This is Stu Epperson from the Truth Talk Podcast, connecting current events, pop culture, and theology, and we're so grateful for you that you've chosen the Truth Podcast Network.
It's about to start in just a few seconds. Enjoy it, and please share it around with all your friends. Thanks for listening, and thanks for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. This is the Truth Network. Welcome to, If Not For God, stories of hopelessness that turn to hope. Here is your host, Mike Zwick.
If God called you in the prime of your life to go to reach an unreached culture with hundreds of millions of people who've never heard about Jesus and it was very dangerous, would you go? Welcome to, If Not For God. I'm Stu Epperson, and I'm honored to sit next to your famous and estimable host, Michael Zwick. Michael, I set it up for you there, and you have a special guest named Jay. You want to talk to you today?
It's funny. There were a couple of things that really just came up in my mind, and one of them was the fact that we just did Romans chapter 10, and we talked about the importance of sharing the gospel. Everybody knows, or most people know, that in Romans 10, it says, in verse 9, it says, If you declare with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, that you will be saved.
If we believe this, if this is true, if people are dying and going to hell without the knowledge of Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, then one of the things that I was just talking about in my last show was Penn Jillette, who was actually an atheist. He says that one day a man came up to him after one of the magic shows that he did, and he said this guy was a Christian, and he said that he knew that I was an atheist, and he said after the show, he came to me and he handed me a Bible. He said, there's a lot of atheists or agnostic who say, keep your religion to yourself. I don't want to hear this.
I don't want to hear anything about this. But he said, I thought that this was a beautiful thing, and he said that if you really believe that Jesus Christ is the only way to get to heaven, if you really believe that I have the opportunity to have eternal life, in the analogy that he gave was this. He says, if I see a truck coming down the road at 90 miles an hour, he said, and I see you in the middle of the road, he said, at some point, I move you out of the way because I realize that you're about to get hit by a truck. If somebody could die and go to hell forever, he says, how important is it to us that we share the gospel with those people? And he said, what that guy did to me by sharing the gospel with me, he said that was the most loving thing that he could do. And he ended up saying, he says, how much do you have to hate someone to not share the gospel with them? Well, here we have a guy who's going to Southeast Asia, and he's been trying to get there for a year, and it's like, I don't know, man, what prompted you to do this, Jay? So a lot of things prompted me to do this.
And by the way, yeah, so with all of the COVID protocols and all that stuff, it's been super difficult to try to get even like a two-week trip over there because the visas are like super scarce right now. But the thing that really wanted me to take part in a mission like this was just basically what you're talking about right now, just realizing that there's a lot of people out there who they can't go to Wednesday in the word, or they can't go to their local pastor to hear about the Lord's prayer or to hear about the hope of Jesus Christ. Like, that's just foreign to them. They would look at you and just think, well, that's kind of what are you talking about?
Like, what are you even saying? And so just the fact that there's millions of lives out there that are experiencing that right now and has been going on for generations. Like, this is a long chain of generations that have been going through this over and over and over and over again. And so the thing that sparked my heart was just realizing that, like you said, there's people that are going to hell, and there's people that will never get to experience this hope that we're living in right now, the hope that we get to go through every single day of our lives.
And so I look at that as, one, it is a sacrifice, like we've said before, but it's also an investment in just, like, taking your life and using it to spread the hope of the gospel to people who have never gotten to hear it before. And that's Jay, and this is If Not For God. And we're at Dario, we just had Wednesday in the word. Michael Zwick, our fearless leader, awesome host of this wonderful program.
Thank you to all the sponsors, by the way, that support If Not For God. But Michael, we're here because the Truth Network studio is not open today. We have all been evacuated.
You want to tell everyone why? Well, we've always known that Stu Epperson was on fire. But now there was a huge fire in Winston-Salem, and I think you said, Stu, that during the Oklahoma City bombings, there were 4,800 pounds of ammonia nitrate. That's about how much was used to destroy that federal building in Oklahoma City, Timothy McVeigh, a horrible dark spot in American history.
A terrible terrorist attack right on our own soil. There are 600 tons of ammonia nitrate not three blocks away from the Truth Network. And so for the last 24 hours, 48 hours, going on 48 hours, we've had to be evacuated because if that crater, if that gets lit up, it's been a fertilizer plant fire.
The big weaver fertilizer plant right up the street from us. We're in the kill zone kind of like we're in the spot. We had Jay here. We have another guy, another man of God, young Jeremy, another Jay. And he's here, too, talking about missions.
