In episode 55 of the "No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe" podcast, host Greg Ryan shifts his planned discussion of the Armor of God to focus first on surrender. He argues that surrender, rooted in Romans 12:1’s call to present oneself as a living sacrifice, is the prerequisite for putting on God’s armor (Ephesians 6:10). Greg shares a personal testimony of intense brokenness after praying the prayer “Lord, use me, break me, send me,” which led to an emotional breakdown in a Pep Boys bathroom, illustrating how God answers that prayer. He uses several analogies— a gun‑sighting metaphor and a “ready‑fire‑aim” approach—to explain that spiritual growth involves imperfect attempts, course corrections, and reliance on God’s perfection. Greg highlights Revelation 12:11 as a key verse about overcoming by the blood of the Lamb and testimony, and he connects this to the biblical story of Gideon, emphasizing how God reduces Gideon’s army to a few to demonstrate dependence on divine power. He further employs the clay‑pot metaphor, describing broken vessels as necessary for the Holy Spirit to flow through believers, tying brokenness to effective spiritual warfare. The episode ends with a promise to continue the discussion in the next episode, focusing on Gideon and the completion of the armor of God theme.
Welcome to episode 55. It happens the same way every episode.
John 1:1, 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 55. If this is your first time, welcome aboard. We are talking about the spiritual warfare, and more specifically, I thought I was going to be talking about the armor of God, but it turns out for right now God wants me to talk about surrender. And so that's where I'm going to keep moving. I'm, I'm trying to get to the armor of God. I'm not finished with the Surrender part of— actually, it's verse 6:10 where Paul talks about being strong in the Lord and in the power of his might. And if you remember a couple episodes ago, while I was praying, God gave me the word surrender. And so I've kind of been chasing down the surrender. It's not a rabbit hole. I think it's very— I, I've never thought of putting on the armor with surrender as the first step, because it's not mentioned in Ephesians 6:10, but it is mentioned in Romans 12:1 where it says, I beseech you, brethren— this is Paul, same author— I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God, present yourself a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable, which is your reasonable service. So every morning, and if you'll look at the prayers on The 5 prayers or the 5 steps, the second step that I have in that list is that presenting yourself a living sacrifice. And then I put on the whole armor of God. So God has it. I, I just, I stumbled across the right way to do it, but I've been doing this for a long time. This is my, my prayer, and I'm putting air quotes, my prayer routine as I get up every morning and I pray, but I present myself and I, you know, I crawl up on the altar and I surrender myself. It's, you know, there's a lot of scriptures that talk about dying daily, and, you know, to live as Christ and to die is gain, and all of those things coming together. But I want to talk— that, that's the reason, if you're just coming in, it's kind of in the middle of the play. If you're coming in on— if this is your first episode, go back a couple, 2 or 3 episodes, and I, and I kind of go into a little more detail I want to stay with the meekness and the brokenness. Now, God, he's taking me to this brokenness part, and I really don't want to talk about this, but my favorite scripture is Revelation 12:11. In fact, I've created a whole clothing line based on it, but it's 12:11: And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death. And I want to give you my testimony. And you know, if you've listened to me, that I'm kind of in that ready, fire, aim mentality. I read a book recently that said, you know, when you're trying to sight in a gun— and I thought this was just a great analogy— if you're trying to sight in a gun and you, you pull the trigger, you're aiming at the bullseye, but where you hit it on the target is probably not gonna be on the bullseye. And so you have to shoot, you gotta shoot to miss when you make corrections. And I guess when I've taught that perfection is not the goal, because we can't be perfect. We've got one example that was perfect and all we've gotta do, tie into or by faith, reach out and grab ahold of God's perfection and that's enough. And as we go through our life, what we do is we're trying to sight this gun we call life and we fire at something and we're attacking or we're going towards a goal or whatever analogy you want to put, you, you've got to pull the trigger. You can't just sit around. And that's to be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. I think we got a lot of us that have got our butts in the pew and we're not getting out and doing because we're afraid we might make a mistake. Well, I'm telling you, I've gone 57 years and I make mistakes daily. And it— the Bible is clear, it says all have sinned, which is missing the mark. And so I'm going to go back to the target analogy, the ready, fire, aim. When you pull the trigger, if you miss the target, bottom left, you can adjust. Again, I'm going to tell you, read the word. The word will start showing you where you're missing the mark a little bit. And so just adjust. It's not a big deal. God's already died for every sin, every mistake. Just don't keep wallowing in it. Just get up Dust yourself off and fire again. Pull it up. I mean, if you're bottom left on the target, pull it up a little and go to the right. You know, just make course corrections. And again, that's a rabbit I just started chasing, my target rabbit. But I am a ready, fire, aim mentality, and that's why I'm here on this podcast. So when I heard— and I, the reason I'm telling you this is my testimony— when I heard this person come in and tell me at church The most dangerous prayer that you could pray: Lord, use me. Lord, break me. Lord, send me. And so when they— when I heard