Washed in the Blood? What Christians Really Mean — Plus Paul’s Courage in Acts 23
FULL TRANSCRIPT
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He's just a regular guy with a cool job that God loves for some reason. Welcome to The Steve Marston Show, a daily journey in learning how to live more like Jesus, conversations with those that God is working through, and dad jokes. It's the most unique show you'll hear today. Now, here's Steve. Welcome in. It is a thrill and a delight to be with you. The Steve Marston Show is underway and we have a couple of amazing
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and I'm glad that you're here. Now we have revamped everything over the last couple of weeks and the website has become such a key part of that. SteveMarsdenShow.com is where you can go and literally find so much information about what we're doing here on the program. But it is growing bigger than the program and that's been the prayer to be able to have a website
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that is going to be able to encourage people and to be able to tell these stories that we get to share from our guests and the way that God is moving in and through their lives, even in some of the most difficult and hard situations that you can imagine. All of this is available in one site, stevemarsdonshow.com. And because of the, as I lovingly call them, the computer nerds, they are putting it together so that
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kick the tires you might say. Go to SteveMarsdenShow.com and just click around and see what we have for you because all of our interviews and conversations that we do are posted separately. have full episodes. We have archived stuff and everything is cross-referenced linked together. So you can put in the search box practically any kind of Christian topic that you can think of and we're going to have some kind of resource, some kind of
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conversation, some kind of thoughts for me that will answer and help you in that situation. So it really is going to be bigger than just a website for a podcast slash radio show. We're so proud of it and so thankful that God has been opening these doors. So we ask you to look at it, stevemarsdonshow.com. As we get started today, I wanted to talk about something that happened last night. My wife and I
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are in charge of a college ministry on Wednesday nights. And it's a full circle deal for us. We started in college ministry together. That's where we met and wound up getting married and the whole thing. And now you just kind of almost turn around good. And it's been 30 years. And instead of being at the table, you know, hanging out with friends and trying to learn the Bible, all of a sudden we're on the other side leading the discussions. And it's been a blessing and
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such an honor for us to do that, to be able to listen to these young adults, open the Bible, discuss the Bible, kind of tear it apart and put it back together and kind of wrestle with it and try to figure out some meanings and things. And we have just been incredibly blessed by it. Last night, we came across a section of scripture that kind of stumbled the group a little bit. It's in Mark chapter 9.
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right at the end where Jesus kind of restates something he was talking about in the Sermon on the Mount saying that if your hand causes you to sin, you're to cut it off, or your foot, same thing, cut it off, or your eye to gouge it out so that it's better to enter the kingdom of heaven maimed than be a fully functioning healthy body and go to hell. And we kind of looked at that and thinking
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That on the surface is a hard saying Jesus is talking about. And we were kind of trying to figure out exactly what the meaning was there. Because if you read it, it almost sounds like, well, you need to do works-based things to be approved, to be able to go to heaven. And if you don't do them, you're going to go to hell. And that seems kind of strange because that's not what we've been taught, right?
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So it was a very teachable moment and I wanted to bring it to you as well because maybe you've wrestled with something along these same lines. But when you start talking about Scripture and being able to rightly interpret it and being able to get the correct meaning out of it, how do you do that? Well, one of the main ways is to let Scripture interpret itself. And what I mean by that is, you take a passage like what we're talking about,
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Mark chapter 9 and it looks like one thing but when you compare it to other portions of scripture and you see how everything else is pointing toward grace and pointing toward how we can do nothing on our own to be able to earn God's favor and that's all throughout the book except for this one little section well then that is the red flag for you to say well wait a minute we got to break this down and really look closer at this and see exactly what
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its meaning is and what it's talking about because obviously it doesn't fit into what everything else in the Bible says or at least on the surface it doesn't. I'll give you another example of that. Someone came to me one time and said, you know, David wrote in the Psalms that in sin my mother conceived me and they were asking if David was, you know, an illegitimate child or, you know,
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came about because David's mom and David's dad had sex before they were married and he was born out of wedlock. But that's a hundred percent not the case. How do I know that? Because when you go back and you look at scripture and you see when Samuel came to anoint the new king, he came to David's dad's house and there was all of David's brothers and sisters who were all older than him and
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David was the youngest of seven brothers. So it was obvious that that's not what he meant. He was more saying that, you know, this is a sinful world, it's a broken world. I came into this life born as a sinner and continue to operate in that fashion. So it's little things like that. Being able to identify what Scripture says overall
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and then being able to apply it to other portions. Does that make sense? I hope so. Because that's a huge key in being able to rightly handle the Word of God. And that's what we want to do as believers. As people of faith, as people who want to have a better and deeper walk with Jesus, we're going to have to be able to know these things. We're going to have to take a little time
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to study. the great part about this is there's so many resources to help us right now. I mean, think about 20 years ago, 25 years ago, when the internet was still just in its basic form, it would have been so hard. You would have had to have gone and gotten these great big commentaries written back in the 1700s and whatever. Now everything is online and there's so many good helps to be able to keep us on track and to be able to learn what God says.
