Be the Bridge

Jesus said, Blessed are the persecuted and they are suffering big time right now. This is Bible League International and 19-year-old Aria was beaten by her own father and violated by local authorities. You know what her crime was?

Simply that she gave her life to Jesus Christ after leaving radical Islam. They need Bibles in order to endure and persevere. And that's why Truth Network and Bible League are teamed up to send God's Word to 3500 persecuted believers around the world at $5 a Bible, $100 since 20. Call 800-YES-WORD, 800-YES-WORD, 800-YES-WORD, or give at TruthNetwork.com.

Not key to Kolov, the Russian nightmare, no the devil's nightmare. Hear from it's time to man up. Challenging men to step into their true manhood. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few seconds. Enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening to the Truth Podcast Network. I want to end by telling the story of the Ghost Writer.

I want my story told, warts and all. God's Word didn't whitewash the shortcomings of His people but it shows His glory shines through ordinary people when we come to know Him, love Him, and serve Him. Amen. And I want to read the subtitle here, Closing the Gaps to a Divided World. This is a fact, we'll take a picture of this for everyone to see, but this is a fascinating picture of a regular man who's literally a human bridge between two different sides of a cliff, you know, and different people, groups, and everything, racial and all that. And you say underneath here, racial, family, religious, global, social, personal, next gen. Let's talk about racial, let's just jump right into it.

Let's just talk about the elephant in the room. I mean, nowadays, you know, more and more churches are talking about, hey, we need to desegregate our churches, we need like, black and white need to come together, and other ethnic groups, and the Hispanic population is really surging, and American, we need to pull together, we're one in the body of Christ. Now, I know there's still racism and all that, but in the 1960s, when you are a born again man of God, loving Jesus, taking Bible classes, and you are suddenly find yourself marching with MLK, and you find yourself showing up after, you know, trying to desegregate things, and say to people, hey, listen, we need to love our neighbors ourself, you got a not so nice message from some guys outside your apartment in a dark alley that could have killed you.

Yes, they could have. About 11 at night, coming back to campus, three Ku Klux Klan men sabotaged my car, and then they beat me up, bugged me, left me black and blue on the pavement, but God was at work, even in that, to show that his concern is that, as it says in Revelation 7, 9, that his kingdom is included men and women from all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues. And something that sets you off on that, and it's really interesting, is a lot of people, when they go to, like when my brother-in-law went to Cuba, he came back and said, wow, they worship, and they worship strong, and it's the most interracial, integrated church I've ever seen, but it's centered around Jesus.

Racial reconciliation, just for the sake of racial reconciliation, doesn't get you anywhere, because all of a sudden, well, hey, black and white, we love each other, but you know what, you're a Yankees fan, I'm a Red Sox fan, now I hate you because of that, because you don't have Jesus as the nucleus, right? So you went to Jamaica, and you found yourself surrounded as a young, white, rural farming dude who loved Jesus. You find yourself surrounded with a bunch of folks that don't look like you, and suddenly, you had an epiphany, and that changed your whole life. Yes, it did, and I discovered, Stu, that God is a global God, and he's calling us to be global Christians, and I met people in Jamaica, I had no idea that he was the God of the whole world. That stretched this 20-year-old kid tremendously, showing me that he's a global God, and he's calling us to be global Christians.

And so you really challenge people in this book to do something as simple as taking a missions trip. And I love how, for decades, you went on a missions trip every year, you took your family, you went to Russia. It's interesting, this whole book is eclipsed by, here to the beginning, you're beaten up by the Klan for reaching and loving folks that are another people group, and yet, toward the end, you're beaten up, maybe nearly arrested by the KGB in Moscow.

Right, indeed, they weren't happy that we were there. We had to meet with the communists, and yet, God opened that door in the 90s to share the good news of Christ, and there was spiritual hunger. I had no idea, I'd never seen some spiritual hunger face to face, eyeball to eyeball, people saying, tell me more, sharing with some nurses. I said, what do I say to these young nurses translated says, share the gospel, we've never heard it. And as we began to share the gospel, the nurses began to weep, I says, what's going on? She says, they're repenting, don't you know? We, we just were amazed by the spiritual hunger. I love it, let me ask this very simple question.

Maybe you should have asked it out of the gate, but let's jump into now. The noise, by the way, a bunch of brothers in Christ are fellowshipping, encouraging each other, praying together, there's a lot going on here. Ballerination's over there, praying with some guys. We got some, the Lord's working in here, and Bill Greenwood's right in the middle of it. Pastor Jacob, you're a younger guy, a pastor, you love Jesus, what's it like to see a guy like him?

