← Life.Church with Craig Groeschel
Life.Church with Craig Groeschel
God Used This Question to Change History | From One to a Billion
00:36:43
It all started with one question: "Could technology help me read the Bible more consistently?" One step of faith. One decision to give everything away for free. And now we’re celebrating one billion downloads of the YouVersion Bible App. God is accelerating the spread of His Word—and you're part of this story.
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Welcome to Life Church. We're so glad you're here. Life Church isn't just something you listen to. It's a place where you can grow and connect. And we want to help you do just that. Visit Life Church PodcastConnect for a quick survey that will let us know more about you and the resources that would help you on your faith journey. Now, here's the message.
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I don't know if you've heard, but we're actually celebrating a milestone today. If you guys heard anything about that or not. I'm just going to go ahead and answer the question that I get asked the most. I literally have been asked this question. It's not an exaggeration. I've been asked this question more than a thousand times. It's the same question every time. And the answer is no. When I was standing in the airport security line, I never imagined that God was going to do what he's done and that we'd be here today celebrating this milestone. Never imagined. I wish I had that kind of faith. I mean, some of you guys have big faith. You dream big, but I did not have that kind of faith. We're talking about a billion. But it actually just started with one question, and the question was, could technology help me read the Bible more consistently? That was the question that I was asking in the o' Hare Airport in a long TSA security line, if you haven't heard before. And it was October 27, 2006. And there in the security line, I was sitting there wondering and asking this question because I felt like I was a below average Bible reader. And so I had this idea for a website. It predated apps. It was a website. I came up with the name youversion in the airport that day. So if you ever wonder where the name came from, that's just where it came from. It came from the airport that day. Best name I came up with. And even though I didn't have big faith, I had just enough faith to take one small step. And you never know what God's going to do when you take one small step of faith. And that one small step of faith was to actually register the domain name youversion.com before I got on the airplane that day. It's something that costs, I think it costs about $25. So just imagine, just a simple step of faith, $25. And then we get to see what God has done. As you. If you don't know the story, we went on and we launched that website in 2007. And to our unfortunately I say fortunately, actually it failed. The website didn't help me read the Bible more consistently and people that went to the website didn't come back to the website. But it's fortunate that it failed because the failure of it actually led us to try putting that website on a small mobile device that we had with us all the time. It was called a BlackBerry. Many of you have no idea what a BlackBerry was, but it was a small, the original smartphone and it worked. And right about that same time, in early 2008, Steve Jobs announced that he was going to make something called an app store and going to make it possible for us to develop apps for an iPhone. So we thought we should try to build a Bible app. The problem is that none of us know and knew how to build a Bible app. We're not engineers. So we found a 19 year old on our team who loved Apple and that was all you needed. And so as a part time project, we built a Bible app we submitted to Apple and to our surprise, on the very first day, July 10, 2008, when the app Store launched, the Bible app was there on the very first day in the App Store, this phone, this actual phone was number one. It's the first phone to ever install the Bible. Apparently it's normally at the Museum of the Bible. I borrowed it. I promised him I wouldn't drop it and we'll have it back by the end of the week so that you guys can see it in person up close. But I wanted to bring this because this phone, number one, this turned into 83,000 iPhones that first weekend when the App store opened that installed the Bible app and it blew our minds. We're like, had no idea that God could do this. I mean, we knew he could do it, we had no idea he would do it. And, and so even if you had asked me at that point in time, even after we had witnessed God do a miracle, if you had asked me, could you imagine that we'd be sitting here today talking about 1 billion? I would have said no, I can't even imagine it. But I thank God that we actually serve a God who isn't limited by our imagination, right? He's able to do more. We read In Ephesians chapter 3, verses 20 through 21 now, to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen. You see, God is able to do so much more than we can imagine. The second question that I oftentimes get is, were there any obstacles? Were there any barriers or any challenges? Because it just seems like this story is kind of up and to the right, and I just kind of laugh. I'm like, man, it has