Gaining Greenbacks With Gas Prices - Classic Show from 2014

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That's 1-866-348-7884. What does being a Christian have to do with buying a car? You're about to find out. Here's your host, Robby Dilmore. We're going to be glad you tuned in to The Christian Car Guy show today for a number of reasons. We are going to be searching, searching, searching. Searching for the best gas price, that's right.

We're going to save you some serious gas money, but that's really not the best part. Just a little bit before the bottom of the hour, we are going to reveal to you, the Christian Car Guy audience, the exact location of the Ark of the Covenant. Over the centuries, many have searched for the lost Ark.

Searching, searching, searching. And just a little bit before the bottom of the hour, we are going to reveal to you the exact location of the Ark of the Covenant. God showed me something yesterday morning that just made me want to jump out of my seat. And I came down to work, even though it was the Fourth of July, and I spent the better part of three hours detailing a map of what God had revealed to me. And so at the bottom of the hour, that's going to post at christiancarguy.com. I don't want to spill all the goodies at the beginning, but the map will post and we will share with you where, and then no, Sean Connery is not involved, neither is Indiana Jones.

Where is the Ark of the Covenant? So, it's also Jesus' Labor Love Saturday, and we've got our good friend Jerry with Raised Body Shop, and Jesus has been busy. Single Moms and Widows is busy. Absolutely, you know, there's plenty of need out there. And you know what, it's such an awesome ministry, and I know you promote it. You know, this is your brainchild, as a matter of fact. And you know, God just works in such a wonderful way, and for people that have the ability and service centers to be able to extend Christ through a simple thing that they're able to do.

I mean, it's pretty neat, and some of the stories are powerful. We love to highlight that on the first Saturday of the month. It's free car repair for single moms and widows especially, but also any family that's in crisis, a veteran, something like that.

You send in the need, you go to christiancarguy.com, click on the Labor of Love, and then we ask all these partners that work with us, and sometimes out of the network, like we're going to talk about here shortly, if they will supply the labor, if the applicants can supply the parts. And again, you can find out more about that at jesuslaborlove on christiancarguy.com, and we're going to get to that some. But also, very fun today, I'm very excited, I've got Rick Molesky here. Now I said it wrong, I've been so... No, it's Molesky. Rick Molesky. You've been so fun, haven't you? You've been so good all morning.

Practicing, practicing. It's Rick Molesky, and Rick, as a hobby so to speak, he's taken on this GasBuddy thing. Some of you may have the app on your phone, you may know how you can save big money on gas through using GasBuddy, finding the best gas prices. So we're going to talk a lot about GasBuddy, we're going to talk about some of the secrets to saving on gas, and we're going to be sharing that today. But again, we've got this really special appraisal by the Real Black Book, that's where we search the Bible for hidden treasure, cry out for discernment, lift up our voice for understanding. And I do want to reveal that at the bottom of the hour to leave plenty of times to discuss all that this revelation of the exact location of the Ark of the Covenant, what that means to you, how you can apply that to your life. I'm going to just revel in that, I'm actually leaving for vacation right after I get off the air, and we will be enjoying going sailing. And I'll be back to do my show next week, so I'm going to be gone from the studio, but I'll be here, Jerry.

And so anyway, again, all this is going to be at the website, ChristianCarguy.com, and it'll be up a little bit later, as well as the Jesus Labor Love, Karen Mulder's Wisdom of the Wounded podcast, if you can't hear the whole show, or you want to hear about this and you can tune in later, you can go to the website, the podcast, all that information is going to be there. But jumping right in here, we want to talk about this GasBuddy situation, and Rick, tell us, you got involved in this, what, a couple years ago? Yes. A couple years ago, my wife and I got these new tablets, we don't have smartphones yet, but we got these tablets, and I thought that I've been a GasBuddy user all this time, so I thought I'd jump in and see if I can actually use them to actually do some price reporting myself, help some people save some money. So, and I don't know if you've seen this app, you can get it on your smartphone, you can get it on a tablet, it's really a cool thing, it has people that go all over the place, and they report back what the price of gas is right in your area. And so, you know, I've checked it out since I found out about this and what Rick was involved in, actually I have it on my phone, and sure enough, the place where I normally get gas is right there on my GasBuddy app, and it shows the gas is about two cents cheaper than all the gas stations around it, which I've never understood as long as I live, why certain gas stations?