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And there's two primary reasons we want to do that. Number one, first and foremost, is for our own walk, our own benefit, to be able to, yes, know Bible facts, to be able to have that knowledge. That's kind of cool and that's kind of neat to have. But the main reason is so that we draw closer to the one who created us. He gave us his word so that we would be able to do exactly this and be able
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to use it to have a closer, deeper walk with Him. And secondly, it's to be able to pass along what we've learned to others so that they can do the same thing. They can know the scripture, know what it says, to be drawn closer to God themselves. That's the whole purpose for what we're supposed to do. It's vertical, but it's also horizontal. And it's up to us to be what Jesus has called us to do. Those disciples...
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that go out and make other disciples. That's our challenge, and that's why this program exists, is to be able to encourage you to get on that road and continue that.
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Thank you for your company. The Steve Barston Show, where faith and fun are both taken seriously, rolls on here. you know, we were talking in the previous segment about how to rightly divide the Word and to be able to look into the Scriptures and find for ourselves what it means and being able to apply it to our own lives. And we've got a free resource that will help you with that. It's Five Tips for Bible Study.
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It's just strategies that you can use when you open God's Word for yourself. It's free for you at stevemarschadenshow.com. said it's just a PDF, so you just ask for it. It will come as a link to your inbox. You just click on it and you've got it immediately. We want to get it into your hands because I really do think it will help you. These are strategies that I have used and I have kind of tailored for my own self. I mean,
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They're certainly not original with me, but they will help you get the most out of your time in God's Word. So again, just look for the free PDF, Five Tips for Bible Study, when you go to SteveMarsdenShow.com. Okay, we've got a brand new segment we want to throw against the wall here. You know, we're famous for doing that. Just trying to throw something against the wall to see if it sticks, and if it does, it'll be something that we'll do on the regular, if it's something that just kind of...
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fall short, well, we'll pretend like it never happened and we'll just move on and keep going. So that's what we're going to do today. And we've got this segment we're going to call, Explain Yourself Christian. And I came across this actually from a chat GPT conversation that I had. I know that sounds weird, right? Just on the surface of that sounds like you're having a conversation with AI. Well, yeah, I have. And
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The conversation was about the radio show podcast and they brought this idea up. I say they because I don't know, he, she, whatever AI is. And I thought it was a brilliant idea. So we're going to try it. The whole gist of it is that we have our own kind of language as Christians. We say phrases and use words that other people on the outside may be going, what?
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Excuse me? Can you run that by me again? But you know what else I found is not only is it outsiders that have a little difficulty understanding, there's a lot of people inside church when you start using phrases and words that will kind of smile and nod and go, oh yeah, sure, right, exactly. And they have absolutely zero clue as to what you're talking about. So let's try this little experiment here.
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This is Explain Yourself Christian. And today we're going to talk about a phrase that has been used in Christianity for literally centuries, and that is, are you washed in the blood? Because on the surface, that sounds gross and just completely awful that you would even bring something like that up. But here's where it goes back to. There was a man named E. Hoffman that wrote the song
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Are you washed in the blood of the lamb? And here is the chorus of that song. Are you washed in the blood, the soul cleansing blood of the lamb? Are your garments spotless? Are they white as snow? Are you washed in the blood of the lamb? Well, first of all, you would think, how can my garments be spotless and white as snow if I'm washed in the blood of a lamb? So let's explain ourselves.
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When you look back in the Old Testament and you see the animal sacrifice system that Moses instituted, it was to take a perfect, innocent little lamb and have it be offered as a sacrifice to God for the people. So it's the innocent for the guilty. And really, it goes back even further than that, all the way to the garden in Genesis chapter 3, when Adam and Eve fail and sin against God.
