Interview with Robby Part 6

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Stories of hopelessness that turn to hope. Here is your host, Mike Zwick. Alright, If Not For God with Mike Zwick.

I'm back again today. I wanted to let you guys know this Sunday, which is going to be tomorrow, February the 19th at 11am, I'm going to be preaching at Northside Baptist Church in Greensboro. So, I'm going to be preaching on healing and I'm bringing some friends. We're going to be praying for the sick. I've seen a lot of knee problems immediately go away.

I've seen a lot of back problems immediately go away. And the Lord is healing people, despite the fact that I'm praying for them. I'm the one who's praying for them. They're getting healed. And so, if you need healing in your body, please come to Northside Baptist Church this Sunday, tomorrow at 11am. And you'll get to meet me there and some other friends as well.

My friend, Jason Hamlet, and many others as well. You'll see Pastor Steve Goode. But today, Robbie and I are going to be looking at James chapter 1. And I've got the ESV version of the Bible pulled out. So, if you have your Bibles, and I hope you do, James 1, starting in verse 2. It says, Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds. For you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given to him. But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord.

He is a double-minded man, unstable in all of his ways. And, you know, Robbie, when I was looking at this, there were really kind of two parts to this that I was looking at. The first part is obviously when count it all joy. When you meet trials of various kinds. For you know the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. But even as I go into this new season of healing, and I'm praying for the sick and seeing them healed, and just miracles are happening, and putting them online, and it's building other people's faith. The more that I seem to grow into the Lord in this area, the more kind of opposition seems to show up from everywhere.

And unfortunately, Robbie, we were talking about this before, but sometimes the opposition comes from those who are the closest to us, who can hurt us the most. But, you know, even though that's the case, I'm glad that the Lord is doing this work, and I see him moving fast. But yeah, the Bible is very clear when it says that we will suffer persecution as a Christian. We will go through tough times. But what I'm seeing is that when I keep my eye on the prize, yes, the opposition is going to come. Yes, the trouble is going to come. But if I stay focused on Jesus, I'm not going to let the enemy kind of push me off course. Have you seen that?

Well, it's, you know, that idea of not having a prophet in his own land. So, you know, when you're around people that know you well, you know, they've seen all sides of you. And, you know, there's some implication that you're involved in it, but it's actually, as you pointed out so well, it's not really you that's doing the healing. You're just helping point people to the one who does do the healing. And that passage has always been very precious to me.

You will find it written in my journals when I was diagnosed with cancer. I wrote it before I was healed because I realized, man, let me think, how am I going to consider this to be pure joy? But in so many different trials that you go through in your life, you know, you'll find it is the worst of times, but it's the best of times, right?

That in so many different ways, what God taught me in that season of my life was spectacular. But if your faith isn't tested, you know, you can't end up like that wave, like the sea. In other words, you know, it's only when He teaches you, like if you came in with your faith already set, He can't teach you a whole lot because you're full of faith, right?

But that isn't the way it works, right? He's going to grow your faith. And in order to grow your faith, it indicates that at some point in time, it wasn't as strong as it once was. And so, you know, that idea of doubt that he's using in that is a spectacular word from the standpoint of understanding how horrible it is to find yourself in that place where you lack faith, right?

Because if you can imagine... So what do you mean by that exactly? What I mean is that if you look in Habakkuk chapter 2, it describes, you know, how the righteous will live by faith, right? But it goes into contrast in the fourth chapter, the very verse, it says the righteous will live by faith.

It first starts talking about a puffed up man and actually how that a lack of faith leads to Adolf Hitler kind of character. Because what happened, like with Cain, after you murder somebody, right, you begin to get more apparent because you had no faith that God was meeting your needs. Like Cain lost faith, right, in God. And then he lost faith in his brother. And so he killed his brother.

And then what? He was even more scared and all the other men in the world were going to kill him. If they find me, they're going to kill me.

He's looking over his shoulder everywhere. Well, then I better kill them before they kill me. And the more people you kill, the more you need to kill. And the next thing you know, you become what they call bloodthirsty. Because there is no place on earth that you feel safe.

Yeah. I mean, when you're talking about this, I'm reminded, we've all had our moments of crisis or moments where we're saying, God, is this real? Am I crazy for believing what I do? And so when I first became a Christian, I was in my early 20s, and many of my friends were atheists. And I believe that I heard, I think it was Dr. Michael Youssef who we interviewed on the show a while back. Really nice guy. But he said, if you become a Christian and you're trying to figure out how to get rid of your friends who are not Christians, he says, let me tell you what to do. He said, you start telling them about Jesus. And he said, you won't have to worry about getting rid of them.