been nonstop challenges and barriers and obstacles. In fact, we had obstacles before we even got started. Then the first obstacle was, was that we needed to get permission to be able to use the Bible text in the website. I don't know if you know this. I certainly didn't know this. I was pretty ignorant at the time, But I did not know that people owned the Bible. I kind of thought it was free. I thought it had been around for a long time. Turns out that the Bible publishers and the Bible translation groups that translate the Bible into modern English, many of them have spent as much as millions of dollars translating. They hire Bible scholars. They spend years carefully translating it so that we can have an accurate translation of the Bible. And so it's common for them to. To. To sell Bibles and to take the royalties from selling Bibles and have that go to pay for the translation. It makes complete sense, but I just didn't know that. And we actually wanted youversion to be free, so we needed to ask them for an unlimited license for an unlimited number of people with no royalty. It's not. It's not a very good business proposition. But the bigger problem was that we actually had no relationships with any of the publishers. We didn't have an inside track. We didn't know who to call or who to talk to. We didn't know any of these people. And so we took another step of faith. And Pastor Craig and I had a blog for pastors and church leaders that was actually pretty popular at that time. And so I wrote a blog post, and the blog post just declared that we were launching this website called youversion, and it had all these features, and you're gonna be able to sign up to get early access to it. And my team's, like, looking, going, what are you doing? I was like, well, we're creating a blog post, and we're announcing the youversion's coming. I was like, I know, but we don't have the website, and we also don't have permission from any publishers to be able to use their text. I was like, I know, but this is how we do it. We just, like, we say we're gonna do it. That's how you start it. Just kind of one step, step into it. But we had no idea what God was going to do with that blog post. But what he did was amazing. People began to hear about it. Someone in Florida named Rob Hoskins, who I had never met before, he hears about this website. He calls me, wants to learn about it. He gets off the phone with me and he talks to Mark Green. And Mark Green lives in Oklahoma City. I knew of Mark Green, but I had never met Mark Green before. And Mark Green calls me and says, tell me about the website and how can I help? And so I said, well, Mart, I don't even know how you can help. The first problem is we don't have permission to even use a single Bible text. And he's like, well, we actually have a chain of bookstores called Mardell, and we buy a lot of Bibles. And so he goes, I can't promise you anything, but I can make introductions for you. And I said, man, that'd be amazing. So he didn't just make introductions. He introduced us to the CEOs of all of these organizations. So we went straight to the top. Terry Storch and I went around the country having meetings, and we were Talking to these CEOs about this website and trying to get permission. And I wish I could tell you that they all said yes, but they all said the Christian version of no, which is, we'll pray about it. You guys know that's the Christian version of no, right? We'll pray about it. I don't know why you're clapping. That was not a good thing. That was not good. We did get one, though, one that said yes. And that was enough for us to launch the website. And I want you to think about was almost impossible. It seemed impossible for us to get that. We didn't know anybody. We're asking them to do something crazy. They didn't know us. They were asking to believe in something that didn't even exist, you know, at the time. And God knew the perfect person, the perfect person that could introduce us, lived in our city. And even though we didn't know Him, God used our step of faith to actually be the tool that he used to complete his miracle. It was actually the step of faith. When we put our faith into action, you see, God meets us with his faithfulness. Some. Some of us are thinking about faith as something we believe, but it's not complete until we actually take that action. We see this in James 2:22, where. Where they're talking about Abraham. It says, you see, his faith and his actions work together. His actions made his faith Complete third question that I get is, why is it free? Like, do you realize, like, if you, like, charged a dollar for every time someone download, you'd have like, like, like, like a billion dollars is what you would have? It's like, well, you have to really understand something about our church. You see, back In January of 2006, Pastor Craig, myself, Jerry, Sam and Kevin, we were sitting in a room and this. We're having a meeting. This meeting was a culmination of several conversations that we'd had before then. But at that meeting, we made one decision that would actually change so many things about our church. That decision was to take any of the resources we had, whether it was a sermon or sermon outline or graphic or video or kids curriculum, whatever it was that we had and we built for our church, we