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You remember they sewed fig leaves together to try to hide themselves and cover themselves. But what happened? God said, no, that doesn't work. And God went and killed an animal and used that skin to be able to cover Adam and Eve. And what did the Bible say there? The only way sin can be paid for is with blood. The remission of sins, the forgiveness of sins can only come by the shedding of blood.
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So we moved to the sacrificial system with Moses and the people would come and sacrifice an animal and it would temporarily be able to cover their sin, but they would have to do it year after year after year. Well, that became a foreshadowing of what was to come. All throughout those centuries of those animals giving their life's blood for the people, then came Jesus. And you'll remember John the Baptist famously said, Behold,
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the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. That's what he was referring to. The blood that was going to be shed by Christ was going to be just like the blood that was shed by those lambs throughout history. However, the big difference is Jesus' bloodshed would be once for all. He would be the ultimate Lamb, the perfect sacrifice. And then we even see Jesus described as the Lamb at the end of the Bible in the
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book of Revelation when he's described as the lamb slain from the foundation of the world. So that's where the imagery comes from. The blood of the lamb in the Old Testament would be able to temporarily cleanse the people from their sins and make them right with God. Then you move to the New Testament. Jesus is the ultimate lamb. And when we, you and I, are immersed
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washed and covered in His blood, that's the sacrificial thing that makes us right with God. It doesn't have anything to do with our goodness, our righteousness, our just being a wonderful human being. That doesn't count. What counts is being a part of that sacrifice and accepting that sacrifice that Christ made on the cross for us, spilling His blood, the innocent blood
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of the sinless Son of God so that it was transferred over to us just like it was back in the old days where it was the innocent for the guilty and now we are washed in the blood of the Lamb. That's how our garments could be white as snow because we are washed in the blood of the Lamb. So there you go. That's Christian Explain Yourself. This has been a fun exercise. I hope you've enjoyed it and I hope maybe you've learned something through it.
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and I would love to get interactive with you on it. So if you've got an idea for this segment, some kind of phrase we use as Christians or maybe a word that you don't really understand and think, what in the world? Send it to me and we'll see if we can explain it. Steve at SalemMedia.com is the email address. Once again, Steve at SalemMedia.com and we'll get to Christian Explain Yourself again next week here on the program. Stay with us.
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More coming up, the Steve Marcin Show rolls on after this.
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The Steve Marston Show continues. It's the only Christian podcast slash radio show that really matters. We're glad that you are bored today. And let me tell you once again about our YouTube page. It's re updated revamped, all for better consumption of all of the content that we have. So we would love for you to check it out because you're going to be on YouTube. So when next time you're there swing by.
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Steve Marston show and click like subscribe all that stuff because it really does help I know it's cliche and everybody says that but it's because it's true it will help grow the show and make the audience bigger and speaking of YouTube channels so welcome in my son Tyler he's got his own YouTube channel 1189 where he breaks down every single chapter of the Bible in video form and it's just an excellent it's an excellent channel is an excellent
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resource for you to help you continue to grow in your faith. So Tyler, welcome back, bud. It's good to talk to you again. Yeah, it's good to be back. How's it going? It's going great. So let's pick up where we've left off. We've talked about the Book of Acts, and you've kind of about halfway or so, maybe more than that right now, through that particular book. And we're up to chapter 23 that just hit.
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not too long ago. So let's give a little preview. What can we expect from Acts chapter 23? Yeah, Acts 23, we're coming to the kind of close of Acts, we're getting there. And so we've been following the Spirit of Jesus, the Holy Spirit comes and fills the disciples at the beginning of the book of Acts, and Jesus commissions them before he ascends into heaven, tells them to go
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all over the face of the earth and priest the good news, priest the gospel saying that Jesus is alive. He came back from the dead, right? And so as we read through the book of Acts, we follow the disciples doing that, doing exactly that. And we begin to narrow in on the ministry of Paul about halfway through the book. And so Paul is this really interesting guy who started off as a Pharisee, started off persecuting Christians. But then whenever Jesus appears to him,
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uh... completely uh... his life completely changes he realizes that you've actually did come back from the dead and so in the last chapter we talked about paul uh... telling his testimony to uh... some judaians in at your room so long who were trying to get arrested trying to kill him uh... and he's trying to defend himself saying hey uh... this is this is
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what I'm about. This is what happened to me. This is how I know that Jesus's gospel is true. And so as we come into Acts 23, we see that because of this riot that's broken out, the Roman soldiers have kind of arrested Paul. And there's been, we see that the Roman soldiers want to learn more information. So they set up this council hearing.
