ryan opens with a reminder of the FANATIC acronym—Follower, Action, Now, Affirmation, Together, Indestructible, Conqueror—intended to define a committed Christian identity. He then shifts focus to the central problem he perceives in believers’ lives: unbelief, which he argues is the true sin that hinders faith and hope. Using Hebrews 12:1, John 14:12, Romans 8:1, and 2 Corinthians 10:5, Greg explains how unbelief manifests as a failure to fully trust and act on God’s Word, leading to spiritual stagnation. He outlines three spiritual adversaries—Satan, the world system, and the flesh—that feed unbelief, and offers practical guidance for recognizing and “capturing” doubtful thoughts, discerning God’s voice versus internal self‑talk, and applying Scripture to refute false ideas. The episode concludes with a prayer asking the Holy Spirit to reveal and remove listeners’ hidden unbelief, reinforcing the call to live in the miraculous power of Christ.
Welcome to episode 97, In the Beginning Was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Spending time in the Word of God is the best way to spend time with God. Welcome to No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast, where we will encourage, inspire, and empower you to live your best life in Christ. Here's Greg.
Welcome to episode 97. If this is your first time, welcome aboard. If you are a frequent flyer, welcome back, you fanatic. And I want to reiterate what fanatic stands for. I've said it multiple times since our— I think it was 72, way back in the day, where I pulled back the COVID on what I believe the fanatic stands for. And it's an acronym. I think I figured out what the word was. I struggled with it on episode 72, but it's an acronym for the word fanatic. And the F stands for follower, and you could also say faithful follower of Jesus. And the A is for action. Nothing destroys fear like taking action. The N is for now. Take it now. Don't put it off. Now faith is the substance of things hoped for. Right now faith. The second A is for affirmation, or to affirm yourself in the body of Christ, to reaffirm that you are God's favorite. You need to be build yourself up in your holy faith, and you need to affirm yourself that you are a Christian and you are God's favorite. The T is for together. None of us are gonna get through this alone. God sent people out two by two. We need to hook in with other believers. And that's where a fanatic is— he's not a lone ranger. And remember, the punk walks about as a roaring lion looking to whom he may devour. The roaring lion usually takes the people that are separated from the herd, or takes the weak among us. And that's why we all need to be together. There's, there's strength in numbers. The enemy knows that, and God knows that as well. We need to be hooked in together. We are part of the body of Christ. We're all believers. The I is indestructible. Once we accept Christ, we are indestructible. We will never— we died to self, we accepted him as our Lord and Savior, and we will never die again in the spirit man. Our spirit man comes alive and we are indestructible. Our spirit man is 100% just like Jesus. And the C is for conqueror. We are more than conquerors in Jesus. This is a fight to the death. You're gonna be a fanatic, you've got to agree that you are a conqueror and that you can take the ground that Satan has taken away from you. So there you go, there's your fanatic definition. I don't know who needed to hear that, but I needed to say it again because I hadn't said it in a while. Well, I wanna continue to talk about the faith and hope. And I want to open up maybe a can of something on you that I don't know that you've ever thought about, but I have taught on this in Sunday school. And I'm going to preface this, but this may be just a little bit of Gregology. This might be Greg's way of interpreting it. I don't want you to build your whole life on this idea, but I believe we have more unbelief than we ever need. I believe that the biggest problem— it's not faith, and we're going to get into that Now, when we're talking about faith and hope, I— we need to talk about what it's not, or what it fight— what fights against our faith. And I believe it's unbelief. And I want to go to Hebrews 12:1. It says, therefore, we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us. Now that sin that so easily ensnares us, I think we all have that in common. And I think— now this is where the Gregology comes in— it might just be each one of us has a different sin that ensnares us, but I believe it's each one of us has the same sin, and the sin is unbelief. The Bible is pretty clear that if you know to do right and you do it not, it's counted as sin against you. And I don't know exactly where that is in the Bible, but it's in there. The unbelief could be a again, is if you truly believed everything in this book, you would no doubt live your life by every word that came out of this book. If you had a question, you would just start digging in until you found it in the Bible. But I believe— and I mean present company included, I'm talking to myself now— when I start trying to solve problems on my own and I think I'm doing God some kind of favor by not bothering him, you know, not taking my petition up to him in heaven, I 'Look, I've got this,' you know. And if you tell God, 'I got this,' he lets you have it, even if you're going down the wrong road. God is a gentleman, and God is a perfect father, and he wants his children to grow up. And in order to grow up, sometimes you got to fall down. When you learn to walk, when you learn to do anything new, you're not going to do it perfect. In fact, when I was doing this podcast— and I'm still— I'm almost 100 episodes in, and I still struggle with things in this podcasting business, and I'm putting up air quotes, but it's a struggle. Some of these things are struggle. And to assume that you don't have any unbelief in your body, I, I just— laughable, because we all have unbelief in our body. And if you don't, I want you to read John 14:12. This is where I knew that I had so much unbelief. John 14:12: Most assuredly I say to you, he who believes in me, the works that I do he will do also, and greater works than these He will do, because I go to my Father. Now I read that and I was thinking, wow, what could be greater than what Jesus did? Raising the dead, walking on water, all of the things that Jesus did. But let's not concentrate on the greater works. Let's just talk about everything that Jesus did. He walked on water. He, he rose people from the dead. He healed the sick. He opened blind