I mean, these guys are coming out of the woodworks, Michael Zwick. So what's going on with you, Jeremy? Jeremy, to summarize kind of what you're doing in your ministry with outreach. Yeah, so I'm over in Raleigh, and I'm reaching out to international students. We have international students coming from all over the world, a lot from Asia and a lot from China and India. And so we are starting churches among international students and equipping them to share their faith so they can share their faith in Jesus with others in their lab. But when they get a job, that they can go and share the gospel in their workplace.
My church is really into bivocational ministry. So we've sent a team of folks to UNC Charlotte. They're engineers. They started a company there, but also they're elders there, and they're reaching UNC Charlotte. We sent a team out to ODU. We work with people overseas, but actually we're partnered with churches all across the country that are focused on college students.
There's a huge battlefield there. Eighty percent of those that grow up in the church leave the church when they come to college. And so we are fighting hard there. Back in 2016, the church that I go to, Grace, they filed a court case against NC State. The NC State people said, you know, you can't give Christian material or anything. And this is, you know, we're a student club to the university. So we did a case against them in 2016, and we won the case. And they said, you know, the conclusion was we're not required to have a permit as a student club to be able to share about Christ, provide resources. So I'm just so encouraged by that.
Just, yeah, there's such a huge battlefield there. Please pray for us. So this J is reaching international students coming here in numbers, big numbers from Asia and all over the world, Africa. This J is going to a country of, you know, in Southeast Asia, millions of people that have never heard the gospel.
Jay, when you hear this J share that, what do you think? Well, I mean, I'd love to be a part of both. I think I think both see, like the thing is like it's just about finding your specific niche in the Great Commission. Everybody has their own specific calling.
Like you guys have your calling and taking part in the Great Commission. You are using your entire life right now to further the gospel of Jesus Christ. This J over here is doing the same thing through his ministry. And so that's basically what we're all just doing. We're all, some people are going overseas to do it.
Some people are staying here to do it. But we're all just trying to take people who are far away from God and just bring them closer to him every day. Is there any more collaborative than the gospel? I mean, these guys, you know, here they should be fighting each other. Oh, no, that's my donor.
Oh, no, that's my field. But they're collaborating. They love each other. They just met each other today. But they have the love of Christ in them because they have a passion for souls.
Michael Zwick, what about that? Is everybody J because they have Jesus in them? There you go. Well, speaking of J and Jesus, we actually have a guy named Ralph here who earlier today, he said that he decided that he wanted to share Jesus with somebody. And he said, so he went out.
It was in a parking lot in maybe a Home Depot or something like that. And he said he felt the Lord tell him to give this guy who needed it his little red flag so that he could put it on the back of something that was sticking out of his truck so that people would know. And he said, when he went to this guy, he said, man, he said, I just want to ask you, he says, do you know Jesus? And the guy says, I'm Jesus. That worked out real well, didn't it?
So, so, but. He says, for the name of Jesus. And there he is right there.
There's a guy with his name. So the, you know, but one of the things that I was thinking about is that, you know, one of my favorite quotes is by Winston Churchill. And he said, Winston Churchill, when, when, when the whole World War Two was going on, he actually went out into the battle. And what he said is he said, there is nothing more exhilarating than being shot at without effect.
In other words, there's nothing more than being in the heat of the battle. And I think sometimes some people are so afraid to share their faith, but man, is there some excitement in that? Yeah, absolutely. And that's, I love that quote that you just shared because it's a, it's very important for everybody to be going out and sharing their faith. Like if you're, if you are just staying in your house and not going outside to, to utilize your life, to, to, to let people know about the hope that you know about. It's like, like you said, like, do you, do you even care about those people?
Because there's a lot of people that, that just don't know anything about that. So it's important to just go out there and get, and get the faith out, get, get the gospel out there. That's the Jay on his way to Southeast Asia to assist in church planting and reaching a lot of people that have never even heard the gospel.
This is the Jay that's got Southeast Asia coming to him in Raleigh, reaching students. Jay, we can say your name because you're stateside and all that, but tell us what, is there anything more exhilarating than seeing an international kid who grew up in Buddhism, grew up in communism, atheism, whatever, receive Jesus Christ as their savior? Talk about that moment. When, you know, when you see that, is there anything more exciting than that? You know, expressing the gospel to them and seeing them, seeing the light come on. Well, I was just thinking what Jim Elliott said is, no fool gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. So I'd rather choose to give up everything for the sake of the gospel because there is nothing more exhilarating than that.