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with the Sanhedrin council who's in charge in Jerusalem. And so Paul goes to defend himself there, but it really doesn't go any better than it did the chapter before. And basically what it ends up happening is that there's this whole internal fight between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and they already have beef with each other. And so Paul, he can see that this is not going anywhere. So he kind of...
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turns the two parties against each other and again is just trying to create just enough of a distraction so that he won't be killed in the ensuing aftermath. so basically all of that is to say Paul's ministry in Jerusalem has not gone well, right? In what you would call successful, right? He hasn't made that many converts, especially when you compare it to places like Asia or Ephesus or
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these other places, you know, there's there's nobody who's been coming to Christ. The church has already been planted there. And, you know, Paul was thinking like, what am I here for? Right. What's what's the point? And is that this kind of moment at one of Paul's lowest moments in his life that Jesus appears to him again? And he says in verse 11, take courage for as you have solemnly witnessed to my cause in Jerusalem, so you must witness at Rome also. And so
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I think really that's the key verse of Acts 23. On the one hand, have, hey, Paul, good job. You've been obedient. I've called you to share the gospel in Jerusalem and you've done that. And, and your obedience is your success. Not anybody's response, not anybody's conversion. You know, the, the obedience to my calling to going to Jerusalem, even though it's a dangerous place and sharing the gospel that is,
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what marks you as a success in my book, right, Paul? And so that's one side of it. And the other side is now in the same way that you've witnessed to Jerusalem, you're going to witness to the people in Rome also. And this is a big deal because Rome is the capital city of the empire, right? It's the heart of the empire. And so if you can get into Rome, if you can start a church there and start changing the lives of people there, you are going to be able to
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spiderweb off of that into every pocket of basically the known world at the time, right, because of the infrastructure, because of the roads, because of the people making decisions, right? And so Paul being able to preach in Rome is a major goal of his. And because of this arrest, because of this kind of riot that's broken out, that's exactly what's going to end up happening. As we see through the rest of the book of Acts, we see that
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Paul is able to make it to Rome. He doesn't go really voluntarily, but he makes it to Rome by the end and he's able to preach the gospel there in the heart of the empire. And so really at a glance, that's the entire book of Acts, but that's what we're focusing on here in this chapter 23. The voice you're listening to is my son Tyler. He has a free YouTube channel called 1189, where he breaks down on video.
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every chapter of the Bible, and we're talking about the latest video that just came out, Acts chapter 23. I want to circle back to something you mentioned in the description of chapter 23, and that is one of the things you do really well is being able to connect the dots on not only how things relate back to maybe the Old Testament into the New Testament, but also just shining light on things that maybe we don't really pick up.
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just from a cursory reading of it. And you mentioned the Sanhedrin Council, and you talked about how those people kind of had beef with one another. Let's jump into that a little bit, because I think most of the time we hear the religious leaders, and we think they're all unified, and they're all against Jesus, and then now they're all against the apostles who are saying Jesus rose from the grave, but that really wasn't the truth. Yeah, far from it. mean, you think about
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our modern context and you think about how many denominations there are and how many people have really intense beef with one another, even though they claim to be, know, both people would say that they're Christians, but there's a lot of bad blood between a lot of denominations. so people, you know, that was just as true back then as it is today, right? And so even though you have all these people who are
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subscribers to the Jewish faith who believe in the God of Israel, the way that that plays out in their everyday lives is very different. And so there were a lot of different kind of sects just like there are today. And so you have the main two players in this chapter are the Pharisees and the Sadducees. So you have the Pharisees. They're a little bit more of the fundamentalists, the legalists. They are really educated.
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in the Old Testament, in the Torah Commandments, and they want to completely obey the letter of the law as much as they can as possible, right? And so, they create these really hyper-specific boundaries on how to interpret the laws of the Torah. And by the time Jesus gets on the scene, he says,
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You you guys have gone too far. Like it's one thing to obey God's commandments, but you guys have placed even more commandments on the people and even heavier burden on the people just so you can get this superficial agreeance. But inside on the inside, your, hearts aren't really changed. You know, your, lives haven't really been transformed. So that's the Pharisees side of it. The Sadducees were kind of the oligarchical ruling class, right? These were the, the elite.
