Episode 26: Kathie Lee Gifford: The Jesus Kathie Knows
Transcript
Patsy: Hi, I’m Patsy Clairmont, and I’m a Boomer.
Andrew: And I’m Andrew Greer, and I’m a Millennial.
Patsy: And you are listening to Bridges.
Andrew: Spiritual Connections Through Generational Conversations
Patsy: Season Two is brought to you by Food for the Hungry.
Andrew: Meeting the physical and spiritual needs of people all around the world for over 40 years.
Patsy: Today, you’re not gonna want to miss this because we have a very sanguine personality that will be coming to captivate your mind to help you understand the value of God’s Word and it active and alive in your life. So don’t miss this.
Andrew: Sanguine, whoa. That’s incredible. Something to learn from the Boomer.
We have another Boomer in the house indeed. Her name is Kathie Lee Gifford. She has written the new book, The Jesus I Know: Honest Conversations and Diverse Opinions About Who He Is. She is an honest person herself. She is a diverse person in her talents and skill sets as well. We are so excited to have her here on the debut episode, premiere episode, of Season Two of Bridges. Listen in.
Patsy: You know, Andrew, we can’t begin unless we have a bridge to cross.
Andrew: Absolutely.
Patsy: And we love to see the different bridges that people are building in their life, and our guest today is a bridge builder. She is a person of great energy and joyful exuberance.
Kathie Lee: Not 10 minutes ago, but anyway.
Andrew: There she is.
Kathie Lee: I am now, but not 10 minutes ago.
Patsy: That’s generally speaking.
Andrew: That’s exactly right. We are thrilled to have you in the house, Kathie Lee Gifford, talking. We’re in Franklin, Tennessee, and you are local. I was just saying, “Well, we gave you some local food,” but you’re a local already.
Patsy: Yes, she is. And I’m not done talking about it because…
Andrew: Alright. Keep going, keep going. I respect my elders.
Patsy: I want to talk about the kind of bridge that she builds that I’ve observed, and that is with her expansive heart. She has such a heart for people, and she receives them where they’re at. And I think that’s exceptional today with all of the conflict that’s going on in the media, in the news.
Kathie Lee: It breaks God’s heart.
Patsy: It does break his heart, and it’s cruel. It’s unkind. It’s damaging. But what I’ve seen you do, through your work on TV and also through the ministry of the written word, is that you build bridges to people.
Kathie Lee: I pray so.
Patsy: You receive them and allow them to be who they are while you remain who you are.
Kathie Lee: You mean I treat them like Jesus did? And does?
Andrew: Yeah. Absolutely.
Kathie Lee: Thank you.
Andrew: I mean, I think that sometimes we find that the way of Jesus can seem like an archaic thing, at least culturally speaking. But in your new book, which I love this title — The Jesus I Know: Honest Conversations and Diverse Opinions About Who He Is, you’re talking to all kinds of different people — friends, notable, not notable, known, unknown — about who Jesus is and about the way of Jesus.
But I want to turn the tables on you before we talk about this book and these conversations…
Kathie Lee: Stop it. I love it when you get like that.
Andrew: I’ll tell you something later.
Kathie Lee: It’s early in the day, and it’s never too late.
Andrew: That’s exactly right. Oh okay, whoo.
Kathie Lee: That’s a different book.
Andrew: I got you, Patsy. Here, take my notes.
Kathie Lee: She’s cooling him down, for those of you that can’t see.
Andrew: I remember this workout video from the 90s when I was growing up, but anyway.
Kathie Lee: Oh gosh. We go back too far.
Andrew: But where did you first meet Jesus, this Jesus you know?
Kathie Lee: This is what I love among the gazillions of things that I love about Yeshua — the Hebrew word for Jesus — and I’m a Jewish girl. It’s that he is such a personal Lord and Savior. He’s a personal friend.
My favorite verse in the entire Bible is one word. It’s what he said to Mary Magdalene when she was at the tomb. He said, “Mary.”
Ah, it kills me. Every time. It kills me.
She didn’t recognize him until he said, “Mary.”
He says Andrew. He says Patsy. He says Kathie. Anybody who’s listening to us today, just put your name in there. That’s what Yeshua says to you today. Before he says anything else, he says your name with such love, with such tenderness.
He is not the God we’ve been told about, we’ve preached about. You know, the one who’s coming to destroy us and send us to everlasting sulfur and fire and brimstone in hell. The smiter. He’s the lover of our very souls.
It breaks my heart how Satan has used Scripture, has used Christians, has used Christianity, which is a different entity than Christians, to perpetuate the lie that it’s all about religion. This walk we have with our Savior in the garden is not religion. It’s the antithesis of religion. It is relationship with the living God. And I love how personal he is.
