Finding Stability in Life’s Uncertainties

Join us for an enlightening conversation with Dr. David Jeremiah as he shares his insights on the one constant in our ever-changing world: the Word of God. 📖

In these uncertain times, it’s reassuring to know that God is always enough and keeps us going.

Today…….I am asking all my prayer warriors to say a prayer that may help others. So many people are hurting right now. Many are struggling with finances and need jobs. Some are facing foreclosure and don’t even know how they are going to make it from week to week..

Many are lonely. . Many are heartbroken. . Many are facing sickness and health is fading. . Some are dealing with difficult family members. Many have lost HOPE.. Tonight, let us put our prayers and faith together decree and declare breakthrough over our families. Financial miracles WILL take place. Jobs WILL be found. Our Bodies WILL be made whole & sickness WILL flee. Marriages and relationships WILL be restored. Family members WILL find Jesus. Heartbreaks WILL be healed. JOY WILL be restored and HOPE WILL be found. In Jesus Name. Amen!!!!!! Keep God First…….

I don’t have any answers for the cultural issues we face. I promise you they are not political.
I know it’s so easy to get caught up in that. And I think we should be good citizens.
But the answer to the problems we have in our world today, whether it’s here in the UK or in the United States is not a political answer.
We’ve tried that. All of us have tried it and it doesn’t work and it wasn’t supposed to work.
The answer is God and God is revealed to us in his precious book.
And if we forget that any more than we’ve already forgotten it in so many places, then we, we don’t have a bright future, Doctor David Jeremiah.
Yeah.
Yeah, he’s great. Thank you. Absolutely.
Thrilled to have this opportunity to have a conversation with a church leader, a pastor, a theologian.
How long have you been in ministry? Oh, my goodness.
Do I have to admit that in front of all these people? Um Right.
At 50 years, I’ve been in the same church for 32 years and I was in another church before that for about 12.
And then I came out of seminary and I was a youth pastor.
Not like the one you had on tonight, but I was a youth pastor.
And, uh, so I’ve been, I’ve been doing this about a half a century, half a century. Wow.
I know.
I don’t look that old, but that’s the way I know. You’re looking good. You are.
Um, and you’ve also been married for, how long? 52 years am I? Right. Like, somewhere right there.
Could you just give us a few tips on marriage because that’s fantastic.
Oh, my goodness. Um, well, the first thing starts with marrying the right person.
You know, God led me to a wonderful woman who, uh, has, uh, been so supportive of me and everything that I’ve done and stood with me along the way and, uh, we really have had a blessed time together.
I can honestly tell you that we, we were like all married couples. We’ve had our disagreements.
No, normally she’s been right and I’ve been wrong and I learned that going away.
That’s a pretty good point right there.
Um, and, um, the Lord has been at the center of our family.
We have four Children and 12 grandchildren and they all are serving the Lord and love the Lord.
And, uh, so, um, it’s so interesting.
One of your earlier guests talked about making the family number one.
And, uh, I was people who know me would tell you that I’m probably a classic example of a type a who I’m a hard charger.
I go after what I’m trying to do.
And in the early years of our marriage, I was a little out of perspective and I was putting the church and my work, we started a church in Fort Wayne and I was out visiting every night trying to win people to Jesus.
And we had a young family and I would come home and sometimes my wife would say, honey, you gonna be gone again tonight.
And I’d kind of give her a little lecture about how was the gross national product of our church.
And there was nobody else. And if I didn’t do it, it wasn’t gonna get done.
And, and I was really out of, I was out of sync with where I should have been.
I’ll never forget she and I both know this and we remind ourselves of this on occasion and all you guys, you, you’re gonna know when I tell you this, this is the sign.
She said, honey, we need to talk. That’s really serious when that happens.
If you haven’t figured that out and we went and sat out in the kitchen and I remember her saying something to me like this.
She said, David, I know God has called you to serve him and I’m 100% behind that.