Right now I'm discipling a Japanese student. I met him a week after he moved to Japan or from Japan to U.S. to start his Ph.D. Share the gospel. Next day we were reading through John and he saw John 112 where it said to those who receive him to believe in who believe in his name. He gave the right to become children of God.
And this Japanese student, his name is Masahiro. He was ready to give his life to Jesus. So he gave his life to Jesus and now he's sharing the gospel with others. His wife's from Columbia, the country of Columbia does not know Jesus, but he's reading the word to her. And so, and he's shared his testimony now to his family back in Japan.
So it's coming, they're coming to Raleigh, the triangle, but they're taking it back to the ends of the world. So that is just, that's just such a big thing. Only the Lord can do this.
This is nothing I can do, nothing you can do. It's all about the Lord. Wow, we're going to take a quick break when we come back on If Not For God with Michael Zwick. We're going to tell a little bit about how people can support your ministries. We're going to be careful the information we give out here, you know, like websites, Facebook pages, because our listeners really love supporting and our sponsors, you know, the gospel going out. There's nothing more powerful than supporting someone than giving money to people. People are pushing, putting bills in my hands to give to you earlier. They say, give this to this guy, because we know that that's going to help him and you save souls and reach souls for Jesus Christ.
So we'll be right back after this quick break. How is everyone, every Christian, a missionary? Famous quote by one of our Truth Network pastors who said, Every single believer, or really every single human being, is either a mission field or a missionary.
This is If Not For God with Michael Zwick. I am in, Stu Epperson, kind of sitting in Robbie's chair. We're sitting at Dario because there's a fire right near the Truth Network headquarters. So we're at our Dario studio after Wednesday Word.
We had some 60 guys in here getting in the Word. Justin popped in for us. Cousin Brian, some great guys. Jamal, awesome.
Joe Sperley. Just a great group of guys. We're talking about the glory of God. And one of the awesome things about the glory of God, Michael Zwick, is the glory of God is manifest, personified in Jesus Christ.
That's right. You know, John said, We beheld his glory. And when we present people, Jesus to people, we are presenting the glory of God. We're presenting the only one with whom the Father was well pleased.
That's right. When you come to Christ, you receive him, you suddenly have the favor of God upon you. And the only way to be accepted by God is through his perfect sacrifice, Jesus Christ. If Not For God, Michael Zwick. Michael, we've got some awesome men of God who are missionaries.
One of them is going way far away soon to plant churches in Southeast Asia. Can't see a lot about him. We're calling him Jay. The other guy's first name is Jeremy, but we can call him Jay too. It just kind of fits.
And, of course, the king of kings is Jesus. But what are your thoughts talking to these guys, man? Well, you know, in case anybody's wondering why we don't have the other Jay in the video, he is so good looking that he would have millions of young women just following him. And we want to keep it focused on Jesus.
The dating sites, all that stuff, we just kind of keep it clear here, you know. At least we can come up with these zingers like that. But, yeah, I mean, so we want to keep it focused on Jesus. But, you know, one of the things that I was thinking about over the break is there's a story that I heard, and I do believe it's true, but Napoleon, during one of his battles, his side was losing and his side was losing bad. And so what he said was he called, he sent somebody to go down to the bugler and to blow the bugle for retreat, to retreat. And so nothing happened. Five minutes later, he said, I'm going to send somebody down again.
Nothing happened again. A third time before he was going to send somebody down, he said, this time I'm going to go myself and I'm going to go down there and tell the guy to blow the bugle to retreat. And so he goes down to the kid and he says, I don't know if you heard this or not, he said, but two times and now this is the third time we've told you to blow the bugle because we need to retreat. And, well, the kid looked up at Napoleon and he said, well, sir, you've never taught us how to blow the bugle to retreat. And Napoleon said, I've never taught you how to blow the bugle to retreat. And the kid says, no. And Napoleon says, well, blow the bugle to charge. And they charged and they won the battle that day.
And just as that same thing with Napoleon, Jesus never taught us to retreat. But sometimes we do have obstacles. Now, Jay, you've never had an obstacle, have you? Never. Never.
Not once in my entire life. In fact, no, definitely plenty of obstacles. Even in getting over there this past year, I wanted to take like a two-week trip just to kind of, basically you're just looking at the ministry and everything that you're going to be doing over there, looking at the people that you're going to be working with. But even those obstacles, it's like, it's that whole story of, I forget how it goes, but basically the point is like good day, bad day.