You know, his truth is forever. That doesn’t change. But he adapts his love to each one of us who comes to him and says, “Show me, Lord.” He will let us walk down different paths, knowing that it’s not a new path to him. It’s not a surprise to him. He knows it’s the one you need. It’s the one you are familiar with.
So I first met Yeshua in a movie theater, because all my life since the day I was born, with a pratfall and a rimshot coming out of my mama, I knew I wanted to be an actress and a singer. And so where did Jesus meet me? In a movie theater when I was 12-years-old.
My precious friend Billy Graham had never before done a movie with his organization, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. He took such heat for it back then, you guys. This was in the early 60s, probably about 1965. It was a movie called The Restless Ones. And I’ve shown it to my children like 10 years ago, and they go, “Mom, this is crap.” I said, “It must seem that way now, but it was radical stuff for back then.”
And all that matters is that it met me where I was, a little Jewish girl confused about my daddy is Jewish, my mother is a shiksa, and we’re living in Annapolis, Maryland. They’re stoning my father sometimes, and I know he’s the most godly man I’ve ever met. And I go to a little movie called The Restless Ones, and at the end, there’s an altar call and anybody that wants to receive Jesus — nobody every called him Yeshua then — into their hearts, come forward. And I remember literally hearing the voice of Jesus, Yeshua, in my heart, not in my ear. A more profound organ is our heart. And he said, “Kathie, I love you, and if you’ll trust me, I’ll make something beautiful out of your life.” That’s all he said. And I said, “I want to trust you, Lord.”
I got up, ran down that aisle as fast as I could. Probably the only thing in my entire life, including my first marriage, that I do not regret.
Andrew: You know, I think in evangelical culture, which we’re kind of smack dab in the middle of the Bible Belt here in Tennessee, but even in that evangelical culture, we can seem to discount people’s relationship to Jesus, meaning how they got there. If it didn’t look like just how he reached me, I don’t know what to do with that, so that’s why we recite a sinner’s prayer, which is nowhere in Scripture. We want to control…
Kathie Lee: Everything.
Andrew: True. So how can we remain open? I mean, isn’t the Holy Spirit kind of this wild, untamed…
Kathie Lee: This wild, untamed creature, and yet completely and totally in control and sovereign.
Yeah, for me, it’s always been what did Jesus do? When I study Scripture, and I study rabbinically, mostly in Israel, but since the pandemic, I can’t. But I study teachers who teach that way. They teach the Bible as written in the original source material. The Hebrew in the Old Testament, which I don’t even like Old Testament or New Testament. It’s one story, and so much of the confusion we have and so much of the problems we have in understanding the Bible is this like, Oh, the Old Testament is for the Jews, and the New Testament’s for the Christians. No, that is not true. That is a lie from the pit of hell. That has separated Jews and Christians for centuries and millennia at this point.
It’s not true. It’s one story. It’s God’s love story that goes back before creation when God, through Jesus and the Holy Spirit — Jehovah Elohim, the Creator — created everything, with the intention in his purpose that we know him and walk in the garden with him and have communion with him and have joy and all the names that we attribute to Jehovah God, and there are hundreds in the Scripture.
Jehovah Elohim means God Creator, but he wants us to know him by name as he knows us by name. And we attribute so many things to the word “shalom” in the Hebrew. It’s sort of like mahalo now in Hawaiian. Hey, have a nice day. God bless you. No, it does not mean just peace. In the Hebrew, it’s the word that we use every attribute of God for. It’s his forgiveness, his loving kindness, his sovereignty, his peace, his mercy.
So peace is a part of it. It’s like everything else that bothers me about Christian teaching in the Western world. We’ve watered down everything. So studying rabbinically has literally changed me, changed my entire life, changed my perception of God, my understanding of him, my adoration of him, my purpose under him, his Lordship. Everything changed when I started to understand that if I don’t read Scripture in its original source, I don’t infuse it into my life because we are what we put into us, whether it’s porn or whether it’s junk food. Whatever we put in is what comes out of us.
I want the purity of God’s word to penetrate every aspect of me, and it can’t happen if we’re reading bad translations of the Bible and then memorizing those bad translations and feeling so good about that. And then we share it with people, and then we try to apply it to our lives, and guess what. We wonder why there’s no power in our life. It’s because quoting the Word. In the beginning was the Word, and that’s in its purest sense. And if we don’t know it and ingest it and memorize it and then apply it, we are going to go around as half-living creatures, wondering why there’s no power in our life.
Patsy: And what I love is when we read the Word, the Word reads us. It helps us to know who we are, who we were meant to be, and how that’s possible, which fills us with a sense of hope. And he, of course, is the God of all hope.
“When we read the Word, the Word reads us.”