But one of these days you’re gonna stand before him and he’s gonna ask you what kind of father you’ve been and what kind of husband you’ve been.
And I think that’s important too, but she said I’m never going to ask you about it again.
I’ve turned it over to God and from now on, it’s between you and him and it changed my life from that moment on.
And I’ve got kids here, you can ask them about it. Um, we got our perspective.
I got my perspective right. And I put my family and, and my Children first and uh I’ve never regretted.
I tell people now my kids are almost all grown and they’re my friends.
Can you believe that my kids are my friends and we have these great grandchildren who live all around us in San Diego where we serve and sometimes they all come at once and that’s really interesting.
Um They’re 17 to 6 months. And so we, we’re uh John and Kelly.
I got to tell you we’re so blessed and, you know, I, I wake up so, you know, 20 years ago I had a bout with cancer and I didn’t know if I was going to get through that and the Lord healed me.
And uh people ask me why are you working so hard for so long?
And I said, well, when he healed me, he didn’t do it for me to go sit on a beach somewhere.
And uh so I just want to serve the Lord with all my heart for as long as I can and I feel so blessed just to be here.
I feel like I’m representing America. I’m the only American I can find anywhere around here. So I’m here.
I’m here to say we, oh y’all are back there. We love America.
Well, you know, um I wanted to be a part of this, not just as a representative of America, but because I believe so much in what television is able to do and what it’s going to do here all across this uh this great region of the world.
And I’m, I’m so proud of Matt and Laurie and how God is using them uh in the follow up of their father’s vision.
And so to just be here and, and sense this whole thing is just a thrill for me.
Thank you for letting me do it.
But Doctor Jeremiah, you, you, you lead a church, a local church, but you think globally and you’ve always done that.
Um And you know, you, you not only teach a one congregation, you’re getting it out on numerous radio stations.
How many radio stations are you on? We’re on about 2000 radio stations around the world. Yeah.
And uh that’s kind of how we started, we started radio before we got into television and now television is kind of taken, taken off and gone past it.
But radio was the beginning of it.
And I was uh believe it or not when I was in college before the Lord called me to preach.
I thought I was gonna be a disc jockey.
You know, I, I actually had my own radio show on a little station and played music.
And then when God got a hold of me, I was really discouraged, disappointed because I loved radio so much and I thought he was taking it away from me, but he didn’t, he took it away from me and gave it back to me way bigger than I could ever have dreamed for it.
And, uh, I promise you as good a disc jockey as I was, I wouldn’t have been on 2000 stations.
I promise you that with the gospel that can happen over the years.
Uh, Doctor Jeremiah, you’ve, you know, you’ve tried to kind of, I think all of us in ministry are trying to hear from God and understand what’s happening in the world.
Have you seen changes over the decades? Yeah. You know, I’ve written a bunch of books about it.
I wrote a book one time called, I never thought I’d see the day and it’s all about all the things that have so drastically changed during my lifetime and ministry is so different and yet it’s still the same.
You know, the, the world changes, uh, technology obviously look at this place, it changes.
But the one thing that doesn’t change and it’s what keeps me going every day is, is the word of God.
God’s word is settled forever. In heaven. We have a little kind of a byline for what we do.
It’s called the Unchanging Word for an ever changing world.
And the one thing that we can hang on to with, with absolute confidence is this book we call the Bible is God’s message to us.
It always has been, it is now, it always will be, it will never be any other message.
And when we stick by this and we teach it and we preach it.
God honors it and he does it today just as he did when I started uh some 45 50 years ago, the difference is, as you mentioned, the culture has changed.
The, the the receivers of the word of God have changed and much of that change I have lived through and watched and, and uh some of it has grieved my heart as I know it has many.
And I have to keep asking God to give me a sense of freshness in my spirit because I know that what I just said to you is the answer.
I don’t have any answers for the cultural issues we face. I promise you they are not political.