I don't know. Because a lot of times the things that you look at that are supposed to be bad things in life are actually the things that made you the best in your own personal life. So it's easy to picture the things that we visualize and say, oh, that's awful. That stinks that I couldn't get to go over to Southeast Asia this whole past year. But at the same time, the things that you learn from those times and having to be centralized here on the East Coast here learned a ton of things. Good year, bad year, I don't know.
Really, it was one of the best years of my life. There's no activity or no movement that will receive more antagonism and literal hate from the forces of hell. They will do everything they can to stop the spread of the gospel. Honestly, if you're comfortable and cozy in your Christian life, you're probably not sharing the gospel with someone because that is prayer warfare. Because the enemy does not want the seed of the gospel to go to be planted in the hearts of men because what will happen, that's the only thing that can transform the power of the gospel. I said, I'm not ashamed of the gospel. This is the power of God unto salvation. Jeremy, you have found that I'm sure, I mean, there's probably all kinds of obstacles of waste, just like your brother in Christ, Jay, who you met for the first time today, but you're both going to spend eternity in heaven together.
It's kind of neat. And you're both doing, he's going, but you've got all these international kids coming to you. But every force in hell is trying to keep you from doing what you're doing. Talk about the obstacles to that. Well, to start with, I'm working with students and a lot of them can just use the excuse, oh, I'm busy with my PhD, I'm so consumed with this schoolwork. And yeah, we live in a society where it's just always, we got to be on social media, we got to be doing things, but for them to miss the big picture. And so that's what the enemy uses. He uses distraction. Yeah, sin sends people to hell, but ultimately distraction sends people to hell.
He's distracting us. And so that's a big obstacle. And then just living in this culture where there's a lot of antagonism toward Christianity, there's a lot of challenges with that. And yeah, now there's this, you know, they, what's the term? They cut you out.
They push you out. Cancer culture. Cancer culture. Cancer culture, yeah, that's right.
Talk about anybody, but don't talk about Jesus, right? Exactly. That is, that's, you know, we're coming to a day where, you know, I'm learning from Voice of the Martyrs. That's a great organization. And, you know, what they've said is, this will equip you to pray for people overseas who are being persecuted, but also persecution is coming here to US and we got to be prepared to make a stand for who we believe in.
Right. I mean, as a matter of fact, you know, our friend, Jamal Dubbs, who comes over to the Bible studies on Saturdays, he shared something today and it was by the Southern Poverty Law Center. And it said that there's groups of people who are hate groups.
And one of the groups that it says is people who are not affirming of the LGBT community. And so, you know, well, the Bible says one thing about marriage between a man and a woman. And so when you believe the Bible nowadays, you know, then a lot of times you're going to have people come against you. But when we were talking about these spiritual attacks, I mean, the Bible clearly warns us about it. Ephesians 6, 12, it says, for we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness and high places. But, you know, the Bible also says that greater is he who is within you than he who is within the world.
Jesus never told us to be afraid of the enemy. You know, he said that, you know, with the power of Jesus Christ that we can overcome the darkness that is in this world. And Jay, can you think of a time where maybe the enemy has tried to come against you, but through the power of Jesus you've been able to overcome? Yeah, there's plenty of times where people have tried to come through and change the way that we've been able to do our ministry. You know, ministries in general, there's a lot of things that will happen that shade us in a bad light. You know, there's a lot of things that even people within certain ministries can do that can turn people away from Jesus. Even people within your own flock that you have to make sure that don't have any wolves that are in the pack. You know, you have to always be watching out for false prophets and people who you might have trusted them to further the gospel. Everyone that is in the body of Christ is trying to do what they can to further the mission of God, to take part in the Great Commission. Michael Zwick, host of If Not For God, you just read Ephesians 6-12. It's a fascinating passage on the armor of God.
It really is. And then Paul's going to get into, you know, this whole idea of taking the helmet of salvation, right? The sword of the Spirit, the shield of faith, the breastplate of righteousness, all these great, you know, and then the feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace.
These two guys have beautiful feet. They're going and taking the gospel, right? Jay to Southeast Asia, to people who've never heard about Jesus. And Jeremy's got them coming to him, who've never heard about Jesus, from these other lands, coming to get an education in America.