Andrew: I want to bring it back to this book. Talking about how you’ve been studying Scripture for these many years now, do you think by going back to this kind of fundamental way of reading the Scripture… I don’t want to tie that into fundamentalist.
Kathie Lee: No, please don’t.
Andrew: To the foundation, right, to the very foundation. Being able to take that to your core and go from a 2D understanding to a three-dimensional understanding…
Kathie Lee: And even beyond.
Andrew: Yes, right. Who knows where it ends, right?
Kathie Lee: God is not dimensional.
Andrew: Right, yeah. Well, in our box, he is.
Kathie Lee: We put him in a box.
Andrew: Yeah, it’s tidy, isn’t it?
Does that understanding of Scripture and that embodying of how you live your life based on Scripture, the Word of God living through you, does that allow you to remain open to so many different people from so many different backgrounds believing so many different things? Is that part of it?
Kathie Lee: You know, that’s such a great question. That’s everything, right there. Right there.
Yes, because Jesus lives in me powerfully through the power of the Holy Spirit, he enables to me see others as he does. That’s my prayer every morning. Lord, let me see people like you see them. Let me not judge them because I’m not capable. I have no authority to do such a thing. Help me to love them, that’s it, right where they are, Lord, because you’re not gonna leave them there.
And we’ll judge people and say, “Oh, they don’t worship like I do. They don’t look like I do. They don’t go to my church. They don’t sing the same songs. They don’t raise their hands. Oh my goodness, they speak in tongues. No, no, no, no.” Instead of staying, you know the first three letters in the word Yeshua? Yes. Yes, Yeshua. Show me. Let me love people.
So when I started all these rabbinical trips to the rock, the road, and the rabbi, which is a book that I wrote about Jesus being the rock, the road being the Holy Land, and the rabbi is not a particular rabbi; it’s rabbinical teaching, like Jesus was a rabbi. It’s his teaching. So when something chemical happens when you are in the Holy Land studying Jesus’ words and his travels in the word, in the land, and then the teaching of it through the centuries through the rabbinical scholars.
Anyway, something happens, and it started to happen to me at a very, very age, and I try to remember what all those experiences were like when I would be in a place where I knew Jesus had said this very thing right there. I’ve travelled it so much I know it could only be right here that that happened. There is something so incredibly powerful you can never ever ever be the same.
So when I sat down to write this book, which I did not want to write. I don’t like writing books. They’re lonely, and it’s hard. This is my 25th or… I have lost total track of how many books, doesn’t matter. I’ve got to be faithful to each one. This was the result of a friend of mine, actually my literary agent in New York, who let’s just say he’s completely different than I am, completely different politically, sexually, spiritually, in every way, but I love him. And he said, “Kathie, the last book that we worked on was called It’s Never Too Late. He said my favorite stories in that book, and you told amazing stories, were the ones where you talk to people in your everyday life, whether it was a movie set or in the studio, whatever. Wherever God puts you,” your mission field basically, “you talk to people about Jesus, and their reactions and responses were fascinating to me. Would you consider doing an entire book on that?” And I went, “No, I would never think about that. No.” But he said, “I would buy a book like that.” He said, “I’m fascinated by that. I was moved deeply by that.” I said, “Then let’s do a book like that.”
And so I prayed, as I always do, Who do you want me to talk to, Lord? And so many of the people that ended up being in this book are people that went on rabbinical trips with me that had nothing to do… I love them as people, but they were Sikhs, they were Hindus, they were Scientologists, they were broken-hearted Catholics because of the tragedy in the Catholic church. They were very confused Baptists who still think, and will forever think sadly, that Jesus didn’t drink wine.
Andrew: Confused Baptists?
Kathie Lee: They’re not the only confused ones in the world, but on that subject, they’re extremely confused.
And then other people that were just atheists. But I said, “Show me, Lord. Reveal.”
This is the thing, you guys. I usually pray with an outcome I want. I’m learning more and more and more to take myself out of the outcome and say, “Show me, Jesus. I want who you want to come on this trip.” And I will go, “Really, Lord? I will question you. I mean, Moses did. But then I want to trust you.” And so every time I tried to be faithful to the people that he put on my list.
So this book represents people who came on those trips who had an outrageous reaction to the rock, road, and rabbi experience. Not all of them would be called “Christians” by people maybe reading this book, but that was also part of my purpose. I am tired of us judging people just because they’re at a different place in their journey than we are. We have no right.
The woman with the issue of blood was at a different place than Bartimaeus or Zaccheaus, anybody. We’re all unique, precious individuals to God in different places on our journey, and if we’ll just love people, then we will help them on the journey.
Andrew: That is so right, so much our heartbeat. We are loving this conversation with our guest for this episode, Kathie Lee Gifford.