He said, they'll get rid of you. And so I remember when this first happened, I was in Raleigh with my friend, I won't mention his name, with my friend who is not a believer, as far as I know, is still not a believer. And there were a few others there as well. And they were making fun of Christianity. And all of a sudden we were in this guy's apartment and I sat there and I said, well, I'm a Christian. And all of a sudden it got so quiet, you could hear a pin drop and they died laughing. And immediately after that was done, I said to myself, that's it?

I thought it was going to be worse than that. That's it? That's all that you've got? You know what I mean? And so, yes, there have been times in life where it's been tougher than that. But, you know, I think sometimes what the enemy uses is it reminds me of the little tiny dogs that you would see sometimes.

And I've sold insurance for years. And you get a huge dog who really can pack some punch. A lot of times he's kind of sitting over there and he's pretty quiet. But you get these little tiny dogs who can't really do much of anything, but they can bark louder than anybody. And so the enemy, what the enemy uses to bark, I believe, Robbie, is fear. And if the enemy can get you in a state of fear, panic, consternation, whatever it is, where you're afraid to share the gospel with people, where you're afraid to let your light shine down, then he's won half the battle. I'll tell you a story. Many years ago, I was on a mission trip with a young lady. And she had said that the Lord had showed her a vision where she had gone into this church. And it was in the bottom part of the church. And she said that she saw that children were actually being molested in this church. I don't know if they had a daycare. I don't know where. And I don't even know where this lady lived.

OK. But she said that she actually, after she had this vision or this dream, she went into this church. She didn't know that this was the church. And everything that was in her dream or vision was the same as this church was. And she started to see it.

And she says, well, God, what do I do? And so what happened immediately after that was that she went to she was laying in bed one night and all of a sudden she became completely paralyzed. And she could not move for 30 minutes. And she said that either I think it was her husband at the time or her fiance, he had come over.

They were over doing something or whatever. And she said that that she was just laying there and he just started to speak the name of Jesus. But for about 30 minutes, she was I mean, I think all she could move was her eyelid. She couldn't even talk. And so finally the Lord the Lord broke through and she was able to come to. But what she said was she said after that, she said, I was going to have nothing to do with that. And so for me, you know, I'm sorry that she was paralyzed temporarily for 30 minutes. But that was a case where the enemy actually won because the enemy scared her into thinking, hey, if you keep if you try to pursue this thing or you try to go down this road, I'm going to get you.

And the Lord had clearly shown her that for a reason. But, yeah, we're going to receive some opposition. But, you know, I have to ask myself this as well, because I'm not perfect and I've made mistakes. But will I bounce back when I receive opposition or will I continue to do the work for the Lord?

Robbie, I think you were kind of pinned between a car one time. Yeah, I was right after the cancer thing. That's all in my journal. But it's critical because as you begin to lose faith in God. Then you begin to lose faith in others as you do that. You know, you you become to start looking over your shoulder because you'll start talking bad about others.

And as Jesus pointed out, that's the same thing as murder. Right. And so if you're talking about others, you're wondering if they're talking about you.

And the next thing you know, you're looking over your shoulder and you begin to talk more and more. And that in and what happens is your as your faith erodes, you get to this place of doubt. And that person that James is describing right there, that doubts God.

Right. It's it's it's like gets you to this place of like total paranoia, like I can't trust anybody. Well, then you're in fear, right? If you're in fear, how much faith do you have?

And you can see the dwindling spiral of what's going on there. So it's a fascinating to me to just look at that passage. It says, consider it pure joy when you faced trials of many kinds. However, in the Lord's Prayer, lead me not into temptation or as Jesus told his disciples. Right.

When they went into the Garden of Samity, what are you supposed to do? Pray that you don't fall into temptation. So there is a point of confusion for me.

It has been until recently. And I began to understand the difference. See what Jesus quoted to Satan. If you remember when he said you want to jump off the temple here, he said you don't test the Lord your God. So there's a difference between me testing God to see if he's going to come through for me. Or God testing me to see if I'm going to continue to know that he's going to be there.

Right? It's a beautiful difference. And so I don't want to fall into the place where I'm testing God to see if he's going to come through for me. Because then I end up where Eve was like, God's not enough. Cain was, God's not enough. Which gets back to Paul's thorn in the flesh, right? Like, my grace is sufficient. It's enough for you, Mike. So if you've got this situation, A, my grace is sufficient. But B, you know that God is going to work this in some way that it's going to be great.

Yeah. You know, it's funny you're talking about that because I heard something on Christian radio today and I thought it was really good. It was the music station, I think it was K-Love, but they said it was the guy, the disc jockey, what did he say? Traitor, you were listening to K-Love.

I was listening to K-Love. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stu, hold your ears. Yeah, there you go. No, but what the guy said was this. He said that faith can move mountains. But he said something else after that that was good. He said, doubt can create mountains.