I know it’s so easy to get caught up in that. And I, I think we should be good citizens.
But the answer to the problems we have in our world today, whether it’s here in the UK or in the United States is not a political answer.
We’ve tried that all of us have tried it and it doesn’t work and it wasn’t supposed to work.
The answer is God and God is revealed to us in his precious book.
And if we forget that any more than we’ve already forgotten it in so many places, then we’re, we don’t have a bright future.
When people ask me, what is the greatest thing that’s changed in the church since you’ve been doing this?
I will tell you without any serious reservation.
It’s the marginalization of the Bible church today in many places can be almost anything but the Bible when I was growing up and you all, some of you got gray hair too, you went to church, you carried the Bible with you.
And if you can go to church now, a lot of times you don’t need the Bible because the Bible is kind of, they throw a little verse at you or whatever, but the Bible is not there.
We need to be nourished up in the word of God.
If we don’t do that, we, we can’t make it in this world because the world today is not friendly toward us and toward the God and toward the Bible.
If we don’t get that in our churches, we will never get it.
And, and I don’t know how we survive without it.
What would you mind telling us what is your daily discipline with regards to Bible reading?
Well, I read the Bible right now. I’m, I’m trying to do something that I never thought I would do.
Uh, about a year ago, we released a Study Bible called the Jeremiah Study Bible.
And now I’m trying to read through it and read all the notes that are my notes in the study Bible.
And, uh, that’s, that’s a pretty good discipline because there’s a lot of them and I’m trying to do that.
Somebody gave me a book about a month ago and I’ve started this and it’s based upon in the Old Testament where the kings were told to write a copy of the Law and they had to write out all of the Old Testament Law and prophets to qualify as a king.
So somebody has taken little books now and, and they’re encouraging us to handwrite our own copy of the scripture and I’m working on Romans handwriting, the book of Romans, just copying it right out of the Bible.
And when you do that, something happens, I mean, I’ve been studying this book for a long time, but I wasn’t quite prepared for what happens when you start to handwrite the Bible in a little book.
And I see that when you write something, it grabs hold of your heart and your soul.
So I’m kind of in between those two things, reading the, this book and in its study notes and handwriting, uh the, the book of Romans, it’s gonna take me a long time because I’m a very slow writer.
But anyway, wow. I actually have published little books.
You can get little notebooks that have like Romans on the front of it and then it’s got pages and has all the sections and everything.
So, verses 7 to 9 and you write it all there and, and you can go through the whole, I think they have for the whole Bible.
Now. It’s really cool. Now you’ve written on various subjects and topics.
But one of the subjects I’ve noted is that, you know, you take prophecy seriously.
Um, and could you just explain to us when we use the word prophecy? What, what do you mean?
Well, you know, there’s two kinds of prophecy, there’s fore telling and there’s fourth telling.
I don’t think there are any foretell prophets in the sense that the word of God is for forth telling, but there are a lot of forth telling.
I’m a forth telling prophet as you are. That means we’re teaching the truth, we’re preaching it.
But I can’t, I don’t have any wisdom. Uh, that was given to John the revelator.
I can’t tell you when Jesus is coming back.
I don’t know the answer to those questions because those questions are answered as much as we’re supposed to have the answers here in this book.
Uh You know, the interesting thing about the Bible, uh John is that more than 1/4 of its prophecy.
Uh If you decide as some pastors, I know have said, I don’t preach on prophecy.
You’re neglecting 1/4 of the word of God.
There’s over 865 promises in the Bible about the second coming of Christ.
Um And, and every book in the New Testament, except one mentions his return.
So the Bible teaches us that Jesus Christ is coming back and that we should preach that truth and we should expect him to come back.
We don’t know the day nor the hour.
But I do think we can know the season and I believe we’re living in that season because, um, you know, ever since the nation of Israel was born in 1948 many of these prophecies that we have read are now beginning to grab hold.