I am your host Andrew Greer, the Millennial, and I’m sitting next to my co-host Patsy Clairmont, the Boomer, and we’ll be back in a minute.
Food for the Hungry Sponsorship Message
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Patsy: “Shout out praises to the Lord, all the earth. Worship the Lord with joy. Enter his presence with joyful singing. Acknowledge that the Lord is God. He made us and we belong to him; we are his people and the sheep of his pasture.”
That’s Psalms 100, verses 1 and 2, from my own Abide Bible.
When we abide him and his words abide in us, everything changes — our perspective, our attitude. So it anchors my soul when I go to the Word of God. It teaches me better behavior than I’d have otherwise because I can really suffer from a case of the attitude. So this helps to keep me in a better place with a sweeter attitude in a difficult world.
The Abide Bible comes in two different versions. I don’t know if you have a favorite, but there’s a New King James and then there’s the New English translation. It is set up so you can journal, so those of you who love to do notes on the side, this paper is set up to receive those notes. It also gives you insights on the edges of the pages that help us to read the Word in a more meaningful way, to meditate in such a way that it begins to sink into the very depths of our being, to pray the verse so that we get better claim on the truth in it, and then to contemplate so that as we move forward the Word goes with us.
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Andrew: We have been talking about the Abide Bible throughout the entire Bridges broadcast, but one new way to highlight your experience of reading the Bible is a free 21-day video devotional series called Experience Abide. It’s an incredible way for people to experience the Bible themselves and adds a free benefit to your own spiritual growth, and so we are excited to offer not only the Bible but this free Experience Abide devotional series straight from bridgesshow.com/abide.
Michelle Margiotta singing “Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus”
’Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus
Just to take Him at His word
Just to rest upon His promise
Just to know, thus saith the Lord
Jesus, Jesus, how I trust Him
How I’ve proved Him o’er and o’er
Jesus, Jesus, precious Jesus
O for grace to trust Him more
Andrew: Well, that was our very good friend Michelle Margiotta singing one of our very favorite hymns, “Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus,” which seems like a great song to include in this episode. And we have another really good mutual friend with Kathie Lee, don’t we, Patsy?
Patsy: You took a trip with a very dear friend of mine, who is now a very dear friend of yours, Nicole C. Mullen.
Kathie Lee: Yes.
Patsy: And there was a beautiful video that came out of that that was just lovely. It was spellbinding.
Kathie Lee: You know, it was anointed of the Holy Spirit, Patsy, is what that was. I can briefly tell you about that because the work that I’ve been doing since then is not just books. I had no idea, as we often do, not one block from where we’re sitting here, I walked into a writing session with Nicole C. Mullen, who I’d never met before, and we sat down, and she sort of did a dance around me, and I did a dance around her.
She does not collaborate usually. I collaborate always. She’s a beautiful African-American girl that I knew of her, didn’t know her. She is meeting an old Jewish woman that she’s only watched on TV.
Andrew: That’s what we’re calling this episode, “Old Jewish Woman.”
Kathie Lee: We just sort of did a prayer, said, “Lord, we don’t know what we have today. It’s yours.”
This is so Holy Spirit. I had had Hagar on my mind, Hagar. I love everything about the Word of God, but it doesn’t whitewash. The so-called heroes of the Bible are so human. We all become saints, but we don’t start out that way.
“We all become saints, but we don’t start out that way.”
Patsy: Isn’t that the truth.
Kathie Lee: Abraham and Sarah, great, great, great hall of God’s fame historically. This is maybe the worst thing that they ever did was what they did to Hagar and his son, Abraham’s son, Ishmael. And I had a heart for her as I came into this session. Little did I know that Nicole had already starting writing a story about Hagar that wasn’t finished.
I also, having studied the Word of God for as long as I have and literally read the Bible in its entirety eleven times in eleven years, I just wanted to not read a Scripture here or a Scripture there, but just get some understanding of the continuity of it and what it means from soup to nuts, from alpha to omega. I got bored with it. It wasn’t feeding me anymore, and I was missing stuff because of it. And one day, God revealed to me Zechariah 2:5, and I’d never… How can you study the Bible for 50 years and not see something?
Andrew: All the time.
Kathie Lee: All the time. And it said, “I will be a ring,” or a wall, depending on the translation, “of fire around her. I will be the glory in her midst.” And Zechariah was talking about the enemies that were gathering around Jerusalem at the time. But I thought, But that’s what I want him to be in my life, everyday of my life. Be a ring of fire for me, Lord. Be the glory in my midst that I keep my eyes and my heart stayed on you.