He's, he's got more tread on the tires than you. He's out writing books about missions, about reaching the world for Christ. How encouraging is that for you to see a guy like him? It's super encouraging, you know, I, I know that there is a huge problem with racism going on in this world, and just to hear about somebody who for all these years has gone out onto the battlefield, fighting against Satan, alongside people who don't look like you, it's a huge encouragement, especially coming from somebody like me, because before becoming a Christian, I was a neo-Nazi skinhead, and I hated anybody who was not white, and I hurt a lot of people, I got involved with a lot of the wrong people, and I intentionally set myself against people who didn't look like me, but upon becoming a Christian, that hatred completely melted in an instant, and just weeks after becoming a Christian, I found myself down at a convenience store down in Meisenheimer, North Carolina, and I have, I'm covered in tattoos, and I have a lot of skinhead tattoos, and things that promote the Nazis, and I was sitting in line, and I heard somebody behind me say, what, are you some kind of skinhead? And I turned around, and here's this man towering over me, probably a foot and a half taller than me, about 100 pounds more than me, big black man, and here I am thinking, all right, well, I'm gonna die today, and instead of that happening, I got to tell him what God had done in my life, and how he had transformed me, and took my hate, and turned it to love, and I got to pray with that man right there in the store, and the lady behind the counter came out, and she prayed with us. God does amazing things, and can set people free from that, so what's going on in the world right now, and what you're walking through, and what you're encouraging people to do, this is real life stuff, where real people are leaving the hatred behind, and are being completely transformed by the power of the gospel. Right, yeah, I saw that in London with a Ethiopian Tigrayan, he was from Tigray, a part of northern Ethiopia, he said, you Christians have something, you have a glow about you, how do I get that, I want that, and I was able to help lead him to Christ. He says, this is what I've needed, this is what I've been looking for, so mission trips enable us to meet people on the very front lines who've never heard the gospel. I mean, it's just amazing what that does to you to see people from all around the world recognizing who Christ is, and coming to him, having their lives transformed. Well, and your book is a really, and I don't want to say too much, we want people to get to know you enough, Bill Greenwood, Dr. Bill Greenwood, the college professor at the highest level, but you embody in this book that life is a missions trip.

It is. So literally, our next meeting after this little interview is a missions trip, it's because we have Jesus in us, and people out there need the Lord, right? So what a brilliant picture in all of your journeys, whether it's substitute teaching, whether it's teaching Bible, where you find yourself in all kinds of, I just am amazed at the life experience of this man, but you're also, you're trying to give back. I heard Dr. Jeremiah say just recently at a big event we had in Raleigh, that he said this, he said, look, he said, retirement's not in the Bible. He said, you can't retire from Jesus. How do you retire from Christ? If he's in you, you're always going to be, and he was talking about, he was on the stage with Bill Gaither. Both men like in their 80s, of course they were having fun at who's older and all that stuff, but talking about, hey, look, we're still here, we're still alive, we're still going to share Jesus. And that's kind of a theme I see here that you're trying to pass on to the next generation.

Talk about that. Yes, yeah, we have been the recipients of God's outrageous grace, and we're to pass it on to others. They've invested in us and we need to invest in them. Paul says to Timothy, the things you've heard of me, the same, commit, entrust, pass along to faithful ones who shall be able to teach others also.

You know, I'm just a pygmy standing on the shoulders of giants, Stu. And I record this in the book, Be the Bridge, available on Amazon. So when you get it, read it, write a little review on it, help the word to get out to others. It's amazing what God can do for ordinary people.

He delights in using ordinary people. Well, maybe we can bless Pastor Jacob with a copy. I know he'll be encouraged, and he'll also like to have a older pastor, mentor him a little bit and encourage him. And we're doing little pastors get together at the Truth Network, energized ministries kind of in our North Carolina office on October, I think the 20th, which is a Thursday for lunch. And so I'm going to make sure, we'll be with David Jeremiah that night in Greenville, South Carolina, but I want to make sure both of you come to that to encourage each other and bring some books.

The book is Be the Bridge, Closing the Gaps in a Divided World. Of course, Jesus Christ, the ultimate bridge builder, he came, he's the bridge to life. There's a great gospel track by that title. And he came because we couldn't get to God. And so he made a way when there was no way. And if you don't know Christ, like Paul says in second Corinthians chapter three, turn to the Lord and the veil will be lifted.

And it'll open your eyes, right? What's your final challenge as we get out of here? Well, I'd say, let God, ask God, use me in ways that only you can do, all for the fame of your name. Wow, to the glory of God. Thank you, Bill Greenwood, for this wonderful book, Be the Bridge, and get this book, bless someone else with it. And this is a great, this is like a Hebrews 11 guy here.

It's a hall of faith that we got to learn from guys like you and you also skinned your knee a bunch. You talked about things you said and did and courting and dating and going to school and teaching and learning from this and that, and things you wish you had to do over again, going into Russia and seeing the poverty and seeing Christians over there on fire for God with so little, we have so much, yet we're so cool, callous. And so you'll love this book and you'll love meeting, encountering Dr. Bill Greenwood and his story in Be the Bridge. For Truth Talk, I'm Stu Epperson. Be sure to download the podcast of this, share about our podcast network, Truth Talk. We have shows for all kinds of, including the KGB agent who converted to Christ and now he's planting churches and supporting pastors in Russia. Went from killing pastors to supporting them. And you'll also hear some messages we do from Dario, where we are now, where all that noise is, at truthnetwork.com and the Truth Talk podcast with Stu Epperson. God bless you, thank you to all of our awesome affiliates for caring, for being brave enough to carry this program. This is the Truth Network.