Spreading God’s Word Globally Through Sermons

Spreading God’s Word Globally Through Sermons

June 6, 2025

Host: Dr. Isaac Crockett

Co-host: Dr. Gary Dull

Guests: Steven Lee

Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 6/6/25. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.

Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.

Isaac Crockett:

I’m Isaac Crockett. I’m the pastor of East Lawrence Baptist Church. It’s up in the northern part of Pennsylvania. We minister to folks in northern PA in southern New York, and my co-host is also from Pennsylvania. He’s my co-host for Stand in the Gap today. Dr. Gary Dull, senior pastor of Faith Baptist Church in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and president of the Pennsylvania Pastors Network and lots of other ministries that he’s part of. And I’m glad to have him today as my co-host and we’re very excited to be welcoming back. Steven Lee, founder and CEO of Sermon Audio, the world’s largest online library of free sermons, hosting over 3 million messages from Faithful Churches worldwide. And Steven, I was shocked when I was looking through, I think it’s been a year ago since we last talked to you. Thank you so much for being on with us again.

Steven Lee:

Oh, you’re very welcome. It’s a pleasure to be here as always, and I hope this conversation will be enjoyable for your listening audience.

Isaac Crockett:

Well, thank you. I know as a pastor, I’ve been involved in church planting for the last couple of decades and some in global missions, and Gary’s been very involved in global missions as well. And I’ve personally seen the impact in my own life and in the works I’ve worked in since college days from sermon audio’s resources, and it’s been a great experience for me. But before we go further exploring the reach that sermon audio has, in talking with Steven Lee, the founder, I just want to talk to Steven about how God worked in his life to bring him to start this ministry. I think we talked about this some a year ago, but I know for me, I grew up in the Midwest, in Indiana and throughout most of my high school days, I worked at a horse farm six days a week, often early in the morning, I would be there before school started a couple of hours or more before school started, and I would listen to some music, but a lot of times I would listen to preaching.

There was a cassette tape player there and I would listen to preachers, sometimes sermons from my dad a lot of times sermons from Bob Jones University Chapel Hour. And I remember listening to a lot of different guys. And then I went to college and when I was in college, I worked third shift cleaning a school in a church building. And again, I would often listen to tapes of people preaching, but around that time, I’d begun listening to sermons on the internet through sermon audio.com and a new technology, it wasn’t I guess brand new, but a technology that was being easier to use as MP3’s. And I could download those sermons and listen to them while I was waxing the floors third shift of the high school Christian high school that I was cleaning. And I would listen to guys like Dr. Ian Paisley or Alan Cairns, Mark Minnick, Jim Berg, and many other guys from even all over the world. I was working in a Spanish speaking church for a while and I was able to find Spanish speaking pastors to listen to. Well, Steven, I’ve read that you grew up liking to listen to sermons on tape and that led you to start sermon audio. And I’m just wondering how listening to tapes of good preaching really helped lead you to this ministry that is committed to expository preaching.

Steven Lee:

Oh yes, absolutely. In fact, just listening to your background, it sounds like we overlap quite a bit as far as that goes. I grew up listening to just boxes and boxes of cassette tapes of preaching. I like music as well, but I would listen to preaching. I would prefer it over music. I would just like to listen to it as I was falling asleep in bed and just all throughout the day. And I’ve always enjoyed listening to preaching. And I think it’s a little bit of a sad thing today. We don’t have to get into this, but a little bit of a sad thing where you don’t really meet as many people who love listening to preaching just as much as maybe we did when we were growing up. But I did. I loved it. I wore out my cassette tapes, I had my favorite sermons, and many of them were the same as what you mentioned.

And there’s just nothing like it when you’re hearing preaching. And these were men, by the way. It wasn’t teaching, it was preaching. These were men that seemed to really enjoy what they were preaching. And so that energy and the enthusiasm and the joy of it carried through in their preaching and it lightens the heart. It makes one filled with zeal and energy for the things of the Lord. And so anyway, I did grow up listening to preaching quite a bit. I had a great love for it. I even wanted to go into the ministry myself. I felt like maybe this is what the Lord would happen me to do. And so graduating from Bob Jones with a computer science degree, I still enjoyed preaching. And I asked my pastor a few years after I graduated whether or not I could go into the ministry and study in the seminary, and he actually told me no, that was a great disappointment and a great blow to me. But he said he detected much stronger gifts than me. And so it was really after that that I started sermon audio, my love of preaching, my love of the ministry, and kingdom work didn’t diminish just because of that. And so I shifted gears into sermon, audio, and in hindsight, that was the greatest thing that my pastor could have done for me. He was honest, he was courageous, and he knew me. And so the Lord had other things in store. And here we are today, 25 years later.