And so I came in with just that. We only had like two or three hours because she was leaving for Nigeria and I had to go back to the Today show. It was a Sunday. And we wrote a little chorus and a little verse, and she left and I left, and I said, “You know what, sweetie? You’re going on to Nigeria. We’re going to be a couple of weeks until we can get back together and finish this song. If you don’t mind, I’ll take it back to Connecticut with me, because after my show with Hoda, I got nothing but time, and that’s the devil’s workshop.” She said, “Yeah, yeah, work on it.”
I sat down a couple of days later, by the power and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. I’m a theater writer. I’ve written for Broadway, off-Broadway, been in that world forever. And I see cinematically, and I see theatrically, everything.
So I started writing, and I said, Oh, this is not just about Hagar. This is about Ruth, century later, two centuries later. I could tell if I looked at my notes, but a long time afterwards there was another woman named Ruth. So I just wrote all this stuff. I wrote this song about Ruth being ripped from the headlines. Let’s admit it — Hagar was sex-trafficked and she was a slave. How much do we hear about that in today’s world? She had no choice when Sarah put Hagar in Abraham’s arms and said, “Get an heir. God’s promise has to be fulfilled.”
She got, like so many of us do, tired of waiting for God’s promises, and she took things into her own hands with terrible results, and yet God even made beauty out of the ashes of that. But we find Hagar in the desert, and the first time God is given a name by a human being is Hagar, the God who sees. The God who sees me in my agony, in my despair, in my hopelessness. Maybe she was the first to name him, but she was not the last to experience that need.
So I thought about Ruth, and she was an immigrant, which we hear all about immigration today, and she was a widow, which I am. So I write about Ruth.
Then it goes on from there, and I think about, I don’t want to just make this about women. There’s too much of that in our world today, trying to separate the genders, if you even believe in the concept of gender, which I do.
So I started writing about David, not the king, not the anointed one, not the mighty warrior — the one hiding in Ein Gedi, which I visited so many times, in the caves. Those caves are dark and they’re rat-infested and they’re bug-infested and there is no water. It’s like hell. It’s hell in a cave. And he ran from Saul, the so-called king, even though David had been anointed 20 or some years earlier. Can you imagine waiting for God’s promise to be… Really, Lord? I’m the anointed king? When’s that going to happen? How many of us spend our days and our years saying, “Lord, but you promised me?”
So I could relate to David in the waiting for promises, I could relate to every one of these people in a different way, and I’m starting to see a pattern of, oh, dear Jesus. These stories, as ancient as they are, are more relevant even today than they’ve ever been because your Word’s alive and active.
And then I ended it with Mary Magdalene at Jesus’ tomb and, let’s not forget, at the ugly, ugly, ugly part of the ugliest, at his cross. This woman who’d been redeemed and healed of Jesus with seven demons in her, that is mental illness. Again, ripped from the headlines. And who followed him with more ardor than probably anyone? The women who had been never loved, never valued, never seen as equal in the eyes of the patriarchal society that they grew up in.
And that’s so true in so many parts of our world still today. Women are still used for sexual pleasure or to make money off of them, pandering to the sexual needs of other people. It’s just one of the ugliest, ugliest truths of our world today, and nobody wants to look at it.
But anyway, when I finished writing, I get in a zone, which anybody will tell you as an artist, when they let the Holy Spirit take over, you just sort of sit back and you just breathe out the breath of God, and you go, “Lord, I don’t know what that was, but it was real.”
And so our precious Nicole came back from Nigeria. I said, “You know that song… Once I started writing, sweetie, it just turned out different, and if you don’t like it, then we deal with that. But I think it’s not a song for Danny Gokey to ultimately sing in a three-minute version.” Not a pop tune. This is a piece of theater. It’s storytelling, and all different stories basically saying the same thing: God is faithful. God will provide. That Jehovah Jireh. God will keep his promises.
He’s the God of the how and when. His promises are true; it’s just he’s the one in control of how it happens and when it happens. And that’s what Sarah did. She decided how and when. We’re not to do that. We miss out on a great, great, great blessing. Even though God ultimately blessed Sarah and Abram with a child, that was not God’s initial plan. It was for them to trust him. Then at the age of 190, they would have… And they did anyway, but it’s another great story of how God will use our mistakes for his glory in spite of ourselves.
So anyway, she went into the studio, Patsy. I wish everybody in the world could’ve been there. I wish I’d been recording it. I meant to. I had my camera, I had my phone, everything. I was going to document it. But here’s the other neat thing. She did not want to go into the studio and do a demo on what we were doing, not because she didn’t love what I had written. I said to her when she went into the recording booth… There was only her and our friend Sal Oliveri, who was playing keyboard and our engineer. And I said, “This is a demo, sweetie.”
Everybody in the music business makes a demo before you record something. You want to know what you’ve got, you want to finesse it, you want to work on it. It’s part of the process.