And little do they know they're going to meet a guy that loves them, who's never met him and doesn't share Jesus with them. But at the end of that passage of spiritual warfare, Michael Zwick, Paul says, pray for me. And he enters, he gives us one of the most powerful weapons of warfare in the whole Bible. After he gives the sword of the Spirit in all these ways, he says, praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit. So he's always saying, praying, right? And then he says this, he says, and pray for me that an open door, that utterance will be given me, that the Lord will open a door. Maybe we could ask these guys how we can pray for them. Let's maybe enlist our listeners in the most powerful practice there is, the power of prayer, singing the throne of God.
Yeah. I mean, and since you mentioned that, it's funny you mentioned it because I have recently been studying revival. And what starts at the beginning of every revival? How do these revivals get started? And before every revival, every one that I've studied, it's where people have come together and prayed. We talk about, we need to do this.
And I agree with that. There's plenty of stuff that we need to do. We need to share the gospel. But without the Spirit of God and without God moving in the land and moving in the hearts and minds of men, nothing will happen. So how can we pray for you guys?
Yeah, I'll start. Just pray for unity. Jesus prayed in John 17, my prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who believe in me through their message that all of them may be one. Father, just as you are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. Please pray for unity. The devil will attack teams. The number one reason missionaries leave the field is because of team conflict.
Please pray for unity. The other thing is just pray for the gospel to be out. Something that we really kind of go back to is a story in Acts where in just two years, all of Asia Minor, and at that time there was between 8 and 12 million people, all of Asia Minor heard the word of the Lord. And you think, how did that happen in just two years? They didn't have Instagram or Twitter or any of these things. But you know, it was passed on of word of mouth.
So from one to the next to the next. So our goal is to share the gospel and when people come to know Christ, we want to immediately train them to share their faith with people they know. So just pray that as we share the gospel with people that we would find those who are ready, that it would fall on fertile soil and that they would receive it. But they would not stop there, that they would share it with their sphere of influence, that they would grow in the Lord and that they would be strengthened in the Lord. And that's Jeremy serving international students coming to America to get education. He leads them right to Jesus with his ministry. Can you give any information about how our listeners can support your ministry, Jeremy? Like is there a website or an email or something specific that they can do to connect?
Maybe they want to support you financially or especially in prayer. Yes. So the best way to give, the easiest way to give is online. But if you go to RaleighGrace.org.
RaleighGrace.org. Okay. They can give and they can find out a little more about your ministry there, huh?
Right. You can click on the give tab and I have my name down there and there's some other ways to give. So yeah, you can text to give, you can mail, you can do online. There's options.
Okay. And that gift is going to help this guy reach more people with the good news of Christ. You got to pay for Bibles.
You got to do all kinds of stuff. You got to support your family. And how about you, Jay, heading to Southeast Asia as we wrap up If Not For God with Michael Zwick.
Jay, how can we pray for and then financially support you? I think you might have a Facebook community that people are allowed to go to. Can you talk about that or point our list or guide us in the right direction?
Yeah. So that's basically the way that I do it because we have a very similar website that people can do that on. But I can't really give the name of the organization because it would all connect everything. So basically what I do is I direct them to my Facebook page, which is called Journey to Asia.
And on there, that's where I do my weekly updates. But that brings me to my big prayer request. And that is if you're listening to this show and you are thinking about wanting to pray more fervently for someone who is ministering cross-culturally, I am looking for more prayer warriors on my team. I'm looking for a prayer team that is 100 people strong. Right now we have 66 people that have committed to pray 10 minutes a week for the different prayer requests that I put up there. And so the big one this week is the visas that are coming in.
It's just very practical. The visas are supposed to come in in 10 days, but it might not. So we're asking for prayer just that everything would go smoothly with the visa situation. And then also so that we can buy the plane tickets in the future. The one thing that is additional onto the other podcast that we've done is I just started my own podcast.
So that would be a good way for people to get connected too. It's basically a way I can offer back to people supporting me. I give a podcast back to them. And I do a monthly podcast. What's it called? It's called The Filling Station.
So basically what drives you, you know? Fantastic. Thank you to awesome to Jay. Big thanks to Jay and to Jeremy for coming on today and sharing their passion.
What would you say as we wrap up? Yeah. I mean, you've heard the, I just went to the website on its journey to Asia on Facebook and RaleighGrace.org. Go to the websites, support them, help them out. We can all do something. We may not all change the world completely ourselves, but we can all do our part.
And so I just encourage you to get in on the excitement of doing your part as well. If not for God. If not for God.