Some of them couldn’t take place until Israel was home in her land.
But now I, I wrote a book about some of those prophecies like here here in Europe, some of the reorganizations of, of the Nations and, and coming together in the European Union and all of that that’s foretold in the scripture in the book of Daniel.
Um the uh the prophecies that we’ve heard about since we were kids that we always thought were, oh, you know, well, that’s gonna happen someday.
They’re starting to happen. Now, for instance, people say, how could there ever be a one rule leader?
How would you ever organize that or manage that? No, uh, tech technologist.
And I know ever doubts that it would not be hard to uh organize this world uh through technology so that it could be easily managed by an evil person if we ever let our guard down.
Uh People say, how could the whole world ever see Jesus come back?
Or the two witnesses raised from the dead as we’re told?
Well, just like tonight, we’re doing this show and it’s going to be seen in 28 million homes.
satellites carry the, you know, by the way, God doesn’t need that.
If he doesn’t want to, if he says y’all gonna see this, you’re gonna see it whether it’s television or not.
But if he decided to use television or the satellite system, I mean, he might start with TB N because there’s hardly any place where they’re not seen in the whole world.
I mean, that would be a good place to start.
So, in the early part of my life in ministry, that wasn’t, that didn’t seem possible because we didn’t know about the technology that we know now.
So, so much has happened in your lifetime and in mine that sets the stage for the prophecies of the word of God to be literally fulfilled.
And they could happen in your time and in my time, I believe it could happen at any time.
So what, what’s the, what’s the best way for the church and for us who call ourselves followers of Christ, how should we be preparing?
What should we be doing well. Romans 13 says we should wake up.
It’s really, it says, you know, don’t be asleep during this time but wake up and you know, the interesting thing for me, I hear a lot of people say, well, you know, prophecies, pie in the sky by and by and nobody cares about it.
But if you study prophecy, you’ll find out something very interesting that for almost every prophetic passage in the Bible, there is an admonition for per personal application, for instance.
Um There’s, there’s a verse that says Jesus Christ is coming back, therefore, for sake, not the assembling of yourselves together as the manner of some is.
But so much the more listen to this as you see the day approaching.
If you look for that in the scripture, you’ll be amazed that the prophetic word is tied dramatically to the application passages of the Bible.
Uh Let not your heart be troubled.
You believe in God believe also in me, in my father’s house are many mansions.
How do you get, how do you get rid of a troubled heart?
You, you, you see when we know that God knows how this all ends and we know God, we can be at peace with what’s happening in the world.
Um My, my sweet wife who is here is AAA wonderful mystery reader and she’s also written a couple of mystery books just for fun.
One day we were traveling across the country on an airplane and she had just gotten this mystery book and she was reading the last chapter and I said, hey, I know you’re a good reader, but you’re not that fast.
What are you doing? Doesn’t that ruin the book?
She says, no, she said when you know how it ends, it helps you to find the plot and follow it.
I said, well, yeah, I guess so.
And I kind of teased her and then she said, well, you teach the Book of Revelation, don’t you?
Isn’t that what that’s all about? We know how it ends, don’t you? We know how this all ends.
Jesus Christ wins. He takes control of this earth and even as he is sovereign over the whole world, even now, one day physically, he will be king of kings and lord of lords and he will reign supreme over this earth.
I serve the future king of kings who is also the current king of kings.
And I, if I get that right, and I see the things that are happening like ISIS and the other things that are so troubling to all of us, it doesn’t make all of the concern go away, but it gives me a, a confidence that I don’t, I wrote a book on Revelation recently that was written in a different way and I’ll never forget a lady came up to me.
And she said, you know, I read the book and Doctor Jeremiah, I’m not afraid anymore.
And I just thought that’s really what prophecy should do. If we really understand it.
It shouldn’t make us more afraid. It should make us confident and fear should not be a part of that.
