NRB Chronicles 2020 (last Year) What Are The Stakes

Well, how fun! We are still here at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention on the convention floor, and God sends us so many people where He's taken His passion and used it to build the kingdom, and I am with Steve Hemphill, who is like, oh my goodness, somebody, a man after my own heart. His passion, in a word, might be spiritual warfare, but nonetheless, I think a great way to start out this, like, I'm sitting here with a bunch of tent stakes. Now, these are no ordinary tent stakes, so maybe you can tell the story about these stakes. Okay, it's a bizarre story. The stakes are high in this one. The stakes are high. I like the pun.

I'm not as stinky as you dumb I am. I was a, my sound kind of went away. There, it's back. I was a, raised in an extremely conservative Christian home, which I'm happy about and proud of, but I'm sort of the last guy you should hear miracle stories from. But I was writing my second book, which is called My Search for Prayers Satan Hates, and I was, I love the cover, too, by the way.

It's got armor and yeah, I know the artist who did that. He lets me use that great guy, Bill Osborne. But anyway, I was writing this book, and I wanted to share prayer success stories from the 30 years I owned a technology company. And as I started to write these stories and realized how active God was in my life and how he helped me through so many things, I prayed a weird prayer.

I pray weird prayers all the time. I like that. And this one was, Lord, please give me something to put in this book that really, truly helps people.

That was my heart's desire. And that's when things started exploding. One of the leaders at my home church called and said, Steve, is it true that your next book is on spiritual warfare? And I said, yeah, why? He said, I got a buddy I've been trying to bring to Jesus Christ for 25 years, but the guy's been mad at God about some things that happened long ago, and I wasn't making any progress. But right now he has a spiritual warfare problem, and I'm thinking maybe this is our chance to convert him. Would you be willing to talk to him? And I said, well, sure.

I don't know if I can help or not. So I go and meet Bill, and I look at Bill and say, what's this spiritual warfare problem you got? And he looks at me dead serious and says, I have demons on my property, and I'm getting ready to commit suicide. I just wanted to talk to you first.

Talk about pressure. So I started what I call panic prayer. You know, he begins to describe all the reasons why he thinks there's demons on his property, and I'm just panicking, saying, Lord, tell me what to say. I don't know how to help this guy, and he's going to kill himself. He's not a Christian.

Please tell me what to say. And as soon as I prayed, a strange verse from Deuteronomy chapter 6 popped in my head, where it says, you're living in a land full of evil. By the way, I think we're living in a land full of evil. You're living in a land full of evil.

Be sure and put my word on your gates and doorposts. And the Jews didn't say, oh, that's just symbolic. You don't really do it. No, it's a real thing. It's called the mezuzah, and they still do it. And it's not a magic box.

It's a symbol of their covenant relationship and connection with God. And so I'm trying to think, how do I apply this in this modern world? And it clicked, and I said, Bill, don't kill yourself yet. Let's try something bizarre. You know, the Bible's full of bizarre stories. There's talking snakes, walking on water, resurrections.

Why don't we put Bible verses on some tent stakes and hammer them all the way in the ground on the four corners of your property and read the verses together and pray for God to make it stop? And he looked at me and he said, okay, I'll try anything. And the story's too long to tell now, but when we did that, everything changed. He said the atmosphere changed. I can tell you his attitude changed because the next week he wanted to be baptized, he and his wife. And all of a sudden he wants to be a Christian named Jesus Christ.

So because I'm raised so conservative and I'm thinking, how do I write this story and not look weird? That's my literal thought process. My wife's a sixth grade math teacher. She's in the kitchen cooking supper, and the phone rings and she answers it. And this other teacher she knows said, Mary Lynn, is it true Steve's next book is on spiritual warfare?

Yeah, why? I got to talk to him right now. Can I come over right now? And Mary Lynn said, yeah, yeah, come on over.

What is it? She had been on a mission trip with her church overseas, and now for the first time in her life she's having terrifying demonic nightmares every night at exactly 3 a.m. on the clock. And she's scared to go to sleep.

It's gone on for six weeks. She doesn't want to tell anybody, afraid they'll think she's crazy. She says, what do I do? And I said, well, I never heard of demonic nightmares. Describe that for me. And when she described it, I later found a Bible verse that was almost word-for-word what she was saying. And I never saw that before. It's Job 4, 13 to 17. Job 4, 13 to 17, NLT says, it came to me in a disturbing vision at night when people are in deep sleep. Fear gripped me and my bones trembled. A spirit swept past my face.

My hair stood on end. That's Job 4. And that's what she's describing. And I just looked at her and I said, well, Victoria, I don't know how to help really except Bill was going to kill himself and we put Bible verses on tent stakes and everything changed.