Gary Dull:

Well, preaching is a tremendous entity. It’s a tremendous ministry. And of course, Steven, as you’ve been talking and as Isaac’s been talking and as I’ve been sitting here thinking, I also grew up listening to preaching, not necessarily on tapes, but I was in an area where there’s a good solid Christian radio station. And I can remember going to bed at night listening to great preaching over the air, the Oliver Big Greens and the guise of those days. And that made an impact upon me as well. And I’m thankful for the Ministry of Preaching and for the ministry that you have there with the sermon audio because it’s tied into what it says in Romans chapter 10 and verse 14, how shall they hear without a preacher? And you know, Steven, you started sermon audio over 25 years ago to give conservative churches a global voice. And I’m wondering if you can share with our audience this vision and how that verse I just quoted, Romans 10 14 has made an impact upon your life and your ministry.

Steven Lee:

Oh, sure, absolutely. I absolutely believe in that whole passage in Romans 10 14, but also down to 10 17 where it says, faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. I believe that our God is a God of means. He uses preachers. He has chosen to use the foolishness of preaching to save them that belief. And he doesn’t have to do it that way. He could have done it a much more in what we think efficient way, but he uses means, and he has chosen to use preaching, the heralding, the declaring, the opening up of God’s word to save those that believe. And I believe that if we ever get away from that, or even if we ever diminish the importance of preaching, it was after the dark ages, the reformers, they sort of brought the centrality of the pulpit back into the church life, the centrality of the pulpit. And if we ever start to diminish the centrality of preaching and of the opening up of God’s word, I believe that’s a wrong direction. But yes, the importance of preaching, that’s where it’s at.

Isaac Crockett:

Well, and here at Stand in the Gap Media, we are a ministry of the American Pastors Network, and that’s one of our goals and focus is the importance of preaching, the importance of the word of God, being preached and applied to the hearts so much to talk about. We’re just really scratching the surface and won’t get too far into sermon. Audios impact, but we have more to talk about when we return. We want to explore how Steven and his team are using this technology in some very historic ways to spread God’s word. You don’t want to miss out. Stay tuned. We’ll be right back on Stand in the Gap. Welcome back to the program. I’m Pastor Isaac Crockett, joined by Pastor Gary Dahal and our special guest today, return Guest is Steven Lee of Sermon Audio. And Steven, we’re just again, glad to have you back.

It’s hard for me to believe. It’s already been about a year since the last time were on our program and we’re talking about this technology that you have that can share over 3 million sermons globally that has multiple translations, languages capability. And we were talking a little bit with you right before the program about live streaming and different things, but you’ve also pioneered these audio books kind of like sermons via audio hearing these sermons and some of them from a long time ago. Great preachers, some of them from very long ago. I think last year we were discussing getting all the works of Spurgeon, which I can’t imagine such a prolific undertaking getting all of those available on audio. And now you’ve recently opened up John Knox’s works to be listened to. I just want to dig into this, but before we do, I know I watched a video of you over there at the home of John Knox from the 16th century, well-known reformer. But could you just tell us a little bit about this trip you had? You were in, I think Scotland and Ireland visiting some of the historic Reformation sites. I’d just love to hear a little bit about it.

Steven Lee:

Sure. Basically there’s a lot to unpack here, but in a nutshell, we’re in the middle of kind of a side, suppose you can call it a side project of converting into the audio book format all of the Christian classics from the past. And that’s pretty ambitious. It’s going to take us some time, but that’s our goal. That’s where we’re heading towards. As you mentioned, we have started down the road with Charles Spurgeon. Charles Spurgeon has over 3000 sermons that are available in some sort of a printed format. And we all love Spurgeon, but they, there’s over 3000 sermons and they’ve never really been available via audio until now. So they are now all via audio. And part of the charm in what we’re doing here is we’re using technology. We don’t make a big deal about it because it is just a tool, but we are using technology to accelerate us in this effort.

