Unshakable Kingdom

This is Rodney from the Masculine Journey Podcast, where we explored manhood within Jesus Christ. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few seconds. Sit back, enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and choosing the Truth Podcast Network. This is the Truth Network. He's got over a million views of his videos.

God's using him to pray for people, to bring people to know Christ, and he has quite a remarkable testimony too. He is Justin Neup and Mike Zwick. You introduced me to him, and Mike's a regular contributor to Truth Talk. You have an amazing show called If Not For God, and maybe we can play bits of this on there too. Mike, set this up for us.

Set the stage. Well, I want to clarify something. He has 50 to 60 million views, so it's not over a million views. Well, that's over a million.

Of course, I could have said over 10 too. Well, now it's a little loud. Tell everyone why it's a little bit loud. What just happened in this restaurant in Dario? We had an amazing, amazing Wednesday in the Word. You brought the Word, and actually Justin closed us out in a powerful prayer, but Justin did not go looking for Jesus. He has sort of an amazing story.

Is that right? Tell us your story. How did you come know the Lord, Justin? Yeah, so I didn't grow up with any kind of church or religious background or anything like that.

I wouldn't call myself an atheist. I was more of a skeptic, but living that lifestyle, I actually moved from New York to North Carolina at the age of 15, continued to live in kind of my rebellion, kind of my dad was an alcoholic, his dad was an alcoholic, so I was drinking at a young age, actually at my first drink at the age of 10 years old. So by the age of 13, 14, I was already partying like the lifestyle of someone you would see in college or something like that. But something happened to me. I actually met a girl, and in that lifestyle, obviously, I met a girl, and on a one-night stand, she became pregnant, and that kind of flipped everything upside down for me.

I actually moved in with her mother, and this is where things changed for me. So at this time, now I had people praying for me, and so one day I was walking down the hall, and something pierced my heart, and it was just this thought that came to me. It said, Justin, if you continue to lead down the road that you're walking, it will end in destruction. Now, I was 20, 22, 23 years old and never picked up a Bible, so I didn't know any scripture, and later I find out that this is actually in the Bible, and so this convicted me for the first time. I had experienced guilt before but never conviction, so I dealt with this thought that basically haunted me for about two to three weeks until I went to actually visit a local church in Graham, North Carolina, waited for the pastor to get done with his sermon. I chased him down at the end, probably the only person that actually came up and begged him for salvation.

I don't know if you've ever had an experience like that. That's not supposed to happen in church, is it, Zwick? Well, what's interesting, because what happened is you told this story, Stu, about how Moody, Dwight L. Moody, the week before the great Chicago fire shared the gospel, and he said, I want you guys to go home and think about this, and next week I want you to make a decision. So every single week that Justin was there, at the very end of the service, he would give an invitation, but not this week.

Is that right? Yeah, that was the first time I actually seen him not give an altar call or an invitation to salvation. And so as I sat in my seat, I was trembling, because now I had to make the move. I had to get up and actually go and pursue him.

There was no invitation. And so I did that. He let me know I had no idea I was a blank slate, so he led me to the Lord. My life radically changed after that.

That was in 2009, March of 2009. 2016, I had an encounter with God that absolutely transformed my life. That's when he began to show me that, hey, some of these supernatural gifts are for today. That was right before we left on the mission field, and we began to see the sick healed. We began to see demons come out of people, and true freedom take place. We began to lead people to salvation.

Just a lot, lot more fruit ended up coming in our lives after 2016. So now you're going on, I guess, YouTube and video and Instagram and other social media, Facebook, and how are you using it? There's so many parents and so many people, old funny duds like me, are like, oh, that's social media. It's a waste of time.

It's a black hole. It's a bunch of people putting food pictures, and then, of course, there's a bunch of inappropriate evil stuff on there too. What are you saying about how are God using you to redeem that, Justin? Yeah, what I would say is social media is not going anywhere, correct? And so we can either hand it over to the world, who is the main influencer of our children, or we can try to utilize that for God's glory, because we know that this generation coming up is going to be receiving most of their information through things like YouTube shorts and Facebook reels and all this short-form content. So what I do is I looked at Jesus's ministry, and I saw that Jesus spent some of his time speaking to the multitudes. Some of those from the multitudes came closer into his discipleship. They wanted to know more, and then even closer into his 12. And so what I do is I use the short-form content because it has far reach to reach the millions, right? Out of those millions, you're going to have a percentage of those people that are actually going to come a little bit closer and go, let me more.

So I get messages online from different states, hey, what's going on? This video really touched my heart. Can you let me know more? We'll bring them into some of the more long-form content. And then from the long-form content, we have people that reach out to us personally and say, hey, can I come visit? I would really love to know more. I would really love to go to one of your church fellowships.

I would really love some prayer. We don't have that. We don't have community. And so now we have built this web, this community that actually extends all around the world, relationships with people. Because what we want to do, what our main thing we want to do is we want to encourage people. We want to stir people up into action with their faith. We want to let them know that you don't have to be some special person to go out and share your faith, to pray for somebody, to lead somebody to Christ.

We want to know that every single Christian is capable of doing that, and we've seen that happen. I love it. Michael Zwick, you're excited.