He became a Christian. She said, okay, I'm going to do that. So she drove to Army and Navy, bought some stakes, wrote verses all over them, and she's going to move so she wants to take them with her. So she stands them in her apartment, in the corners of her apartment. She just read the verses out loud and said, Lord, we want to bind anything causing these nightmares and make it stop in Jesus' name. And then she went to sleep and never had another nightmare. And then, I'm trying to make a long story short here. Then the idea sort of exploded. I got invited to stake out a public school where they were having a lot of problems and the guy causing all the problems died suddenly or the heart attack.

He's in his 30s. And people start calling saying, hey, Steve, how much are your stakes? I said, I don't sell stakes.

Go make your own stakes. What do you make them out of? How long are they? How far apart are they? What color are they? What verses did you use? How many verses did you use?

Do they go all the way in the ground or part of the way in the ground? What if your property is not square? And I'm laughing at all these questions and telling my men's small group about it on Thursday mornings. And finally, they looked at me and they said, Steve, we've been thinking about this. And you walked away from a good salary and now you're a ministry and you have no salary and you've got some books, but maybe this is God's way of giving you something that helps people and helps you too. We think you ought to sell stakes. And if it's from God, you can't stop it.

And if it's not from God, you can't make it successful. You're not a good enough salesman. So they talked me into selling stakes. And one of the guys had a machine to make thermal labels that could attach to them that are very durable.

They last 10 years in the weather. And so I started selling way more stakes than books and people started calling me with story after story. We were about to get a divorce and we staked at our house and a peace came over our house and now we're reconciled and everything's great. We staked at our church building and the giving went up and the elders meetings are shorter because the problems went away.

I can't make this stuff up. And so finally I got a call from the camping company in New Jersey where I was ordering these stakes and putting the stickers on them. And they said, sir, we just called to tell you we just canceled your last order for 700 more stakes.

We don't have any more. We don't know what you're doing with all these stakes, but would you please buy them somewhere else? And that kind of shocked me. And I just said, okay. And two days later I get another phone call and this guy goes, is this Steve Hemphill?

Yes. He said, are you the guy putting Bible verses onto tent stakes? I said, yes, sir, that's me. He said, I'm a plastics manufacturer and we'd like to make them for you. We made the cup for the Dallas Cowboys games. And if you look on the bottom of the cups, there's words. We do that by building a mold or having a mold built that has engraving in the mold.

So when the plastic pops out, it's part of the stake itself. You wouldn't have to put stickers anymore. And I said, wow, that would be really cool.

I said, how would it work? And he said, well, you have to go buy the mold and then bring it to us. We just make the plastic items. We don't make the molds. And I said, how much is a mold?

Because I'm in ministry. My salary is actually zero. And he said, they're about $10,000. I kind of caught my breath and I said, thank you for calling. Have a nice day. He said, wait, wait, don't hang up. What are you doing with all these stakes?

You're buying 700 at a time. And I started telling him stories. A lady with agoraphobia for 22 years, fear of crowds, all of a sudden she's cured.

Nothing else helped. A kid with autism and other mental disorders, I don't know how many of those are connected to the demonic, but I guess some of them at least are. And so after five or six stories, he said, stop, nevermind. I'll pay for the mold. I said, sir, you don't even know me.

And he said, I know God. This is God's thing and I want to be part of it. So, so far I've ordered 67,000 stakes.

We've shipped them all over the world. We staked out my hometown of Longview, Texas, which has 83,000 in the northeast corner of Texas. Crime had gone up for 27 years and it was the highest it ever been. We staked out January of 2017 and crime dropped 45% in 18 months. The police chief found out and he said, can I give you eight addresses to stake out where we're having daily calls for violence from gang problems? And I said, sure. So I called the group. We had 40 guys and it was eight different city blocks all over town.

We staked out all eight and crime stopped in all eight locations. You can't make this stuff up, but I'm going to tell you, God's word is still powerful. He's not the great I used to could.

He calls himself the I am because he still does. And I'll tell you, we staked out the White House before the last election and we were praying about abortion being stopped and we staked out the Supreme Court before the Kavanaugh hearing and we believe God's going to overturn that soon. That's our prayer.

So that's an overview. The stakes are high, Steve Hemphill. The stakes are high.

That's where the name of this book is and I'm like, oh my goodness. And I'm standing here holding these stakes that he can pry out of my hands because I know where these stakes are going. And you can make your own. You don't have to have mine.

I tell people that. God gave me the coolest stakes of anybody, but it's not the stakes. These are patriotic stakes. They're red and blue.

Well, blue for heaven, red for the blood of Jesus. That's how we did that. Thank you, Steve, for being with us today. That's so much fun. You're awesome, man. God bless. Thank you so much for being with us today, Steve.