What do I mean by that? Well, there’s a gentleman here, an older gentleman and who used to work quite a bit in radio at WNUU, in fact. And he spent the last 30 years of his life reading in the sermons of speed Charles Spurgeon for radio. And he did that with nice high quality and he read it very well accurately with good emotion. And he spent the last 30 years of his life reading in Spurgeon, but he was only able to get 500, which is a lot, 500 of his sermons read in. And we partnered with him, we asked him if this was permitted, and we were able to synthesize his voice and clone his voice and we were able to read in the remaining. So all 3000 sermons now have been read in really essentially with his voice and his inflections and his everything.

And we did that in a matter of three months versus the 30 years that he spent reading in 500. We did it in three months for all 3000. And so we’re using AI for this. Yes, it is a brand new emerging type of a tool. It’s kind of a mysterious thing in many people’s minds, but we’re using it for a very specific purpose, which is to accelerate the proliferation of good preaching and teaching out there. And we wanted to do this for not just Spurgeon, but we want to do it for all of the great classics. You see, the English speaking world has been singularly blessed, we believe over the centuries with a treasure trove of some of the godliest and spirit-filled men throughout church history. And they have left us just volumes and volumes of great material. A lot of it is still not really available for the masses.

And so it is our desire to use some of these newer tools to accelerate the process of getting this treasure out there so that people can access it and enjoy it once again. And so we’re in the middle of getting yes, Spurgeon, all of his works. We’ve done all the works of John Bunion, all the works of Horatious Bonner. We are in the process of doing many other works. But the last one was John Knox. And the reason why this one is so interesting to us is because nobody has yet really been able to get all of John Knox’s works digitized, not even digitized. It’s in these very old scans, very hard to decipher very old English, English that you really wouldn’t understand today. And it was pretty much unusable. But again, using some of these newer tools, we were able to accelerate the process and all of his works from beginning to end that we know about are now available and they are available in audio form and they’re completely free.

And so this is kind of a first we’re very happy about that. And so we visited Scotland and Northern Ireland, but Scotland in particular because that’s where a lot of these great men come from, from that part of the world, from the UK. And we visited his house and it was just an amazing experience to me. I have to tell you to be sitting and standing right there in his, what I take to be his bedroom or his study looking out the window. I can see St. John’s Cathedral where he preached every Sunday. And so I know he would’ve been right there meditating on the word, preparing sermons, writing his letters. And we are now taking those same letters, those same sermons, and we are distributing them all around the world, and we haven’t done this step yet. But the goal, the next step is to then take them in the audio format and take them in every language so that in every language his sermons will be preached. And so he being dead yet speaker is absolutely true. It was a wonder to be there and it was great privilege.

Gary Dull:

That’s amazing. And of course you know what you’re doing is bringing history and the present day together by means of modern technology. It’s amazing that we can do that, and I’m thankful for what you’re doing through sermon audio, audio book there, Steven. And I’m just wondering, as I understand it, you are also working on John Knox’s history of Reformation in Scotland, and I’m wondering if you can share with our audience how these are structured in Audible format and why making them accessible today really makes a difference for us today.

Steven Lee:

Oh, yes. They’re all there. In fact, the history of the Reformation, it’s all there. That was one of the part of the works that we digitized and put out there in audio format. They’re all organized by book and by chapter, and we’ve sought to put a little summaries, little overviews, like a summary with every one of these audio books out there so people can read and make sure that they want to commit the time to listening to it. But why it’s relevant is because if you actually take the time to listen to these audio books, which I’ve been doing a lot more lately, now that they’re available, what John Locks had to say at that particular period in history is still very relevant for us today. I find it quite remarkable that the relevance of his message back then, it fits exactly with the kind of problems that we’re having today.

For example, he talks about the church as being the stomach of the nation. You may have heard me make reference to this in one of my videos, but it really stood out to me because he was encouraging the lay people of Scotland. He was really more than just encouraging them. He was commanding them to rise up and stand up for that which is right. The church, the body of God’s people, the assembly of God’s people, they are the stomach of the nation. What he means by that is that just like in a normal body, a human body, when the body starts getting diseased and weak and ill, it usually starts in the stomach. There are things that are going on in the stomach and it spreads to the body. And he says, if you look at a nation today, and he was looking at Scotland, he was looking at that time period.