eyes, deaf ears. Jesus did incredible things while he was here on the earth. In John 14:12, he says, most assuredly I say to you that he who believes in me, the works that I do, he will do also. And I just got to stop there. If— do you really believe that? Do you really believe that you can do the same works that Jesus did? And if you believe that, then why aren't you doing that every day? Where Jesus walked, why aren't you drawing a crowd everywhere you go? And because people are touching your garments and people are trying to get next to you. And I'm not getting on to— I'm getting on to me. But if we truly believed everything in this Bible, every word in it, we would live differently. I want to go back to Hebrews 12:1: to put aside the sin that so easily besets you. The thing that I've got to remind you is sin is no longer the issue. Jesus died for all sin. That's past, present, and even future sin. Next Thursday's sin has already been dealt with. So we're not having to deal with sin. And I'm going to have to take you to Romans 8:1 that says, there is therefore now no condemnation to those who are, who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. So there's no con— I'm not condemning you because I'm not walking this whole Bible out every day. There's no way that I can do that. I mean, I, I'm just not that good. I'm trying to be, and I'm trying to get into this Bible, but I'm— there's still an awful lot of Greg in here that needs to be changed, and it is a constant battle. There are— remember, there's 3 enemies that we're fighting against, and it's not— one of them is Satan. So one of them, he's going to come in and condemn you, and he's going to come and try to deceive you and all of that stuff, all of his stupid tricks. But the second one is the world. And that's the world system. And it's not a sin to live in the world. We're, we're called to live in this world. We're to be in the world but not of the world. When God gets upset is when you just put everything you've got into the world and you forget about God and you get distracted by the things of this world. Again, that goes back to the seed and the things that are choking us— his attention. And the things that choke out the word of God is the cares of this world. So that's another thing that we're battling. And then the third thing we're battling is our flesh. This stuff that, that we're walking around in, Peter called it his tent. Again, God is spirit, and your, your spirit man has been saved, and it was born again, and it's a brand new spirit man. But your body and your spirit man are never going to get along. They're at enmity to one another. They're always going to fight, and they're fighting over your soul, your mind, will, and emotions. So there's always a battle going on. So you've got three enemies that you're fighting, I believe one of the, the things that you need to start tackling and you need less and less of is unbelief. If we can rid ourselves of unbelief, that's where we start walking in the miraculous and the supernatural. When you get to the place where you look at the Word of God and you see the Word of God with the eyes of your heart and the ears, when you start listening and you hear God speak to you through his word. And something inside you— and I, and again, I've tried to explain it, don't really do a great job of explaining what goes on and how I feel it— something kind of comes alive, if you will. I don't— it's still hard to explain, but I can kind of feel, I can sense when God is urging me or nudging me to do something. And it's not the same as when I get a thought or something that goes on in my head that's not God. But I can also tell now, because Satan has got me off on a ditch, to a 2 or 3 different times, I can kind of sort of tell when Satan starts getting next to me as well. And you know, it's the same voice in my head. It's my vernacular. It's inside my little voice box. And it's the voice inside of my head that's talking to me. Like when I'm working out, I'm thinking, you know, I can get 5 more reps. And so I start— me, that's me talking to me— you can get this, you got this. And so I'm talking to me. I know that's not God talking to me, and I'm not saying it out loud. But I'm saying it to myself and I'm pumping myself up. Then I hear some just off-the-wall wild comment in my head that, you know, just that thought— you've had those random thoughts, I, I mean, I'm assuming you have, I have— that just come out of nowhere. It's like, what was that? And it, you know, it's just some random off-color or something that you just, you got to put your eyebrow up and go, man, what is that? Where'd that come from? I think that's the punk. Throwing little darts at you, and sometimes they, they come in. And I've heard someone say, you can't keep birds from flying over top of your head, but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair. And I think that's a pretty good analogy. You can't keep thoughts from coming into your brain, but you don't have to— you can take those thoughts captive. And that's what it says in 2 Corinthians 10:5, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. So when you get one of those random thoughts, you know that it doesn't line up with Scripture. You bring it captive, you put the sword of the Spirit on it, and you take it down to Jesus and you say, Jesus, Holy Spirit, was this from you? And I'm pretty confident he's gonna say no. And the third thing is God speaking to you. And so you've got three voices going on. I want to go back and circle this wagon up before we run into like 35 minutes. There's a lot to unpack here, but unbelief is an incredibly powerful tool of the enemy, and you are inundated with it. We're going to shine a light on this, and we're going to hopefully expose it to where we can start pulling it out of our lives. Well, let's pray real quick. God, I thank you so much for the person listening to this episode, and I— you know right where they are, God. I have no idea who's listening, and I have no idea, but God, you know everything. You are everywhere all the time, and, and that is so incredible. Holy Spirit, I pray in Jesus' name that you would comfort the person listening to this and that, that you would show them any unbelief that they have that you want to help them with. God, I thank you so much, and I ask it all in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, thanks for being a part of this, and I look forward to visiting with you on the next episode.
Thanks for listening to the No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast at www.nodoubtonlybelieve.com.