Have you ever been able to understand that? I know, you sit there and want to be across the street from the other, and I'm thinking, why would anybody go over there? But they actually have volunteers across the country, I suppose hundreds of thousands of folks, that are calling and reporting this every day what the price of gas is going on, right Rick?

That's right, you can go to the website or go to the app and find these prices, and if you're a member you can report them, you can report them as a visitor too, but it'll say visitor, not your handle. But anyhow, that's the main benefit of it, is that it puts information in your hands that normally only the gas station owners and the oil companies know, so you can actually use that knowledge that you didn't have before. I mean everybody knows pretty much where your local gas prices tend to be the lowest, or what areas are the lowest or so forth, but what you don't know is when you're out traveling, especially a place that you're not familiar with going, you don't know necessarily. My wife and I went on a trip to Virginia last month, we knew generally speaking that Virginia has lower gas taxes, so they had lower gas prices, but we were able to go just a little bit out of the way into this one town that we would normally go around, and when prices were in the 320s, most other places, we paid 315.

There you go, and again, it's ChristianCarguy.com, you can see there's a link there to GasBuddy if you need that app for your phone, and the nice thing about having it in your phone is it knows where you are based on the GPS feature in your phone, and so it can tell you, hey, within 2.2 miles, here's the gas here, here's the gas there, and all those kind of things, which leads to the question that I've always pondered. I really have pondered this for years, and I never have sat down and actually worked through it, so I did it this morning, how far should you go to save two cents on a gallon of gas? What's the math on that?

How does that work out? If I can save 15 cents across town, is it worth me driving five miles, or if I can save 10 cents, is it worth me driving three? What's the exact math on that? So I sat down this morning with calculator in hand and understanding what I know about miles per gallon and mileage and time and all those, and I did all the math, and then I posted it all at ChristianCarguy.com to say, okay, this is how far you should go to save on gas. And what I came up with, actually I surprised myself, but there is a very simply put, practically speaking, for every cent you save, you shouldn't travel over a quarter of a mile. In other words, if you're only saving two cents a gallon and you're driving a half a mile to do it, you're losing on the deal.

And so off that goes. There's a great deal of math that goes into that, and I'm going to share a lot of that as we go through the show today, but there's another gas secret. While I was doing this math on how far you should go in order to save on gas, Rick, I came across, I said, okay, this all has to do with time and money, so if I spent 15 minutes to go five miles to save on this gas, how much am I making per hour to save on this gas? So I did the math on that and I went, wow, there's another way that you can save time and money, or that your time is worth more money than driving 15 miles to save 10 cents a mile on gas.

Now if you know me well, and Jared's looking at me like, I know where you're going. The old time, value, money thing. There you go. And we're going to share that, certainly, as we come up.

But let's get into the Jesus-labor love a little bit. We had a lady's car that actually we've been trying to fix since August, and it's embarrassing to say. Sometimes the best mechanics in the world can't figure these things out, and it was a Volkswagen, and we were really, really struggling with it. And this poor lady was so patient with us, and we were trying to get it fixed, and we found another place that might possibly help it. Well, how that happened is I called my good friend, Jerry, at Ray's Body Shop, and, Jerry, can you relate the story from there? Yeah, when Robbie called me, it was a tough situation for this lady because she'd had her car in the shop. And if you're familiar with the Volkswagen product and a lot of the German products and European products, they can have those little tendencies that are tough to find. However, we had a service center that was one of the Jesus-labor love service centers, and they just could not pinpoint or come up with what the issue was with the vehicle.

And it had been going on, as Robbie said, for a couple months. Well, we'll get back to that story, but as we got started looking at it, I knew instantly, dealing with these vehicles, a couple options that it needed to go to. You are only a very few minutes away from finding out the exact location of the Ark of the Covenant, and how to save on gas.

We got so much on the Christian Car Guys show today, you who believe me need to stay tuned. I hear a beat. How sweet, just to register emotion, jealousy, devotion, and really feel the part. I could stay young and chipper, and I'd lock it with a zipper, if I only had a heart. Yes, the exact location of the Ark of the Covenant.

It's in your heart. Like the Tim Woodsman, who, he was trying to figure that out, and I don't know if you're familiar with the Tim Woodman story from The Wizard of Oz, but he got snookered by the world. He thought, wow, if I could just chop wood like crazy, every time he'd cut off, he got bewitched, so every time he'd cut off a limb, you know, they'd put on a tin one. And he went crazy working hard, Jerry, have you ever seen any of that happen to anybody? He could cut some serious wood, because he loved this munchkin girl, and it was going to go great for him.