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of the first century Judean world. And so they were kind of in bed with the Roman political powers of the day. This is when you think about the Herod's, all of them were Sadducees. They were working closely with the Roman Empire and overlooking a lot of the atrocities and ungodliness and anti-Torah things that the Romans were doing in order to
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stay in power to continue to have their money and their assets, you know, and things like this. And so both sides, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, hate Jesus. Both sides hate Paul. Both sides hate... But they also kind of hate each other, right? And so what Paul says is, you know, really, I'm on trial for is the resurrection of the dead. Well, that's a doctrine that the Pharisees and Sadducees were split on. The Pharisees believed in an ultimate resurrection, in an afterlife,
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and the Sadducees did not. They didn't hold to that truth. And so that is how Paul really kind of goes on the offensive in his trial and is able to turn them against each other so that he will be spared from these people who were trying to gang up together to kill him. It really is a brilliant move when you think about it as a legal case and a legal drama unfolding before us in Acts chapter 23. But I know
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When we get to heaven, we could ask Paul, and Paul's just like, hey, that's all God, just putting the words in my mouth for sure. But it still was just brilliant the way it all unfolded for sure. So when you're looking at Acts chapter 23 and you see that Paul is at his lowest, Jesus does appear to him again. You made mention to that a little bit earlier. And I just wanted to underline that too, because I thought that was such a key moment, because we always talk about his conversion in Acts chapter 9, where he goes from being
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saw the terrorist, saw the Pharisee, saw the imprisoner of Christians to now Paul the apostle and the guy that we all look up to and think is the greatest missionary of all time. But yet he had his down point and he had a really low period and Jesus came and spoke to him and I think that's something that we may think of as maybe unusual but God will do that for us even here and now.
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Yeah, exactly. I think the key here is that it's a walk with God, right? It's a walk with Jesus. And so from that first day on the Damascus road, Paul has been walking with Jesus. He's been trying to do his will, to listen to the Holy Spirit and obey the things that Jesus is commanding him to do. And so as he's journeying through his kind of career as a missionary and just his life,
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as a Christ follower generally, you know, Jesus is right there along with him. And even at his low points, even at the points where it looks like there's no hope, it looks like there's no way, he has no direction on where to go, it's Jesus then who steps in and tells him where to go. Just like earlier in Acts, Jesus had appeared in a vision and told him to go to Macedonia, right, with the Macedonian man there.
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And so, yeah, I think that's the thing to focus in on. Sometimes we treat Christianity as, okay, I had this one experience. I believe in Jesus now. I've been saved. I've been baptized. And now I just keep doing what I was doing before. Well, no, you know, it's a journey. It's a walk. It changes us. But then it also allows us to continually be transformed, to continually be sanctified as we walk alongside Him.
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No doubt about it. My son Tyler is our guest here on the Steve Marston show. He joins us every week to talk about his YouTube channel, 1189. He breaks down every book of the Bible, that's why it's called 1189, and he does it in video form, and it's really top shelf. And I know you might think, well, it's the nepotism and blah blah blah. Listen, I don't care who's doing it. This is an excellent project, and you owe it to yourself to check it out. So we've covered Acts 23. That's going to be actually just dropped.
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And now coming up, the next chapter, 24, is on the horizon. Give us a little thumbnail of what's going to happen and what we can expect in that video. Yeah, so a whole aspect of chapter 23 we didn't get to is that there's this whole assassination attempt on Paul's life. And because of that, he has to basically flee to Caesarea. The Romans move him there to the palace of the governor. And so the governor's name is Felix.
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Now he's in charge of trying to figure all this mess out and he's got Paul under arrest. And so he brings back Paul's accusers to Caesarea and he brings forward Paul and they both make their defense in Felix's court there. And we get to see how Paul interacts with someone in a position of power, someone in a position of authority. And he's very humble and, you know, obedient. But he also doesn't
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let the foot off the gas, right? He's committed to the truth and he's committed to testifying even to Felix that, you know, Jesus is alive and Jesus is God and Jesus is the King, right? And so Felix, actually what you need to do, even though you're a Roman, even though you're someone high up in the government, even though you have a lot of power over whether I live or die, basically, Felix, you need to give your life to Jesus. You need to accept him as Lord.
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and Savior. And so this whole thing goes on for about two years because as Felix continues to hold Paul in custody, he often will bring him up to listen to him. And so Paul continues to tell him what it means to follow Jesus and try to show him the way and try to disciple him. Now, ultimately, Felix rejects Jesus.