I said, “It’s just a demo, sweetie. Before we start recording it, I want you to just intro each of the characters. You know the Bible so beautifully.” She’s very, very biblically literate, and she’s got a beautiful, beautiful speaking voice, every bit as gorgeous as her singing voice and every bit as beautiful as she is just personally. She’s one of God’s most glorious creatures. I could hate her if I didn’t love her so much.
But anyway, she said, “But Kathie, I don’t do that. I don’t do that.” And I said, “But it’s only because you haven’t done it. This is a safe place to try it. Nothing can happen here that’s bad. We all want the same outcome. I’m here. Sal’s here. We want this to be a blessing. We want this to be anointed.” So we prayed, and she went in, stood there regally like she is, and the first words that came out of her mouth were “Hagar was a single mother.”
I went, Oh my gosh, that’s what she was. And she went on, and when you watch “God Who Sees” on YouTube or wherever else you find it, millions of people have, 95%, 96% of what you see and hear in that was first take, in the studio the first day. The anointing of God was on it, and all I did as a theater writer is help a little bit with the segues that we needed. But she nailed it.
Once she recorded it, I was on my face in the studio. I never took one picture or recorded anything. The power of the Holy Spirit was so strong I had to fall on my face. I went over to Sal afterwards, and Sal’s at the keyboard and his hands are trembling. This man is a brilliant, brilliant musician and engineer. He’s done thousands of sessions. His hands are trembling and tears are streaming down his face. And I go, “Not just your typical demo, huh, Sal?” He gose, “No.” He could barely speak.
And I look over at Nicole, and I said, “Baby, look what Jesus just did. Look what the Holy Spirit just did.” And she couldn’t believe it either.
Why do we put God in a box, and why are we surprised when he shows up in ways and then shows off in ways that we could never… He said, “I will do more, immeasurably more, than you can ever ask or imagine.” Why are we still surprised? We should expect it. Come, Holy Spirit. Come, Lord Jesus. Take us. Take us to that new place. Show us new things, streams of living water, deserts changed from wasteland into gardens. Lord, we wait on you.
“Why do we put God in a box?”
Patsy: Yes, yes, yes, Yeshua.
Kathie Lee: So I’m so glad that blessed you.
Then we went to Israel, and I took all my prophets from The Rock, the Road, and the Rabbi. I have $500,000 from a little book that I thought would sell maybe five copies, maybe to my mother. She’d buy them. Because I thought nobody had any spiritual curiosity. People are hurting and they’re hungry for truth.
So I had all this money sitting in my little kingdom account. I used the Nashville Symphony orchestra players to record it, and I got a great orchestrator, Phillip Keveren, in to orchestrate it. We went to Israel after we did that, and I’d never directed before. Been in front of a camera my whole life being directed, but the Lord said, “No, Kathie, you’re ready.” And the way it turned out was simply astonishing.
Patsy: It’s exquisite.
Andrew: It’s an incredible story. It’s an incredible song. It’s an incredible performance. You are an incredible person, from TV, stage, author, everything.
We are here with Kathie Lee Gifford. I’m Andrew, the Millennial.
Patsy: And I’m Patsy, the Boomer.
Andrew: And we’ll be back in a minute.
Patsy: Andrew, I understand, word is out, that you do another podcast with a friend of ours. Tell us about that.
Andrew: Mr. Mark Lowry, who was a guest on this podcast. He’s my co-host for Dinner Conversations with Mark Lowry and Andrew Greer. We have a ton of fun talking about all kinds of topics around the table, and you can find them at dinner-conversations.com.
Do you know something that we both love a lot of, Patsy?
Patsy: What’s that?
Andrew: That’s books.
Patsy: Food
Andrew: That too. But I hear you have a book club.
Patsy: I do have a book club. It’s called Porch Pals Book Club, and you can find out more about the book club by going to patsyclairmont.com.
Food for the Hungry Sponsorship Message
Patsy: Food for the Hungry is giving us a wonderful opportunity. I’m so glad that they have put this program into effect because of the literacy issue around the world, and this is going to help tackle that, plus bring the light of Christ into the lives of children that will be spread throughout the villages and the homes and the hearts of people. I love it. I love it. Tell us more.
Andrew: We have been given the opportunity, through our friends at Food for the Hungry, to purchase Bibles for people in communities around the world. The beauty of these Bibles is that they come ready to read. No matter where these folks are — that may be a community in Bolivia or Cambodia or Haiti or Kenya — all across the world, these Bibles are translated in their native tongue, which we think of being able to procure a Bible anytime we want, either through our technological devices or going to a bookstore, picking one up, or Amazon. It’s not as easily or readily available to other communities that are more rural and more impoverished around the world.
