The Bumper Sticker That Fired Me Up And Is The Reason I'm Podcasting

Welcome to episode 14, 2 weeks in, and I'm about to tell you the day— what happened on the day that I saw a bumper sticker that got me into the middle of this. But before I get started, my sponsor's getting me a little bit of a rash, so we need to listen to his message real quick. 1211 Apparel, the most powerful clothing line in the world because it's based on the Bible and gives glory to God. Jesus gave his followers a Great Commission before He left, and that Great Commission includes you and me. But if you have ever struggled with sharing Jesus, 1211 Apparel created Prayer Wear and Share to help. It's a free training on how to fulfill Jesus' promise of light and easy found in Matthew 11:28-30. Since 1211 Apparel is Bible-based, they start out with giving first. Give and it will come back to you. This is not a theory, it's the truth. 1211 Apparel wants to give you access to unlimited Christian tracts and free training to help you get off the pew and into the battle for the souls of your friends and family. Use our special link, nodoubtonlybelieve.com/battle, to get started today. For those of you that don't know, I own 1211 Apparel also, so it's kind of a tongue-in-cheek kind of intro, but I really, I'm excited about all the different things God's got going on in my life. But episode 14, I've been waiting to tell you this episode for a while, and this is the, I guess, the genesis of how this program started. I was driving down the road, minding my own business, which if any of you have seen me on the road, you can attest to, I don't see anything. You can wave and shout and scream, you're gonna have to honk the horn to get my attention. But I'm driving down the road and I see this bumper sticker that I'm thinking, you've got to be kidding me. So before I get started, you know how it starts.

Gospel of 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.