that, you know, I wrote that down. I was taking notes when the person— I can't, I can't give credit to the person that told it because I cannot remember. I remember writing that down and thinking, well, that, that don't sound that dangerous. So as in my quiet time and my prayer time the next day Then I started praying that, "Lord, use me. Lord, break me. Lord, send me." You know, I didn't think much of it, and I was in Pep Boys of all places. I was having my car worked on. I got a friend that works there at Pep Boys, and so I was sitting there in the waiting room, and I had this book that I was reading. And so I'm reading this book, and I could just feel something welling up inside of me, and I'm like, "This something's not right." I kind of had the urge, and it wasn't the I-had-to-go-to-the-bathroom urge, it was the get-out-of-this-waiting-room urge. And I went into the men's bathroom in Pep Boys, and I shut the stall and sat down on the seat, and I just broke down. I'm telling you, I bawled like a baby, and I cried and I cried and I cried. And I mean, I'm telling you, tears, you know. And the whole time I'm crying, I'm thinking to myself, what is going on? You lost your mind, you know. And I'm just I'm just crying, and I'm— God is so wonderful because nobody came in to Pep Boys while I was doing this and broke and breaking down. It was not a nervous breakdown because when I got done, I was just— it's to the point where I was kind of shaking. I mean, I'm embarrassed to tell you this, but it is my testimony. This is, this is a true story, and it actually happened, and I'm And I walk out, you know, and I walk out and I'm wiping my face with toilet paper and I wiped up. I mean, I'm telling you, there was a puddle of tears. I don't know that I've ever cried like that. And it was just, I can't really put words to it, but I was sitting there and I'm like, what in the world just happened? Then God said in my spirit man, You told me to break you. I was like, oh my gosh, are you kidding me? I was thinking, you know, and then I'm telling you, be careful if you're going to pray that prayer because he will answer. I'm here to tell you, God will answer that prayer. That was incredible. I don't know. I really— I haven't had another experience like that. He's humbled me many times and we're going to talk about that in the next episode. But the brokenness, I think you only have to be broken one time. And then we're going to go to Gideon. We're going to finish this episode up in Gideon because we've already talked about Gideon. And we're talking about, you know, we're clay pots. Sometimes in the Bible we're described as clay pots, or that we're pots, you know, that— and we're— if you can imagine yourself as a pitcher or a clay pitcher with what's inside of you. If, if you've just got a clear— like a— and we're going to use kind of a clay or, or glass, I don't even know. But if you can imagine having the Holy Spirit inside of you, and it's wonderful that God just pours the Spirit up inside of you, and you're just walking around in the Spirit, and you're having a good time. Well, if you are broken, that water, or the Spirit, cannot stay inside the vessel. It is just not possible. And so when God pours his Spirit in you or on you, there's no way that if you're broken that it can't, it can't help but spill on to other people. Well, with the brokenness, I want you to picture, because I, you know, the Old Testament is so wonderful for giving you a picture of how something works in the spirit realm. And it, you know, sometimes it's hard when I talk about the spirit realm and the physical realm, and we're talking about spiritual warfare. And instead of being weird or anything, you got to meditate on the word. You got to just look at what God's trying to tell you sometimes with symbolism and stuff like that. But if you look at Gideon, and there's the thousands, hundreds of thousands of Midianites that Gideon was going against. And God— and I think Gideon started with 30,000 people, and God's saying— I mean, think about— let's just say that there's 500,000 Midianites and there's 30,000 men, and God said, nope, there's too many here. And you're like, what? No, we can't beat them with these 30. God said, nope, well, there's too many. Gideon whittles that down to 300 men against, and we're going to say 500,000. They said it was— they were so innumerable you couldn't even— they were like locusts, you couldn't count them all. So there's a lot of people there. Gideon is then told— he gives kind of like the Battle of Jericho. God, God does not like to share his glory. We've talked about that before. He will not share his glory. God said, look, I'm not going to get the credit if we have too many people here. God gives him a plan. He says, look, grab these— he's got these pitchers, and that's where I want to go to, is the picture that Gideon has., and it— there's, there's light or a torch on the inside, and that is, I, that is a representation of— in the symbolism, that is a representation of the Holy Spirit. And the, the clay pot, if you can picture yourself as the clay pot, and when the enemy comes against you, if you are broken, he cannot stand. I, I— that's what I want, and I— this is kind of going a little bit longer, but I think it's, it's going to be worth it. I, I think someone that it needs to hear this, and I, to be honest, I need to hear it again, but the brokenness, when you truly are broken before God, then God can flow through you. You're not trying to hold it all in. You're not designed to hold it all in. You're not designed to win the battle. We're talking about, remember, we go back to 6:10, that we're in the power of his might. So in order to be in the power of his might, you need to use his might, and his might is not used like you would use your might. So that— we're gonna, we're gonna pick this up in the next episode. I just looked and I am way long. So I appreciate you being a part of this, and I look forward to finishing this up in the next episode.
Thanks for listening to the No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast at www.nodoubtonlybelieve.com.