If he could only cut enough wood to make enough money to build that house and have all that treasure, then he was going to be able to live the dream. And then he chopped his body, and the tin man left out the heart. But interestingly, similarly to Jesus, he got this special touch that ended the curse, and he found out what it was like to have a heart. And you got one, too, when Jesus came in there, and you think about it, okay? In the Holy of Holies, that's behind the curtain, you got the Ark of the Covenant. What did the high priest have to do every year? Come in there, and he had to sprinkle that blood, right?

And who have we got? We've got this great high priest, right? And I was thinking, wow and double wow. God said he would write his law on our hearts, right, Jeremiah 31, 33? And you know, you got those tablets, the tin, guess what, that's written in your heart.

And he also said that he would hide his word in your heart. You see, that's the manna. It comes down every morning, and you can go gather as much as you want, and it's sweeter than honey.

And it goes right into the jar, right inside your heart. And it's there to spiritually grow you. But actually, as cool as those are, my favorite one is the rod that budded, right? He looked inside the Ark of the Covenant, what was in there? The rod that budded, the manna, and the law. That rod that budded, according to Matthew Henry, he taught that that rod is a picture of Christ. And the reason he said that is Aaron's rod was made of the almond tree, and the almond tree is the first to blossom, and it's also the first to bear fruit. And Jesus was our first fruit. But he also said that that rod was the same one that Moses used to strike the rock, and streams of living water came out of it, you see.

And so, in John 7.38, Jesus said, Whoever believes in me, the Scriptures have said rivers of living water will flow from within them. So think of this rod that you've got. You've got Moses' rod right there in your heart, man! And if I can take that from my heart to another person's heart, their heart of stone now will flow with living water. Did you get the picture?

Rob, is that like, we have a responsibility here? Well, the neat thing about that rod, do you remember the varple sword in Alice in Wonderland? And if you remember the famous line, the varple sword knows what it wants.

She had to face the Jabberwocky, and this thing looked scary, and that varple sword took after the Jabberwocky. But how cool is this? That rod that you have in your heart, that one that budded the first fruits, that is like the varple sword, man, and it knows what it wants. And you'll be talking to somebody, and all of a sudden that rod, you can feel it well up and it's just burning in there. You have got to share what it is, the living water that's in your heart, and by striking that other person's heart of stone, what happens? Is that not too cool?

Wow. You sit there and it's put in that context and stuff. Man, you just realize how awesome the gospel of Jesus Christ is. I mean, how awesome the authority that we have through Christ in us. And there's so many things, and I don't want to rob you of the joy of just spending some time here, and I think it's worthy of spending some time when you really think about the Ark of the Covenant and how much care God took to make sure it was overlaid in gold, and to make sure it had the chairmen up there protecting it, to make sure that the high priest came in and kept it holy. All those things, that's how he feels about that heart that's beating in your chest. That part of you that is you, God has... See, the temple was a picture of something better to come.

Well, that something better to come is your heart if it's been touched by that rod. Isn't that cool? I'm telling you, I have just gone crazy about that. I apologize. The website did not post as I had... No, it did. It just posted. So the picture, the map that I talked about, the exact location of the Ark of the Covenant is now at ChristianCarguy.com. That's ChristianCarguy.com. And if you look at this picture, I spent some time yesterday creating this heart with the staff that budded and the law and the manna.

It's in there like Prego spaghetti sauce. So how fun is that, man? And I wouldn't rob you of the pleasure of spending some time there. But also, if you feel led to say something about that, you can call us. We are live today. It is 4th of July weekend.

866-348-788-4866. 3-4-TRUTH. And, Jerry, I'm just, man, I'm going to spend probably the next few weeks just trying to revel in what that means. You know, like I said, when we sit there and we realize what Christ has done for us and what He's installed in us and given us the gift of, that's part of that, when Christ tells us, follow me, pick up your cross, you know what? Part of that is pick up your cross and help carry His. And not just keep it to yourself. I mean, this is in our heart. We don't need the holy huddle. We need to get out and reach out and share that and strike other people's heart and change the world for the gospel of Jesus Christ. And if need be, you know, I'm just saying, Rick, maybe you can turn it into a snake.

I don't know what all you could do with that staff, but I'm going to be thinking about that. Well, we're going to get back to, we're searching, searching, searching for the price of gas. I wrote this this morning as well, that practically speaking, for every cent you save, you shouldn't travel more than a quarter of a mile or you're really not saving. So if you're saving two cents, you can go a half a mile, but it's not really much savings. If you can save ten cents, don't go more than two and a half miles. Or 20 cents, don't go more than five miles.