Now, as Christians, Doctor Jeremiah, we’re like Easter people living in a good Friday world, but it feels like Easter Saturday.
So we live, you know, we’ve experienced something of the resurrection, but we’re living in a broken world.
But we’ve got this tension between Friday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
And you’ve had to face the battle with cancer.
Many of viewers are probably struggling with health issues, struggling with other concerns. Life feels hard.
What would you say to them?
Well, here’s, here’s what I, I said when I came back from my two bouts with cancer, I ended up having a stem cell transplant 20 years ago and I was out of my pulpit for seven weeks.
And, uh I kept thinking when I go back, what am I gonna say to these people?
One of the things about being sick as a pastor is everybody watches you.
They want to see if you really believe the stuff you’ve been teaching for the years that have gone, you know, you know, I’ll never forget.
II I really thought to do.
And the only thing I could say, the simplest thing I could say is I stood in my pulpit that Sunday and I just looked at everybody and I said, God is enough.
He is really enough, whatever we face, whatever our issues, God is enough. He’s promised to be with us.
We don’t know that He will be until we go through some stuff.
But when we do, we realize that he’s telling us the truth.
He is not going to leave us or forsake us.
If you’re, if you’re watching here and maybe you’re going through cancer or some other life threatening situation, a broken marriage or Children who’ve gone south on you.
You know, in the midst of it all, there’s one constant and that God loves you.
He’s going to be with you. He’s going to help you.
He won’t necessarily make the problem go away immediately, but he’ll be with you in the midst of that problem and his strength and his courage will be transmitted to you so that you can be everything.
You should be in the midst of that trial and you will come out of it stronger.
You’ll come out of it knowing that God is enough.
You can’t really know that God is enough until you until you’ve tested it. And you know, here’s my deal.
You say, well, what if I haven’t been through suffering, just hang on.
You know, somebody told me that you’re either in a storm, you’re coming out of a storm or you’re going into one and you don’t get to go from the cradle to the grave without some trouble and some people ask me, well, you’re a pastor.
How did you get cancer? Like you get a pass.
If you’re, if you’re a pastor and I tell them if that were true, there’d be a lot more pastors than we have right now.
We have a whole bunch of pastors. You get sick, you get cancer because you’re human.
It’s a human condition. But you, if you’re a Christian, whether it’s cancer or any other life, life troubling situation, what you discover is in a way that you can only understand it when it happens to you is God is there and God is enough and he will give you his strength for that moment.
And I hear a lot of amens. Yeah.
What Doctor Jeremiah, what would you say to anyone listening to our conversation at the moment?
Who’s just struggling to believe in God and believe God, they, they’re not, they’re not feeling or sensing that love from God.
Well, obviously, what we feel about it has nothing to do with the reality of it.
I, I have a, a another book that I did two or three years ago called God Loves You.
He always has and he always will.
And I learned when I was writing that, that God’s love for us is not based on our performance.
Our love relationships are performance based, but God doesn’t love me because of what I do or don’t do.
God loves me because it’s his nature to love me. The Bible says God is love. Love originates with God.
In fact, we can only love God because he gives us some of his love.
So we love Him because he first loved us.
And so in for a person who struggles with God, the Bible says that if we will determine that we will do what God asks us to do, he will show himself to us.
If, if we say God, I don’t know if you’re real.
But if II, I commit myself to do whatever it is that you want me to do.
Show me, show me your, your, your realness, show me your reality.
Sometimes when we go to God and say, well, I’m not gonna do this unless you do this and this, that’s not how God works.
God is who He is. And as we uh as we deal with God, we need to focus on who He is as opposed to how our feelings are related to Him.
When you read the Bible, the Bible strengthens you in the, in your inner person so that you can believe the word about God.
I often have people say, well, I can’t believe and I say, well, do you want to believe?
Do you want to believe God? If you don’t want to believe, you never will.
The Bible says, if you want to believe God will give you the information, you need to strengthen your belief system so that you can trust Him.