If you look at a nation today and it’s diseased and it’s weak and it’s broken, look to the stomach. In other words, the problem is in the church, the problem is in the pulpit, you fix the pulpit, you fix the nation. That’s a relevant message for today. I think that people are looking to the President, they’re looking to politics. These things don’t have their place, but it’s the church, it’s the pulpit. If that grows weak and sadly it is weak in many quarters, if that grows weak, the nation grows. Weak messages like that turned Scotland and the world up upside down, messages like that can turn our world upside down.

Isaac Crockett:

Amen. Here at Stand in the Gap Media, we are ministry of the American Pastors Network, and that is the heart of our ministry as well. And that’s our goal is to support these pastors. What you’re doing at Sermon audio, and any of you that are listening, some of you maybe are listening on your smartphone via an app or something like that or our website, but many of you are listening maybe in your car, radio or on a radio. But if you go to sermon audio.com, you’ll find just this huge, like I said, millions, a library of millions of now historic works as well as modern contemporary speakers, but people aligned with a biblical worldview and hearing the word of God preach from those who believe the Bible, who understand the Bible is what our nation needs. There’s a lot of things our nation may need, but the most important is what you were just saying, Steven is for our pastors, our pulpits to open up the word of God and to preach it confidently.

I know at my own little church, we go through Bible studies that were written by pastors hundreds and hundreds of years ago, John Owens and John Flabel, and different ones like that. And it’s so appropriate just as appropriate today. And so I hope that if you’re listening today that you are under good biblical preaching, we’re going to come back after this. We’re going to look more at this incredible technology that we’ve been talking about. We want to discuss the global impact that this sermon audio.com has had, especially even in persecuted regions. Please don’t go away. We’ll be right back on Stand in the Gap today.

Gary Dull:

Welcome back everyone to Stand in the Gap today. I’m Pastor Gary Dahl and along with Isaac Crockett, who is also a pastor, we’re joined by Steven Lee of Sermon Audio, and of course what a ministry he has. And I trust that you’re enjoying the discussion on the radio today. But as someone who’s involved with global missions as I am, and of course even as Isaac is, we’re encouraged by sermon audio’s reached to places where Christians face persecution in Matthew 28, 19 and 20, we are told to make disciples of all nations. And Steve’s work is doing just that through this special type of ministry. And during this segment, let’s explore how sermon audio is really impacting the world. And Steven, I’m very thankful unto the Lord for what he’s done through you and through your ministry and how you are able through your ministry to deliver sermons in multiple languages to listeners all around the world. And I’m just wondering if you could take a few moments today to share a story or two of how your platform has touched a church or an individual in some remote or persecuted part of the world that has encouraged them in the things of the Lord.

Steven Lee:

Oh, absolutely. It’s a real honor and privilege to be involved in the Lord’s work is, as you gentlemen would know, and whether we have the ability to literally and physically touch every nation or whether we are working in the confines of our own local church, a soul is a soul. So we counted a great privilege and joy to, I mean, I’m a father of six children and I spend a lot of time just training them. And look, if that’s all I had, I would be very thankful and wonderful for the opportunity. But Laura has opened these doors for us where we’re able to, we have so far reached every country on the planet, with the exception of North Korea. We have not logged any traffic coming from there. And obviously there could be some strong reasons why, although I have to say just as a side note that my grandfather was actually a pastor in North Korea before it was North Korea, the Korean War, it split up north and south and he had to flee down to the south, but he had a church in the north.

In fact, Christianity first started in the northern part of Korea until the war, and then they all moved down. I still personally believe there’s a lot of Christians still in North Korea, obviously underground Christians, perhaps many of them in those concentration camps. But we do get stories, many stories and certainly some very heartwarming stories from time to time are people sharing with us in very unusual places. We just had a pastor who told us that his sermons from sermon audio are being downloaded verifiably in Iran by tens of thousands of people, a whole network of Christians that are there. And they’re downloading his sermons, which are in the Persian language. And so he’s very encouraged by that. He pastors a church in England. He himself is Iranian ethnically, but he pastors a church in England. But it’s a very small church. It’s a Baptist church. But he is encouraged by the fact that he is reaching his own people.