And here's how that works out. Purchasing ten gallons of gas, and again, this math, you can find it all at christiancarguy.com. I know it's a little hard to grasp because I had to really think through this, but purchasing ten gallons of gas, each cent you save, saves you a dime. In other words, if it's $3.47 and you can get it for $3.46 and you buy ten gallons, you have saved yourself a whopping dime. Now, if it was $3.45 instead of $3.47, now you've saved yourself big money. That would be 20 cents. So if your car averages 20 miles per gallon and the gas is $3.50, then each mile is costing you about 17 cents. So then if you go one mile to save a dime, you lose. However, if you're buying 50 gallons, you have gained a gigantic 33 cents. And if your car gets 40 miles a gallon, you've gained 42 cents. How exciting. You know, I was sitting there trying to think what that would buy, and I can't even think of anything that that would buy anymore.

It used to be. So if you can save that every single week, you get to save 20 bucks for the year. If you're saving 42 cents a week, that's all that that amounts to. But let's say that you can go five miles and save 15 cents a gallon, and you're buying 15 gallons with a car that gets 25 miles a gallon.

That's probably average for a lot of folks. You have now saved $2.25 on the gas. But, challenge, you spent 70 cents to get there. And if you went five miles out of your way, you would have spent 70 more cents to get back. So you've got to subtract that 85 cents, and you wasted 15 minutes. So to do that for a whole year, 52 weeks, you saved a gigantic $44.20. But it cost you 13 hours of your time. And for only $3.40 an hour is all you're making on this deal.

So I bet your time is worth more than that. Well, one of the values of it is you don't necessarily have to go out of your way to save on gas. Yeah, that is the GasBuddy thing. But if it happens to be that you have an errand in that direction, then why not go ahead and save yourself? Oh, absolutely. And that's the neat thing about GasBuddy.

It tells you, this is on your way. You can save five cents. That's a clear deal. You won that. But we have got a real time and money saver coming your way on The Christian Car Guy Show. I've done some other math.

It may surprise you as well about time and money, and we really do want to save you some money. But man, you might want to just revel in that heart picture. Go to christiancarguy.com.

And look at the map of the exact location of the Ark of the Covenant. The grave he rose again And as he stands in victory Sin's curse has lost its grip on me For I am his and he is mine But with the precious blood of Christ He is our high priest. And he's coming in to sprinkle your heart And offer that deep cleansing that John Owen, if you've experienced it, you know what I'm talking about. If you have not experienced it, I pray that you will be touched by that rod To understand what life really means to come out from underneath that heart of stone That really doesn't understand things, doesn't understand what's role in life, why things are coming at us.

It's hard to do when your heart doesn't know how to react, but you will be given this new heart Wrapped in gold with inside of it is the precious manna, is the precious law, and the rod that butted. How cool is that? So we've been searching, searching, searching, and we wanted to get back to our discussion On searching for low gas prices, but there's another angle here that we've got to talk about Because it is the Christian Car Guy Show.

So you knew this was coming. So let's talk time and money. The average person drives 15,000 miles a year And an average of 40 miles per hour, that means you spend 375 hours a year driving, most people do. So if you speed, meaning you go 5 miles per hour over, as many of you do, You will only drive 333 hours, meaning you saved yourself 42 hours a year.

That's less than an hour a week or 7 minutes a day. So you can save yourself 7 minutes a day of driving if you speed 5 miles an hour over. But according to the EPA, and I think this is an ultra conservative view, You are spending about 26 cents more per gallon on gas by speeding than if you drove the speed limit.

Did you get that? 26 cents more a gallon. So when you drove 10 miles to save 15 cents, if you did that exceeding the speed limit by 5 miles an hour, You just messed up your whole world because you could save 26 cents per gallon all year long, Which is a savings of $270 this year.

We're not talking $40. We're talking $270 if you would just drive the speed limit. Now, that's $6.42 an hour.

We're not quite to minimum wage yet. But we can save you big, big, big money if you think about if everybody in this country went the speed limit. And everybody could save that $270. And that money, just a 16th millionth of it, went to the kingdom of God. What could happen if we could just go the speed limit?