A lot of people play with the idea of, I can’t believe God and they use it as an excuse not to even get serious about God.
Uh, listening to us tonight all across this network are people who probably are wondering, what am I doing watching this program?
Why am I watching this religious program?
Well, one of the reasons is you’re, you’re, you’re in God’s way and God is coming after you and he’s using this program.
Uh The Bible says he is not willing that any should perish and he’s chasing you down.
He’s the, he’s the hound of heaven. He’s coming for you.
And as you allow God’s word, if you will listen to it, the Bible says, first of all, you receive it and then God comes to live within you and he makes himself known to you and he becomes not only your savior, but your friend and your daily guide and your helper.
So, you know, some people uh come to pastors like me and they say, well, I, I’m having a hard time believing, wave your magic wand over me.
So that goes away and every one of us have to go through that, that.
But the key issue is, do you want to believe if you want to believe there is no way that God will not help you?
You know, I had a, I had a young man um come to see me uh several years ago who was born on the, um, on the West Bank grew up in an Islamic home.
In fact, it was kind of a funny thing.
He called my office one day and he said, uh, Doctor Jeremiah, I think I need to see you.
And I said, why he says, well, he said we want to join your church.
But my wife is Lutheran and I’m Islamic.
I said, yeah, we probably should meet and, uh, he came to see me, I’ll never forget.
He came in with a yellow pad.
He had all these questions on it, all these questions that he said he had.
And he finally asked me this question.
He said, why should I become a Christian as opposed to being a Jew or, or Islamic?
And I had a chance to explain to him that Christianity is not a religion, it’s a relationship.
And II, I didn’t bone up on these other religions because II, I didn’t have time.
It was a busy week. So I just told him about Jesus and I told him how wonderful he was and what he had done for my life.
And uh and I remember him saying to me, so how do I get this Jesus?
I said, will you invite him into your heart? He says, but I don’t know how to do that.
I said, well, if you’ll kneel with me here in this, in this room, I will help you pray to invite Jesus into your life.
And we prayed and Samuel accepted Christ as his savior.
And uh when he got up, he said, I still have a lot of questions.
But he says, I think it’s gonna be easier to find the answers now.
And what he was saying is the Bible says, the questions you have about him and about his word, the natural man does not understand.
Those are spiritual questions. Somebody told me one time that he never understood the Bible, then he got saved.
And in the meantime found out that God had rewritten it.
And what he meant was all of a sudden, it made sense to Him. That’s what happens.
The spirit of God comes to live within your heart and then the things you didn’t understand before God reveals them to you.
And I guess what I’m saying about that is to those who are listening.
If you wait until you have all your questions answered about God and salvation, you will never become a Christian.
You have to come to a place where you have the faith to say, Lord God, there’s a lot of things I don’t understand about this, but I want to believe in you.
Give me the faith. I don’t have, I want to believe in you and you accept Him by faith into your heart.
And you will discover immediately that you will begin to get insight into things you never had before.
Because that insight comes with the illumination of the Holy Spirit who comes to live within you.
He’s the illuminator. He’s the one that turns the lights on.
And I think that’s kind of the best way I can answer that.
You know, I think a lot of people are waiting for God to hit them with a lightning bolt or something or some, a supernatural or phenomenon.
And sometimes he does that. I mean, he knocked Paul off the horse and that’s how he got saved, but he doesn’t always do that.
He doesn’t do that that dramatically. Mostly is that Lord, I want to believe, help my unbelief.
You know, I, I’ve read some books and then I’ve met the authors and then I was disappointed and I’ve read some of your books, Dr Jeremiah.
And um I’m not disappointed. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you, you, Doctor Jeremiah. Honestly, you are gentle, gracious, godly and a gentleman.
Thank you so much for just encouraging us and inspiring us on the journey. Doctor Jeremiah. Thank you.
Thank you very, very much. Thank you. Thank very much. Yeah.