No, it does. See, the Word of God has a lot to say about faith and so, and I'll tell you, you know, kind of what we're talking about is overcoming obstacles, I guess, in a sense. And many of the obstacles the enemy throws at us, many of the obstacles, Robbie, we create for ourselves.

Sometimes we cause our own problems and I've got three fingers looking back at myself, pointing back at myself. But, you know, one of the things that Jesus was very clear about and one of the things that he talked a lot about was having faith. As a matter of fact, here we are, right here. We've got Mark 11, 24. Therefore, I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it and it will be yours.

Here's another one. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his spirit and your inner heal and your inner being so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, Ephesians 3, 16 through 17, and I love this verse right here. Hebrews 11, 1, it says, Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. And I love Hebrews 11, 6, it says, For without faith it is impossible to please God. 2 Corinthians 5, 7, and I saw a lady who had a tattoo of this on her foot one time, it says, For we walk by faith, not by sight. You know, but the Bible is very clear that we do need to have faith because, you know, if you think about it, you know, it was Mark chapter 4. And in Mark 4, Jesus is talking about the four seeds.

Do you know what I'm talking about, Robby? Right. And one of the seeds, it says… The parable of the sword. Yeah, one of the seeds was thrown out, and here, I've got it right here. The seeds are faith, by the way.

There you go. And again, Jesus began to preach by the lake. The crowd that gathered together him was so large that he got into a boat. In verse 2, it says he taught many things in parables and said, here it is, verse 3, Listen, a farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly because the soil was shallow, but when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. Still other seed fell on good soil that came up, grew, and produced a crop, some multiplying 30, some 60, and some 100 times.

So three out of those four people, three out of those four different types of people, you know, nothing really good happened. Now, some of them, it looked like for a little while something good was happening, but then the worries of life came along, and they fell away. And we've all seen Christians like that who get excited for a while, and then something comes up, and they're off to the next thing. But Jesus said that 25% of the people who we share the gospel with, or 25% of the seed that we sow in that parable will bear fruit.

And it's going to bear 30, 60, 90 times. And so, you know, I imagine so many times I go out and I share the gospel, Robbie, so many times I'm excited about Jesus praying for the sick, and sometimes I see nothing. But I wonder if the person who shared Jesus with Billy Graham, I wonder if they thought, oh, man, this is another one. I wonder if the person who shared Jesus with Jerry Falwell, his mother was praying for him for years, didn't really see anything, if she said, oh, this is probably a waste of my time. But we never know when we're going to meet that one person who, when we share the good news with them, and they get excited and on fire for Christ, they're going to bear 30, 60, or even 100 times.

Yeah, but, you know, for me, there's also a gigantic opportunity for those other three out of four that didn't receive it. And that those first ones that are in the rut, you know, they're in the road, which, you know, you keep going the same way, you keep doing the same things because it seems to work for you, you get in a rut, right? And so if you're going to receive the good news of the kingdom, your soil needs to be tilled a little because you're in a rut, you know what I'm saying? Well, Jesus said something about making disciples.

Right, right. And so that parable, you know, I've heard it taught, and I believe it's true, that that is more than a parable. That is like a true description of human beings in that we are dirt, right? We essentially are soil, and those seeds essentially are faith, and to an extent, when we get hard, and I've known some hard people, and even people that would be fruit-bearing Christians that have gotten hard, there's still opportunities, right, to get new seeds of faith in areas, you know, just like on the idea of healing. There's people that are unbelievable, growing, wonderful Christian, but if you talk about a healing of some kind, you know, their skin starts to crawl or something happens, you know, they're like, oh, well, bring on the snakes, you know, whatever it is. And what happened, and this is what I'm finding out, is that a lot of those people who are very funny about the subject of healing, a lot of them, they had a bad experience.

And I'll give you an example. My mother would go to these places where there were healing services and this and that, and my grandmother had a, it was a, some sort, she couldn't hear very well. And so they went up there, and the guy prayed for her, and he did something with her ears, I don't know, the doctor told her this later on, but where immediately after he prayed for her, he held her ears in and did something where it would help her hear, and she was able to hear immediately afterwards, and they were so excited.

And then when she got to the car, she couldn't hear anything anymore. So many times, I would say this, if you have something against healing, you know, look at what the Bible says about healing. Does the Bible say that, hey, we'll pray for the sick and we'll lay hands on the sick and they will be healed? Well, yes, it does. Just because you had a bad experience does not mean that everybody who prays for the sick and see them healed, like I'm seeing right now, like you've seen, where you were healed of cancer.

You know, I went to a bad restaurant one time, but I'm not gonna say that all restaurants are bad. That's right. But no doubt that people have ruts in their faith wherever they might be. And so, disciples are learners, right? But if I've already learned something, then I stop learning because of my cup's full. And so, the idea of that hard, like that hard soil, it's something I've got to continually cultivate myself.