And so, of course, Food for the Hungry has been committed for decades to not only meeting the physical needs of people around the world, and of course, we helped do that through chickens last season. This season we’re getting to complete their mission, and that is meet the spiritual needs through the offering of a Bible.
So go to fh.org/bridges, and for $12, you can purchase a Bible for someone who is waiting to receive it across the world. And don’t forget — your gift is tax deductible.
Andrew: We’re back with Kathie Lee Gifford in the studio. This is Bridges. And I want to ask you, Kathie Lee, when I look at this book, The Jesus I Know: Honest Conversations and Diverse Opinions About Who He Is, what it says to me, because when you look at the list of people that you talked to — people like Megyn Kelly, Kristen Chenoweth, Kris Jenner...
Kathie Lee: Jimmie Allen
Andrew: It doesn’t end, the list of intrigue, in these people that you’ve talked to.
Patsy: Intrigue is a great word for that. I was really surprised.
Andrew: Absolutely, it is surprise. I mean, you’ve always been a little surprising.
But what it points to me is that we live in this culture that we call secular, but I’m wondering if actually it’s not as secular as we’ve made it out to be, because when you get into these individual people, who actually play a fairly large role in what we call secular culture, but talking about very holy things. Do you think we actually live in a secular culture, or are we actually holy humans interacting in what we’re told is a secular culture?
“Are we actually holy humans interacting in what we’re told is a secular culture?”
Kathie Lee: I think one of the great gifts God gave me as a child going forth knowing what he would be doing in my life. I didn’t know. I just know that little girl that walked forward in that theater and said, “Yes, Lord. I’m going to trust you.” I knew I was called into the so-called, at the time, as you say, secular world, but I never looked at it that way.
Jesus did not separate the secular from the spiritual. The only thing he said was, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.” But he wasn’t manipulated or controlled by those kinds of labels, and I don’t want to be. I know that I was not called to be a missionary in Africa, which was the place good Christians go, you know. He said, “No, no, no. I am calling you to the world like Jesus.”
When Jesus called his disciples to get into the boat and go to the other side, we as Western Christians think he was saying, “Meet me on the other side of the sea of Galilee.” No, the other side was a physical place called the Decapolis, only five miles from Capernaum where Jesus had his headquarters but a world away, the ultimate end world that nobody, no good Jew, was ever supposed to go. So Jesus was saying, in essence, “Get in the boat. Meet me over there where you are gonna experience things that you were told your entire life you’re not supposed to get there because you will be unclean. You will be ostracized. You will be removed from community because you’re not toeing the line.” The status quo, the religiosity of the day.
I despise religiosity. Jesus, the greatest rabbi, greatest teacher who ever lived, was the least religious by definition. He was radical in his love, and he said, “If you love God the Father with all your heart, soul, mind, strength, and then you love your neighbor as yourself, guess what, everybody. Boom, you have kept the law, and I’ve come to fulfill it.” And he’s the embodiment, incarnation of God the Father in the Son.
When we saw Jesus as human being, we saw the face of God and the works of God, and Jesus said, “We will do even greater things than he did in his name.” And the reason we don’t see that in our culture and in our world today is because we don’t have the faith to believe.
I have friends like Heidi Baker who go into Mozambique and see people raised from the dead after four days in the tomb just like Lazarus was. I have a dear friend, JoAnn Moody, who just got back from Brazil. She sees limbs that never existed grow. She sees people saved and healed, demon possessions gone; people with stage four cancer, it leaves the body. We are one miracle away from all kinds of miracles because we don’t believe he can actually do them through us.
Andrew: Are we too enlightened in our little American culture?
Kathie Lee: No, we’re not enlightened. We’re not enlightened enough. We’re too woke to begin with in our whole culture, but we need to be awakened to the work of the Holy Spirit and the possibilities. Jesus said, “With God, all things are possible.” But we say, “Yeah, but I don’t have my degree. Yeah, but I’ve had a divorce. Yeah, but I have this addiction. Yeah, but I don’t like people really.” Well, Moses was 80-years-old and stuttered and had a murder rap.
Stop it, you guys. I have to say “stop it” to me everyday. Stop putting a label on God, wrapping him up neatly, putting him on a shelf and saying, “That’s what God does.” How dare we tell anybody what God does?
So this book is about what God is doing in the lives of people that he loves that don’t look like me, don’t worship like me, don’t believe like I do, don’t go to church like I do, don’t worship like I do, don’t vote like I do. It’s the antithesis of our culture today, and Jesus says, “Love them in my name, Kathie. You want to see miracles, you want to see a human heart change — don’t tell them they’re going to hell. Tell them that God loves them and has a plan for their life because he does.”