Now we're going to stay on the general theme of the sovereignty of God since we've picked up that the last couple of episodes, but I want to kind of try to tie this all together and what I believe is the problem and why God is not, or Jesus is not, the King of victims, but he's the King of Kings. And I think part of it— now remember, it— for the first 29 years of my life, I didn't know God from a billy goat, so I looked at things as the world looks at things. And so I think I've got a different perspective when it comes to looking at things through the eyes of the world. I try real hard to run my filter through the Bible But sometimes, you know, I'm looking at stuff just like you are, and I see things. And the thing that just blew me up or got me all fired up was I was driving down— I was on my way home from work, and I'm driving down the street, and I look at this bumper sticker. And I— and one of the things I want you to think about is you can put anything you want on your car. It's your car. You can put any kind of bumper sticker, any kind of whatever catchy saying, you know, you can have. I see a lot of people with the middle finger and people peeing on stuff. I mean, it, you, it tells you a lot about the person. But this person, this particular bumper sticker said, "Nothing fails like prayer." And I want to tell you, that just lit me up. I was like, you have got to be kidding me. I started judging these poor people, didn't even know them. And I'm like, oh my God, I'd already put them— I mean, I'd already put them in the agnostic or atheist and hating God camp. I mean, I went ahead and give them the— I give them the whole treatment in my mind, of course. But I'm driving thinking, and I think they had all the different symbols to religions. So I mean, these people obviously were upset about religion or God. You know, I don't know their past, got no idea who they even are. I may never see them. If they listen to this podcast, thank you for putting that bumper sticker on your car because it got me to think and it got me looking at the world and wondering why would someone put that on their sticker and why would someone think like that. And so then I started looking at how people react to bad news and all of the stuff. And I'm telling you, it, it just fired me up. And I, I'm more of a contrarian, if you hadn't figured it out. If you tell me to go, I stop, and if you tell me to wait, I go. So I mean, I, I try to do— I try not to be like that, but that's just my personality. It's ready, fire, aim. I'm not going to go with the crowd normally. I try to, I try to be compliant, but I'm not very good at it. That's who I am, like it or leave it. I mean, I just can't, man. I pray for my wife because she's got to deal with this every day, but I am— that's who I am. And so instead of— after I got over my judgmental, which I'm told not to, but I did it anyway, but after I got over that, I started looking at, well, why would somebody think that? And I think if you full circle it all the way back It's because I believe we as Christians have been begging God to do what he's commanded us to do. And I want that to sit there for a minute because we are the King of Kings. And if you think about for a minute what a king is, a king rules over his kingdom. A king tells people to come and go. A king tells people what to do. A king sentences life or death to situations. And so we are, we are to command things. As a king, we are to command things in our life. We're to command things to happen. And I just don't see that happening a lot in the body of Christ. I see a lot of us begging God, "Oh Lord, please let me do this. Oh God, Help me with this. Oh God, oh Lord. And he's got to be thinking— and, and I'm not getting on to you, I'm getting on to me. I, I've done the same thing. I want to bring up— I have prayed for two wonderful men. I'm going to mention two men that I love dearly in this world, that God put me in their paths, but they both have passed away. And I prayed for both of those men One of them is Jack Whitty, and I had the privilege of being with him. I have no idea why I was on this FCA board. I guess God has a sense of humor and wanted to bring in some humor into this board because there were some really great men in this board on the FCA, and we were really getting together to help run a golf tournament, and Jack Whitty was part of it, and he was so kind, he was so nice, And I got to really love that man, and he developed pancreatic cancer, and it just crushed me. And so I just called him up and said, "Can I come pray for you?" And I was at the point where, you know, it's the laying on of hands. So I went and I brought a friend because two or more gathered, there's Christ. So I mean, I didn't know what I was doing, but I put— again, one of the things that I do is I try to put feet to it., and I went and we both laid hands on this man and we prayed and we begged God, God, please heal him. God, please. Well, Dr. Witty passed away and he's with Jesus. God bless him. And I, and I, you know, it just, it crushed me. And I don't know if you've ever prayed for somebody, but that, that, that set me back. And then the next person, a really good friend of mine, was Wally Bergquist. Wally and I became friends. We had kind of the same past. He was a racetrack trainer. I wasn't a racetrack trainer, but we had both spent a lot of time away from God and then got to know God and got saved and then dove in, you know, headfirst into this Christianity thing. And this guy, if you think I'm passionate, this guy had it by 10. And he quoted Scripture and he was all over it. Well, he went, he was feeling bad and went and had and found out he had lung cancer. And I didn't really know how to handle that, but I told Wally, I started praying for him and I started, you know, just asking God to heal him. And, and so I knew that he, the communion was really big deal. So I went and bought a bottle of wine and some bread from, I think it was Kroger. I walked into Kroger and grabbed a bottle of wine. And at this time I was teetotaling. So I felt so, uh, guilty about going in and grabbing a bottle of wine. I mean, that's a whole nother story. But anyway, I went in there and got— because I was gonna— we were gonna take communion and buy his, you know, the bread, his broken body, you know. I was bringing it. I was bringing both guns. I, you know, so we went, I sat down with them, we took— he and his wife— and we took communion and we prayed over Wally. And I cried, we cried, I begged God and, and Wally passed away, that— those two crushed me. I'm telling you, I was so upset that I just, I didn't know what to do. And had I just stayed there, I probably would have been the same way as the guy on the bumper sticker, that nothing fails like prayer. It just doesn't work. You know, I beg God and God's up there with his arms folded But I, you know, I just didn't have a good picture of God in my head. My filter was all screwed up. I had God some angry person that I didn't pray hard enough, or I didn't have enough— I don't even know what I didn't have enough of, but whatever it was, it didn't work. So I beat myself up, and then I heard a man on the radio telling me that God wants me well. The guy's name is Andrew Wommack. He's a wonderful teacher, just sits there and talks to you. And he said that we have been begging God to do what he's commanded us to do, and that hit me right between the eyes. And so I started digging in my word, and I started looking at the Bible, and he was right. In Matthew 9, at the end of Matthew 9, in the beginning of verse 10, it— in 37, pick it up at 9:37. Then he said to his disciples, the harvest truly is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. And when he had called his 12 disciples to him, he gave them power over unclean spirits to cast them out and to heal all kinds of sicknesses and all kinds of diseases. And I want you that to sit in. When I read that, it just kind of jumped off the page. I saw in Matthew that, that God had a, had a stand, had a way that he did things. He taught in their synagogues, he preached the good news, and he healed all kind of manner of sickness and disease. He healed all kinds of diseases. Jesus taught, he preached, and he healed. And so that's kind of the Jesus pattern that I saw is in Matthew 4, and it's in Matthew 9. But then he called his disciples and said, hey, I'm sending you out, and I consider myself a disciple. So when I read that, I wasn't— I'm not thinking about the 12. I'm thinking about, well dang, he wants me to teach and to preach and to heal. Well, then the punk comes in and goes, well, you're not God. What makes you think you can do that? And all of that come on. So I do all this condemning But I was mad. I mean, I'm telling you, I was mad. Two of my friends had passed away, and I had begged God to do— I knew it was something I was doing wrong. I knew God wasn't the problem. I knew Greg Ryan was the problem. So I started digging in, and I started trying, and I started— when I laid my hands on people, I started, instead of begging God, I started taking the Word of God, and I started using the name of Jesus like a billy club, like a And if you can imagine Thor, the hammer Thor, and I had Jesus' name on— I got to picture stuff. So I would bring this hammer down on top of any kind of illness, any kind of sickness, and I would just pound that out. And, and so that's how I pictured it. And so I've been given this power, that's what the word of God says. So I had to picture how I was going to use this power. And of course, it had to go to, you know, Marvel, and I had to, I had to pick Thor. But the hammer with Jesus on it, I would just, in my mind, I would just pound whatever they were asking for. And I, it started out, and I'll talk in the next episode of how I did this, and I want to tell you that I failed a whole lot more than I was successful, but I I started moving. I started seeing things just a little bit different. And I think that's where faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. And you got to dig in. And that's why this sovereignty of God thing, I think, is just such a bad teaching, is because if, if I just thought God controlled everything, then God was in control of the healing, and it was God who didn't heal those people. The grace of God has been poured out for everyone., and we need to figure out as Christians what to— how we appropriate that grace into our lives. And I think that's where faith and grace and humility— and that's like multiple episodes, and this one's been going on way too long. But I thank you for listening. I am going to continue this conversation in the next episode. But thanks for stopping by, and thank you for making it all the way to the end. God bless you.

Thanks for listening to the No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast at www.nodoubtonlybelieve.com.