And for lack of a better way of saying it is very closed part of the world. And this is the testimony that we’re seeing is that even though that these men are pastoring perhaps smaller churches, and the local situation is often very bleak, but through a platform like this, and we’re not the only one, but through a platform like this, they have the ability to preach that same message and reach tens of thousands of people more. And that was the original vision that we had, the original desire, because I come from a small church myself, the pastor that I made reference to at the beginning of the hour, he pastored a small church. It never grew very, very large. And so the frustration for me growing up under his ministry was that I had such a respect and admiration and love of the preaching, but the frustration was there should be so many more people that could hear this. And the platform that the Lord has enabled us to build does just that. It gives churches a voice, it gives churches a voice. I think that’s so important because they have the truth. The world needs the truth, and it’s the false teachers and the false leaders that have all the platforms and all the voice God’s people, the real prophets and the preachers need to have a voice. And that’s what we’re endeavoring to do by God’s race.

Isaac Crockett:

I’m so glad you’re bringing this up. Steven and I personally, pastor, a very small church, we’re replanting in a very rural area. My township is bigger than Greenville, South Carolina where much of my family live, but we have less than a thousand residents in that same land mass. It’s one of the largest counties in Pennsylvania, but about 40,000 people living there. And so I know several amazing expositors in my area within a 30, 40 minute ride from my church. And it is neat to see how sometimes when we upload a sermon online, it’s listened to much more than the original congregation that was there, which was interesting how the Lord does it. But I’m also glad to hear what you’re saying about these far reaching areas about areas that speak things like speak in Persian or different close countries. Gary has a lot of experience with persecuted Christians.

Just last year I was able to go overseas to some countries I won’t name but Islamic regimes and work with pastors. And one of the first things they said is that all the media they seem to get is from the health, wealth, prosperity. It’s not expository preaching. It’s not good. And I remember one pastor talking with him, and he started showing me different books of sermons that he could read in English of pastors that I knew. And I said, these are good people. And he said, yes, that’s very good. And so this is so exciting that this is a global phenomenon. Sermon audio has been around for a quarter of a century, a little over 25 years. It’s older than YouTube. And for some of you listening, you maybe don’t remember life without YouTube, some of the younger generations, but I’m wondering about these hostile regions, Steven, where Christianity is hard to find resources and things. How is it that sermon audio is able to support these communities and what are maybe some of the challenges that you’re facing when trying to deliver audio content there?

Steven Lee:

Well, it’s like this. Okay, so we have on our wall, Matthew 24 14, this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness to all nations, and then the end shall come this gospel of the kingdom, it shall be preached in all the world for a witness to all nations. That part means to all languages, this is going to happen and God is going to use people like us, you and me to see that this happens. So this must happen. Reaching the nations is not an option. It’s not like a luxury. It’s nice to do. This has to be done. And so this is absolutely in our forefront. Part of the problem in reaching these, what we call closed countries or harder countries is especially electronically. Part of the problem is that these countries actually have the larger platforms completely cut off.

You can’t get YouTube in China. I don’t know if people know that you can’t get Facebook in China, you can’t get Instagram, you can’t get any of these social platforms in China. But we are still there. We still have people in China who tell us they still are able to listen to sermons and preaching. In fact, China is one of the largest areas that we see downloads coming from. I think just because of the sheer volume of the people, number one. And number two, I believe there are a lot of Christians in China and they’re looking for content. They’re looking for teaching. Especially when you’re talking about new believers or new generation of believers. They need to be taught. They need to be taught they’re hungry. You remember when you were first a believer, you were just devouring everything, even as a young person devouring the cassette tapes.

What if you didn’t have any of that? You need that. A newborn believer needs to have the sincere milk of the word, and they need to have strong meat. So it’s very important for us to reach these countries. But the way we’re going to do that is not to ride on the back of these other bigger platforms. Like a lot of churches are really just relying on these bigger platforms to get their message out. And we’re not going to knock the big platform because we can certainly use them, but they’re not going to be able to get you into China, that’s for sure. Or some of these other countries, they are all blocked. And so part of our passion, part of our job that we’ve been trying to do is to build out our own infrastructure, and it’s something that we call the vault. It’s very difficult. It’s not glamorous. It’s just where we just have to physically build this out in places around the world. We’re starting here at Bob Jones in Greenville. This is our headquarters, but we have our own physical infrastructure where we can get into some of these countries where we couldn’t with some of the other platforms. That’s a real consideration. I know it’s getting a little bit more into the technical side, but if we rely on the big platforms, the bottom line is we will not get into large areas of the world. We simply won’t.