Andrew: You know what that makes me think of is I’ve been directing this documentary that’s inspired by President Carter and Mrs. Carter, and in an interview with him — he’s 97-years-old, and of course, anyone who knows anything about his post-presidential career, it’s been all about peace and healing. Oh my goodness, the things he’s seen, like you’re talking about.
And so the last question I asked him was, at this stage of your life, with all of this experience behind you, more experience than some people will ever be able to wrap up into their life, seeing the things you’ve seen, relating to the people that you’ve related to, who think way different, come from way different backgrounds, believe differently, what’s the one piece of wisdom you would give to our world?
And he said that they would follow in the footsteps of Jesus.
Is that still relevant to us today?
Kathie Lee: More so than ever. The darker this world gets the brighter his light shines, and we are supposed to be the light on the hill. We are supposed to be his light. He is not expecting perfection from us. If you’re holding back because you say I’m not perfect, he goes, “I know, but in your weakness, you were made strong.” If we’re not feeling weakness, we’re not going to be on our knees pleading for his strength. We can do nothing.
Our righteousness, the Scripture says, is as filthy rags, and that is — this might gross people out, I’m so sorry — but the translation of that is menstrual rags. That’s our righteousness. But when we are wrapped in his robe of righteousness, we’re as clean as the snow.
Again, it comes back to we don’t know what the Word of God says. Once I started understanding that Jesus wasn’t a carpenter — bad translation of the word “tekton,” which means architect/builder. There were no buildable trees in Israel in the first century AD. Nothing but rocks. It was a desert. Jesus was a stonemason, and if we got that wrong, something simple like that…
I asked my first rabbinical teacher, Ray Vander Laan, I said, “Ray, if we’re wrong about something as easy as that, what else are we wrong about?” And he gave me this. I’ll never forget the look on his face, this twinkle in his eye. And he goes, “Everything.” And it lit a fire in my gut to know, to know.
Patsy: And I think it’s that unquenchable in the human heart that longs to have answers and hope, longs to be seen and to be known and to be directed.
Kathie Lee: It’s the deepest cry of the human soul. I agree.
Andrew: Well, thank you for being a person who sees so many people, who’s willing to see them, because I do think that even in a culture where we are so desperate to be known and we long to belong, something as simple as a friend, as someone who takes the time to see a heart and recognize the value of a human, points right back to Jesus.
I think in that wonderfully mystical way, through the Spirit, that when we are willing to see, then Jesus is known. So thank you for making Jesus known through your seeing. And we are so grateful that you’ve been on Bridges today, Kathie Lee.
Kathie Lee: I love seeing you again, sweetie. And Patsy, so lovely, enjoyed your ministry all these years, so praise God, praise God. And bless everybody listening. I hope it’s been a blessing to them. Why else do we get up in the morning?
Patsy: That’s right.
Kathie Lee: If we can’t be a blessing, let’s not be another burden to somebody.
Patsy: And it can all begin for you just with yes, yes, yes, Yeshua.
Andrew: That hit you, didn’t it?
Patsy: I love it. I love it. I’m taking that away with me because I believe very much that when we say yes, we’re more likely to see what the next step is.
Kathie Lee: Why can we not just say yes to the God who spoke creation into existence with his words? Let’s be the people of yes. Not “Gee, I can’t, Lord. Oh God, I can’t. I’m not worthy. I’m not this. I’m not that.” We insult God when we say that. If he calls us to something, he will provide. He will provide everything we need to make it true, and it will bless us by being a blessing. Yes, yes, yes, Yeshua.
Andrew: Give us a little Yeshua prayer to end our time.
Patsy: Okay.
Father God, we thank you for the privilege of lifting up your holy name, of being reminded of the value of your Word and how your Word awakens with us, awakens within us desire and hope and direction. Thank you for the light of who you are. Thank you for the hope that is yet to come, and we look forward to all you will accomplish in and through us. Thank you for our friend who has come here today and shared her heart and her passion for your Word. Please bless her and direct her footsteps. In Jesus name, amen.
Patsy: Bridges is produced by my co-host, Andrew Greer.
Andrew: And co-produced by my co-host, Patsy Clairmont. Our podcast is recorded by Jesse Phillips.
Patsy: And sometimes my son, Jason Clairmont.
Andrew: At the Arcade in Franklin, Tennessee. Jesse Phillips is also our editor and mixes our show. And our theme music is written by Kyle Buchanan and yours truly, and all of the instruments of the music were played by Kyle Buchanan at Aries Lounge in Spring Hill, Tennessee. Our transcripts are provided by Rachel Worsham. Thanks, Rachel, for all your work.
Patsy: If you like what you’ve been listening to, you can help us out by leaving a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to our show.
Andrew: For more information about Patsy, myself, or to read transcripts and to listen to more episodes, go to bridgesshow.com.
Patsy: Catch you next time.