You're jumping up and down. Thanks for introducing me to Justin. He did a great job with us today. Shared some neat things. We talked about how God's grace is sufficient. How have you seen the power of the gospel change lives, Michael Zwick, through him, through your ministry, through your YouTubes, through prayer? What is God doing? Well, it was all divinely orchestrated. We have a mutual friend, Annette Noel, and she had told me, she said, you've got to meet this Justin guy. I had always heard about casting out demons. I've read it in the Bible at talks about it, but I think one of the things that Justin said is that there's many verses that we read in the Bible where instead of saying, no, that's not true, you said we just skip over that. Is that right, Justin? Sure.

Absolutely. For me personally, I started reading the Bible and I realized that there was a huge gap between what I saw in reality and what I was reading in the book of Acts. So my prayer became, God, if this is actually real, if this stuff is necessary for today, will you please close that gap? I say, be careful when you pray that prayer, if you pray it sincerely, because he will begin to close the gap. And like I said, just like we talked today, by his grace, he began to create and orchestrate situations where we were with a person that we could not physically help in the flesh. And so when you begin to put yourself in situations to where it's only God who can help that person, and you say, God, only you can do this, you'll begin to see him show up in miraculous ways. And it gets controversial because some folks are like, oh, that stuff doesn't happen today, or some folks like the gifts don't happen today, but we know God's in the business of doing miracles. And I don't know any Christian, by the way, and there's Christians that may say, well, the sign gifts aren't in operation, the actual sign gifts, but there's also, every Christian believes they're in operation, but some say, well, they're not actually going, but no Christian denies the miracle of God's salvation because when someone is saved, that's a miracle. That's life to death, isn't it, Zwick? You're absolutely right. And I've seen a lot of miracles.

It's funny. I heard people talking against him. They saying that he focused on deliverance and stuff like that. And now people are saying that I'm just focusing on healing, but the purpose of deliverance, the purpose of when Jesus ever healed somebody was to point that person to Jesus. It's not to point that person to me. It's not to point that person to Justin, but it's to say that this stuff is real. Jesus actually said in the Bible, he said, if you don't believe me for the words that I say, he said, believe me for the works that I do because they point to Jesus.

Yeah. And it's not like what you're saying, even for people that may disagree, it's not like you're worshiping the sign itself. I mean, by definition, a sign is a sign that points to, so like how many of us are driving down the road and we stop at this sign that says, take this exit for McDonald's or take this exit for Dario. And we just stand in front of that sign. We're not going to get our hunger filled.

We're not going to get satisfied. It's a sign. It's on posts.

It's still a mile away from where the actual exit and restaurant is, but it points. You're trying to lift up Jesus and God's giving you these different ways to do it. That's right. Everything that we bring, everything that Jesus brought when he introduced the kingdom, when Jesus came, he said, the kingdom of God is near, right? Repent and turn from your ways into the kingdom. So he was inviting people into the kingdom family. And the way that it worked in those ancient times was when they would send people out, just like the Bible calls us ambassadors, we're representing a kingdom that is foreign to the people we're ministering to.

Correct. So when we bring that kingdom, Jesus not only taught in word about the kingdom, but he expressed it through these signs and wonders. For example, he healed the sick because in his eternal kingdom, there will be no sickness. He cast out demons because in his eternal kingdom, there will be no bondage, right? He raised the dead because in his eternal kingdom, there will be no death.

So these were all expressions that people could actually understand, grasp onto. So they know when they enter into the family, the kingdom of God, this is what their future holds. I like that. But even someone that's healed now, they're going to die by 150 or 200 years old or something. At some point, the death is real.

We're in a fallen state. They might get something else. But the important part is that through all of this, the soul gets exposed to the gospel and the grace of God and salvation, right?

That's absolutely right. And so, you know, it's funny, the Bible talks about that there's different gifts that were given. Some have the gift of healing. Some have the gift of teaching. I believe you have the gift of teaching, Stu. And many of us have many of the gifts. I believe Justin has a lot of the gifts.

John Perry over here has a lot of the gifts as well. But we don't look at one gift that says, you know, people look at the mouth as the most important gift. Like the preacher, somehow he's better than everything. That's not true. We all work together because we are one body.

That's the body getting plugged in. What's your challenge to everyone going to hear? Maybe someone's like you or they're running around. They're sitting there under conviction, but they haven't given their life to Christ. What would you say to everyone listening out there? Maybe that even doesn't even know the Lord. Yeah, I would say the most beautiful promise in the Bible is that if you seek him, you will find him right. If your heart is sincere with humility and you seek him, you will find it. Great promise because I'm not worried about people seeking God genuinely and not finding him. He's looking for those that will turn to him. So I say start with seeking God. Humble yourself, seek God, get into the word, learn who Jesus is, get your theology, your understanding of what the Christian life looks like from the Bible, right?

Make sure it lines up with that and then go out there and start extending that to others. Justin, how can people find you on social media and view your cool videos and stuff like that? Yeah, so we're on four social media platforms right now. You can find me on Facebook under my name, Justin Noop. You can find me on YouTube under the name Unshakable Kingdom, on Instagram under Justin Noop, and then on TikTok under Justin Noop.

And Justin Noop is K-N-O-O-P. And it rhymes with hoops and I like that because I'm a baller and Baller Nation is too. Man, God bless you. We'll look you up and we'll get some, we'll get a picture too for everyone to put on the Gram to meet you. Okay. Awesome. This is the Truth Network.