Isaac Crockett:

Well, that is so neat. I remember the last year when you were on, you talked some about the vault, and I’ve seen it develop, I mean just within this year. I wish we had more time in this segment to talk about that, but just within this year, all the developments that have taken place with the vault that you described last year to us, but it is especially spectacular really to think about how the safety mechanisms that you’re talking about and how the simpleness of this, it just reminds me of the simpleness of God’s word. It’s kind of like this technology is the technology of the Gutenberg press for the reformation that getting God’s word into people’s hands. And I know Gary, that’s one of the things you focus on so much when you’re in foreign countries, is getting good resources into the hands of the pastors so that they can do the gospel work so that they can do the evangelism, the preaching, the church building over there.

And this is one tool that we can use an online tech tool, so to speak, that can be used in nations all over the world. We’re so excited about this. Well, we’re about to take another timeout, but it’s been a blessing to hear about this. Please keep your radio tuned or your smartphone or your computer or wherever you’re listening from. We’re hoping to wrap up with some encouragement for pastors and for listeners right after this brief time out when we come back on Stand in the Gap today with Steven Lee from sermon audio.com. We welcome back to this edition, this Friday edition of Stand in the Gap Today. I’m Pastor Isaac Crockett, and my co-host is Pastor Gary Dahl, and we are wrapping up our conversation with Steven Lee from Sermon Audio Founder and CEO of sermon audio. And I know from the work I’ve done with church plants to mission work, to all sorts of different things, I’ve been able to use many of these resources that just continue to grow and get better on sermon audio.

I would encourage you, if you’re listening to go to sermon audio.com as a homeschool parent, my wife and I are always trying to keep a biblical worldview in front of our kids. We use the BJU press curriculum, which does a great job of that. But when we travel, a lot of times as we’re traveling, I like to have my kids listen to good preaching. And that’s one of the apps we will go to is sermon audio.com. And if you go to their website, you’ll see all sorts of different options. You can look up sermons based on scripture. You can look up sermons based on topics. You can look up sermons based on language based on the preacher. If there’s a certain preacher you want to listen to, you can look for churches and find churches that use sermon audio. There’s even something that I use for our family devotions a lot, is using a hymnal or salter to give my kids to indoctrinate, to catechize our children with these hymns.

We use it in our church services as well, but we use it a lot at home. For example, I think the first hymn that comes up because of alphabetical orders, a Mighty Fortress is our God. It has the lyrics, has a history of the hymn, has a Bible passage related to it, tells about it just an incredible tool, literally at your fingertips, at a smartphone or computer that you could use for multiple generations. Maybe you’re a grandparent, you’re looking for a way, something to do to influence your grandchildren. So I would encourage you to use this tool if you haven’t used it already. If you already use it, use it more. But Steven, I want to go to you and I want to have you talk to maybe pastors who are listening right now or people who might go and talk about this program to their pastor. What would you say to pastors? How can sermon, audio help and encourage them to proclaim scripture boldly what we’ve been talking about?

Steven Lee:

Well, there’s two ways. Basically, I would encourage pastors, I mean, whether you’re pastor or not, especially pastors. Pastors need to be fed too. I mean, they do. I mean, they’re the ones preaching every Sunday. They’re the ones giving every Sunday, but they also need to be fed. And of course they’re fed privately in their personal devotions, and that is the primary way. But they need to be fed from preaching as well. They are not immune to the attacks of the devil. And just like the laypeople who sit in the churches, they need to be fed with good preaching. Well, so the pastors and I would encourage pastors to feed themselves on great preaching. There’s, there’s a wealth of resources there on sermon audio, but we’re not the only ones. But avail yourself to great preaching. Faith does come by hearing and hearing by the word your own personal faith is strengthened.