I'm just talking about I can't control anybody else, but I can certainly control me that I've got to remain, you know, a wine skin that somebody could pour a little wine in because otherwise, if I get hard, right, I'm gonna crack if anybody puts anything new in me. And so, not that I need to not discern what I'm being told, but I still need to be good soil. And that doesn't just happen like a good farmer is gonna tell you that the soil, you got to keep working on it, okay?

And then, what? He's got to keep weeding too, right? Have you ever met a farmer that didn't figure out what he was gonna, you know, in other words, it was a continual job because how many weeds grew up with me and you in the last day or two? Oh, yeah.

And they sprout up constantly. Well, you know, the, and I heard this years ago from, it was a guy named Jim Rohn. He was, I guess, sort of a motivational speaker. I don't know if you remember him.

He taught Tony Robbins. But he said, when you go into a situation, he said, there's some people who say, I don't see the weeds, I don't see the weeds, I'm gonna ignore the weeds or whatever. He says, if you do that, then your grass is gonna be overgrown with weeds. He says, you have to find the weeds and pick them out and get rid of them. But on the other hand, we don't just focus on the weeds. We don't focus on everything that's bad in our lives or everything that's bad in this world.

I was talking to you before about this. There is a revival that is happening right now in America. And it's a huge thing over in Kentucky at Asbury University. And students, thank God for young people who are on fire for Christ. It started off, they have their three times weekly chapel and there was a revival over there in 1970. Well, they had their normal chapel as they usually do once, twice or three times a week. But after this one chapel, they didn't leave and a revival started at this place.

It's been 24-7 now for over a week, okay? You got people from all over the country coming to Kentucky to see this. And it's students, it's college students, praise the Lord. There's older people coming. I mean, there's other people coming as well, but it's college students.

And now it's spread to other college campuses, it's spread to Mississippi. But one of the things that I've heard a lot about, because we've talked a lot about revival, is that this next revival that was gonna be coming was not gonna be one person. Everybody coming to look at one person, but it was gonna be groups of people and it was gonna be the Lord who was going to bring this. And in this situation, it was absolutely the Lord.

There was nobody else. And so, but what reminds me of is we see this and we go, oh, well, this just spontaneously happened. Maybe it did, but maybe it didn't. Maybe it's been the years and years, Robbie, that you and I and others have been praying for revival and now revival is actually happening. So yes, I don't want you to stick your head under the sand. I don't want you to ignore everything, all the problems that are going on in the world.

You watch the news and it's bad news. But I do want you to focus on Jesus. And I do want you to focus on the work that He's doing, because if we're just focused on everything that is wrong, I believe we may miss our blessing. Yeah. So you definitely got the weeds, right?

I mean, you got weeds, you got hard soil. And so it's a constant thing in order to keep our, I like to call it butt dust. Our butt dust is the way that the Lord would have it, because I want to be a learner today. And so, you know, as we're talking about this, and some of you out there are still, you know, there are people that believe in Jesus, but they've never received Jesus. In other words, oh, yeah, I know there's a Jesus and I know there's God, but have you ever accepted like, okay, that blood's for me?

Yeah. Like, I need that forgiveness. I never realized how bad I need that forgiveness. Well, there's rarely a day anymore that I don't see how bad I need that forgiveness. I mean, oh my goodness, do I do boneheaded things?

And I need it desperately every day. So if you're listening and you need that blood, you see, it is by faith that you're saved. That's right. Yeah, it says, you know, a Bible verse that actually came to me earlier in the show, and it's James 4.14, and it says, And so when you realize how short life is and how long eternity is, eternity is forever. So even if you live 60, 70, 80, 100 years on this earth, it's nothing compared to all of eternity. Now, the Bible says that for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.

And so that's the good news. If you trust in Jesus, then you will be with Robbie and I and hopefully the rest of the folks at the Truth Network in heaven for eternity. But it says in John 3.36 that if you have not believed in the son, you have been condemned already.

One of the things that I've seen with people, Robbie, is they say, well, I've done too much. God would never accept me. Well, actually, if you're saying that, you're actually close to where you need to be, because Jesus said there were two men who went up to the church one Sunday.

He says one of them said, God, I thank you. I'm not like this other man. I'm a pretty good person. I tithe.

I give 10 percent of my money. I don't commit adultery. I'm a good person.

Thank God I'm not like this other guy. The second guy sitting over there beating on his chest can't even look up and says, God, have mercy on me, a sinner. If you'll just sit here today and you will say, God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Jesus, forgive me of my sins.

He will forgive you of your sins. Give your life to Jesus. Get a Bible. Start reading it. Get into a good church and a group.

Contact us if you need to, but trust in Jesus. Yeah, so wonderful. It's kind of like I want to say, if not forgot. So. You. This is the Truth Network.