You know, Robbie, I'm sitting here as a male, as a man. I'm thinking if I went a mile off of traveling, If I went a mile out of my route to save however much, 5 cent a gallon, I've got to make up that time it took me to go that mile out of my route. What have I just done? I mean, I think it probably just now cost me 36 cent a gallon more just because of, Hey, this is the way I think, you know, I think we all do in a way. And there's no doubt when I see that gas price, if I cross into South Carolina and the price of gas drops 20 cents, My heart leaps for joy.

I'm like, oh, look at this. I'm in gas heaven. But practically speaking, if I would have just driven the speed limit, I would have saved 26 cents a gallon on my way to do that. And I would challenge you that that math is conservative. My math originally, when I did the calculations years ago, because I always said that, you know, with 26 million gallons of gas a week was lost on speeding. You remember, I used to say that beginning. But, you know, when you sit and you see those figures, like at those huge figures, till you break it down to that 26 cent a gallon, five miles over 50 miles an hour.

I mean, all of a sudden that starts hitting home when you start thinking about it. I mean, that sort of brings it back to how that affects my pocketbook. So now here's the good news, right, Rick, is that you have a combination punch because if you carry a gas buddy in your iPhone, and it says you can save 10 cents a gallon, and it's right on your route, and so you check your phone, you go, wow, there it is. I can save 10 cents if I go the speed limit on my way to save that 10 cents. I'm now saving 36 cents a gallon, and what could I do with that for the kingdom of heaven? So there is a way to make it all begin to add together, right? That's right. It's a matter of coordinating all that.

And so the neat thing is there is a combination thing. Saving money is still saving money, but getting your priorities in the place. Now here's the thing about speeding that is on my heart more than any other thing about speeding, is if you are speeding and there is a 16-year-old that is driving alongside of you, peer pressure is phenomenal, and they do not know how to handle that speed. And if you just try going the speed limit for two weeks for me, would you do that? And then notice how many people blow by you and how tempting it is to speed, then think about that 16-year-old who does not know how to drive, and how your peer pressure by you speeding and blowing by them is making them think they need to speed up in order to go with the traffic. And so at some point in time, they may be put in a place where they literally can't handle the speed because of your peer pressure, and I'm not trying to put a guilt trip on you. I am just saying that we're not supposed to put a stumbling block in front of others. And it clearly, I've done show after show after show on this, and I will go on record as saying it is a sin to speed. You're breaking the law. If you were following Jesus, you would be blown by him.

And turn around and look in the mirror. You know, Rob, you just brought up that point about, with the young driver and inexperienced driver, just this past week, we towed in a vehicle that was a young driver following family members on a road that had a drop-off on the shoulder. They went off the road, overcorrected coming back on the road, flipped their truck, and it was just because of the speed. I mean, really, I mean, you know, they were following?

They were following their family? Yeah. Oh, man.

But thank goodness everybody was okay and no one was hurt, but still, it's just that, I mean, we don't think about that. I mean, especially if you're an experienced driver, you don't, you think you can handle that and, oh, if something happens, I can correct it, but. And then there's the habit funk. You know, if you are used to driving, you get in the car and you go, I'm five miles an hour over, that's the habit. And once you've got that habit, then that's a hard habit to break. And you're saying, gee, Robby, you sound like a reformed smoker.

Yes, I do, because guess what I am? I'm a reformed speeder, so I know. And it wasn't until one day a Mocksville policeman had the nerve to pull me over for going five miles an hour over. And he looked at me, I'll never forget, I pull out my license, I'm going five miles an hour over. This is long before I started doing the Car Guys show. He says to me, are you in the habit of speeding?

And I said, no. And he goes, well, you were going five miles an hour over. I lied to remind me, of course I was in the habit of speeding.

And this guy called me up short and little did he know how that would be spouted across the airwaves of the country for the next 20 years. You know what I'm saying? Oh, I struggle with it, I tell you. I mean, I get behind the wheel and it's a race. I mean, I've got to try to get there. It's a race.

And five miles an hour over the speed limit, that's not speeding, right? Anyway, you can wrestle with the Lord on that one, but enjoy some time. Spend some time this week thinking about where the Holy of Holies is, where the Ark of the Covenant is. We have found the location. Go to ChristianCarGuy.com and you can look at the map.

It's showing exact details of where that is. You don't need Sean Connery, you don't need Indiana Jones. You have the Christian Car Guy. Thank you, Jerry. Go to the Jesus Labor Love page, find out what's going on with that.

You can find out about Gas Buddy. Click up and link with that. Thank you for being with us today, Rick. You're welcome and thank you for having me. God bless you. And remember, Jesus walked everywhere he went and got it all done in 33 years. Slow down!