Yes, it’s saving faith, but also you grow in your faith by the word of God. And so you have to be constantly feeding. So that’s the first thing. But I would also encourage pastors to, and this is going to sound self-serving, but I really would encourage pastors to consider putting their church their sermons on sermon audio. There’s really no reason why not to have a multiplying effect on the sermons that are preached. Every Sunday. A pastor, they spend a lot of time to study and in prayer and in preparation for the word on Sundays, and the primary, of course is their local congregation, but it can have a multiplying effect. It’s sort of like Spurgeon sermons. Of course, those sermons were preached to the local church there at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London. Of course that’s true. But look at the multiplying effect it had throughout the decades now throughout the world, multiplying effect of what they called back then, the penny pulpit, those publications of his sermons that were sold for just pennies. This is the sort of thing I’m talking about. Cast your bread on the waters, get it out there. The world needs truth. They need more of it, not less of it. So I would encourage pastors to take advantage of every opportunity, certainly this one, to get their messages out there. That’s what I would say to them,

Gary Dull:

Steven, I think that’s a good challenge. And I’ve got a twofold question. Number one, how can pastors get their sermons up on sermon audio.com? And then secondly, for listeners today who are speaking spiritual truth, how can they use sermon audio to find trustworthy preaching and deepen their own personal faith and walk with the Lord?

Steven Lee:

Well, sermon audio, it is the world’s largest repository of sermons. So there’s a wealth of material, just material on sermon audio. It’s not just preaching. There’s a lot of material like testimonials. There’s a lot of material like Sunday school material. There’s a lot of camp messages on there, a lot of conference messages, a lot of debates and Q and as, lots of different messages, Bible messages. But all of the material that’s on sermon audio must fall within the boundaries that we’ve set out. And this is very important to us. We have articles of faith on the site. We don’t hide them. We are not ashamed of them, but these are the fundamental cardinal truths of the Christian faith without which it is not Christian. We’re talking about the virgin birth. We’re talking about the Trinity, the deity of Christ. We’re talking about the Bible as the final authority.

These things are not for debate. And if a church or a ministry or individual that uploads on sermon audio does not agree, adhere to the entire articles of faith, they just simply don’t belong on the site. So we are governed by these articles of faith. You should check them out. And what that does is it keeps out the main line denominations. It keeps out those denominations that have gone astray, but there’s a huge variety. As Brother Crockett said, you can search by Bible, you can search by topic, by speaker, by event category. So if there’s a funeral that was just uploaded, that’ll be there. If there’s a wedding that just happened, that’ll be there and so on. But church, a pastor can very easily just sign up. It’s all self-serve. There’s a little link there that says Become a broadcaster. You click on that link that says Become a broadcaster, because that’s what we call someone who puts sermons up.

They are a broadcaster and they just fill out a very simple form. There is a fee, but that’s just how we keep the lights on. We are not a site that charges for the sermons. We’re not asking people for remuneration. So the site runs by the churches. The broadcasters paying what we believe is a very reasonable nominal flat fee to put their sermons on. So they are called broadcasters. And I have to say that with all the tools that are out there right now, and we know about many of them, we have intentionally kept our price very low and it’s flat. There’s no hidden costs or anything like that. We’ve intentionally kept our price low. We’ve only had to change it twice in our history, 25 years. We don’t like to change it, but we want to make it affordable for any size church. It’s around $60 per month. And even if churches cannot afford that, we have partnered with a nonprofit group. They’re called Amicus, which is Latin for a friend of the church, and they will essentially open up a scholarship for churches, especially in foreign lands that cannot afford that because they want to help churches get their voice out there.

Isaac Crockett:

Well, thank you for all of this information, Steven. It’s been a fantastic program hearing this, and we are actually, we’re already out of time here, so thank you for this information about sermon audio.com. If you haven’t been to the website, I would encourage you to go if you’re part of a church, if you’re looking for a church, just to listen to good preaching, to listen to these audio books from long ago. Thank you for this. Steven. Thank you so much for being on with us today, pastor Gary Dull. It’s always great being on the program with you. Thanks for being my co-host, and thank you for listening wherever you’re listening from. Thank you for listening to us. Please pray for us here at Stand In the Gap Media and wherever you are today, I pray that you will stand in the gap for truth today.