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And that's a tragedy, but it's not for lack of trying on Paul's part, right? Every opportunity he has, whether he's in Asia, in Ephesus, operating as a missionary and with the support of the church and with the support of all the other disciples, or if he's under house arrest all alone in Caesarea with his only audience being the governor of the region, he's going to do what he knows to be true and spread the gospel that's preached.
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the good news of Jesus to anyone who will listen. We've got just about 30 seconds left. Tell everybody how they can connect with 1189. Yeah, you can check it out on YouTube if you type out the words 1189. Again, it's a completely free resource. Honestly, that's what I want it to be for people. We make videos over every chapter of the Bible. And like we said, we've been working through the Book of Acts, but we've also got videos on every chapter of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.
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Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. So if you are in any of those books in your Bible study, or if you want to follow along with us as we go through Acts, consider subscribing to the channel and liking the videos. That is a really good way to help the channel grow. Absolutely. Love having you on, kid. Talk to you next week. See ya.
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Steve Marston Show continues. Discipleship has never been so much fun. Glad to be with you. And I want to speak primarily to our radio audience, although this may be applicable for those of you that are listening on the podcast. And that is, have you subscribed to the Steve Marston Show on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast? Because if you haven't, I really encourage you to do so because
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The downside of radio, as much as I'm a radio guy at heart, if you aren't listening, you missed it, right? So that's where podcasts can fill in the gaps. So if you maybe came in on the middle of a conversation we had with someone and you thought, man, I would really like to hear the entire thing, well, you can by going through the archives of our podcast. Or if you've been listening to our podcast and you just haven't hit subscribe yet, please do that. That way you can stay in the know.
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and be able to go back and listen to things that maybe you didn't quite get everything of, or maybe you heard it and you think, I just want to see if I really completely understood what he was talking about and go back and listen. So it's available for you. Steve Marston Show again, wherever you get your podcasts, please subscribe. It'll help us grow the show and get bigger as we continue to move on. So let's get to the stories that you might have missed.
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This one is interesting. A new study has come out about the reasons pastors consider leaving the ministry. Now, this would kind of shock me a little bit. I wasn't expecting the reason. But 82 % of the pastors who were surveyed said they seriously considered leaving vocational ministry during the past five years because of culture.
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not pay, not anything else, but because of the culture. The findings were from a study conducted by a Virginia pastor, Jared Fabiac, and he's writing a book called Leading Lazarus, Eight Transformational Frameworks to Resurrect Your Culture, and he includes this as a part of his work. And he said in the book that pastors aren't leaving the ministry because they've lost their faith, they're leaving because
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No one taught them how to lead a broken staff, run a hard meeting, or model a healthy culture. Said seminaries train you how to write and preach sermons, but not how to run a quote unquote church system. And he goes on to say that pastors probably don't even need to clean house for the most part, but they just need to be able to have the tools to deal with the problems that aren't covered.
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in seminary. I just find that fascinating. Another story you may have missed is about Riley Gaines. Riley was a college swimmer who lost out to a biological male. You remember that? And since that time, she has been kind of the face of, hey, let's keep biological males out of girls' sports and out of particularly girls' locker rooms, which the fact that we even have to have that conversation just shows how far we have
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gotten away from sanity and from the word of God in our culture, but I digress. She also is not only on the front lines herself, but she praised Sophie Cunningham, who is the WNBA player who made a similar stand. And Sophie is someone who you may see online from time to time. She's got a lot of popularity now, and Riley called her America's sweetheart.
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She says every video, every clip, every interaction that seems to surface about Sophie just seems like Sophie's getting cooler and cooler every day. But the part that really matters is the fact that she says Sophie is continuing to grow in her faith. She recently got baptized and she said, which I can say in speaking to her and watching her relationship with the Lord grow over these past several months has been really, really powerful and really, really beautiful.
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That's good. Sophie Cunningham to her credit, even though she didn't want to be a part of a quote unquote political movement, she just wants to play basketball. She hasn't backed away from the stance of having no biological men in girls locker rooms or in girls sports. So good for her. And this story is one you may have missed as well. Speaking of that TP USA event, the founder, Charlie Kirk's wife, Erica Kirk,
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told a group of ministry leaders in Santa Barbara that they need to invest in the next generation, preach the gospel boldly, and refuse to shrink from their calling. She told the group of leaders, I'm so proud of you, I'm so proud of our team, it takes a village that includes all of you as well. And she says, just keep fighting the good fight because you never know when your last sermon will be. She said,
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If you wake up in the morning, it might be your last sermon. It might not, but you need to live as if it is because you don't know how much time you have left. And of course, she speaks from a heart that knows that all too well with her husband, Charlie, being assassinated. Boy, it seems like that was a hundred years ago in some ways, but it was really not even a year yet. think September 10th is the date that
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He went to be with Jesus last year. Just a horrible, horrible tragedy. And another story you may have missed comes from Michigan, where a progressive church has teamed up with the Christian ministry to take working and broken guns off the streets. And what are they doing in exchange for weapons that are brought in? They're giving up to $500 in Kroger gift cards. I'm not making this up.
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and this is not a part of the Babylon Bee. It sounds like it, but it's not. The Gun Buyback Program is from St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Jackson, Michigan. And why dispose of unwanted guns? Well, to protect children from whom firearms are the number one cause of death. They also say studies indicate people in mental distress have greater risk of suicide if they have access to a firearm and an easy way to dispose of an unwanted
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Firearm is just to bring it to them and again. They will give them up to $500 in Kroger gift cards now look I'm sure their hearts are in the right place on this. It's just that their brains are not because The people that do bad things with guns the actual bad guys the criminals They're not motivated to bring guns in in exchange for Kroger gift cards. They're just not
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And look, I don't want to be too harsh on these people. I'm sure their heart's in the right place because I'm sure they look at their city and they see the gun violence that's happening and they think, hey, this is a great way to get them off the streets and not have them available. But it's just not going to work. It's just not the right way to approach it because as we all know, the problem isn't with the guns themselves. It's with the people that actually own and use the guns.
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for bad purposes. That's the problem. Let's fix that problem, shall we? All right, more of Steve Marston's joke coming up. Stay with us.
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Here at the Steve Marston Show, we're serious about faith, but we love a good dad joke too. The dad joke of the day comes to us from the home office in Stone Oak, Texas, and it says, my wife asked me to put ketchup on the shopping list. Now I can't read anything on it. Well, I can certainly understand how that's a problem. Steve Marston Show continuing. Grateful for your company.
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It's where faith and fun are both taken seriously. And just before we get ready to wrap up, I want to tell you again about our YouTube page. Would love for you to subscribe to it because it is one of the pieces that we're trying to really boost the numbers on so that we can get this program into the hands and ears and eyes of so many more people. So if you would do us a solid, the next time you're on YouTube, look for the Steve Marston show.
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hit like, subscribe, and ring that notification bell. And then whenever we upload new content, which is on the regular, you'll be notified and you can make plans to be with us whenever your schedule allows for it. Okay, really appreciate you doing that. Again, Steve Marston Show on YouTube. We have a Bible verse that we try to learn together every week. We start on Monday and we carry it on all week long and hopefully by Friday we're able to quote it verbatim.
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And even if we can't necessarily get every single word in order, it's the fact that we know it and understand what it says means more than that. So we call it faith between your ears because that's where I think the biggest part of our faith comes from is having that mindset of being God-centered, God-focused, and the way to do that is knowing His Word. So faith between your ears verse comes from
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1st Corinthians chapter 2 verse 9, no eye has seen nor ear has heard and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those that love Him. Wow, when you really stop and break that down, I know I've said that the last couple of days, but it really can be chill inducing. When you really stop to think that no human being has ever had an inkling,
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as to the things that God has for those of us who love Him. Wow. Such a good verse. And I want you to memorize it. Because like I say, I think this is so key to being able to continue our growth and continue being what God has called us to be. So, how do you memorize? Well, there's a myriad of different ways. And maybe you don't memorize as well as you used to. I get that. But that doesn't mean you can't memorize. So...
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Whatever it takes, writing it out by longhand, whether it's repeating it over and over out loud, or maybe you get your kids involved or your grandkids. Have them hold the book on you and you try to repeat it to them. Whatever it takes to do it, let's do it because it is really that important that we know God's word and have it in between our ears. Okay, we close up shop every day with a call to action. Your next step.
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And I think based on what we've been talking about over this last hour, your next step is to start your journey as a Bible scholar, being able to rightly and correctly handle the Word of God, being able to have it speak to you and interpret it so that you can help others along the way. I know it's not easy to do, but you can do it. Adios.