would take our name off of it, would make it available to other ministries completely for free so they could use it. Yeah. And I want to tell you, this idea was actually a radical idea. You see, at that time, it was so common for everyone that had resources like that to package them up and sell them to other pastors and church leaders who were happy to pay for them, and they would use those resources to then be able to sow back into the church. And so it made sense. We were all from business backgrounds, so that made complete sense to us. And on top of that, our church was actually as tight as you could be financially. We were growing, but, man, we just didn't have. We could have really used another revenue stream, but we just really believed that we were stewards of a kingdom resource, that it wasn't ours, that we weren't owners, we were stewards. And we just felt like God was calling us to make this available for free for other pastors and church leaders. So we took a small. Actually, we took a big step of faith because it was hard, it wasn't easy, but we thought, this will bless so many other churches. And it has. There's hundreds of thousands of pastors and church leaders that have downloaded millions of resources and been able to use those to do ministry in their church. But, you know, the church that it blessed the most, it was ours. You see, we're different because of it. Generosity is woven into everything that we do as a church. And it's not just our staff or our organization that's generous. It's you. All the people that are in our church. God just birthed generosity because you all understand that we're stewards of our. Of God's resources, that what's in our bank account or what's in our portfolio is not actually ours, it's his. And that we're not owners, we're stewards. And that's why our church so generously gives. And that's why our church gives and believes return back 10% to God because it's a tithe. And we give above the tithe towards youversion and things like that. And it's because of our generosity. I really believe it's because of the generosity of our church that God trusted us to steward you, Virgin. I really do. I think that's one of the key things, because we actually believe that we're stewarding something. It's not ours. We don't own you version that we steward it on behalf of the kingdom. And we want to be the best stewards that we can be. You see, we believe and we know that it's all him and that it's all his. Right? We read about this in Romans. Romans 11:36 says, for from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen. You see, there's real momentum that's building right now. Your generosity has actually spurred hundreds of thousands of others to come alongside. Because we're not just reaching a milestone, we're accelerating through a milestone. You may not have known this, but we actually thought we would initially reach the milestone of 1 billion in 2027. And then we thought, whoa, it's looking like it's going to be 2026. And then here we are in November of 2025. And that's when we're celebrating milestone because it's really, really accelerating. But here's. Here's what you need to hear. It took 17 and a half years to get to this milestone. One billion. But now with this momentum, actually we actually believe, I believe that we will see the second billion happen in just five and the third billion happen just three more years. You want to know what's crazy though? I can actually imagine that two and three. And we know that God wants to do so much more than we can imagine. Immeasurably more. And there's. And something is happening globally right now. We see Gen Z so open to the Bible. If you don't know, more than 80% of Gen Z says that they're open to the Bible right now. We see college campus revivals breaking out. We see print Bible sales that are actually up from people that are Gen Z buying print Bibles. There's this amazing thing that God is doing globally right now. There's massive Momentum. We're not simply celebrating a milestone, we're celebrating momentum. And it's not just about people getting the Bible into their hands. It's about getting the Bible into their hearts. They're actually opening it, they're actually reading it. And we know that God's word can transform lives. Do you know what the number one biggest day in youversion's history is for people opening the Bible app and actually using it? What the number one day is of all of history? Some of you might think Easter. That'd be a good guess. Most years Easter is the number one day and stays the number one day all the way up until January 1st. You may not know this, but New Year's resolutions are a big thing for the Bible. A lot of people like to start the year the Bible and then January 1st becomes the number one day sometimes until the next Easter. But you want to know the number one day in the history of you version was Sunday last week. Yeah. In fact, the last two Sundays. The last two Sundays are the two biggest days. You know what's remarkable about the last two Sundays is that there's nothing remarkable about the last two Sundays. They're just the last two. That's it. There's massive momentum that we see happening right now. And I want you to be encouraged because this is what God trusted at our church to steward. And there's so much more that he wants to do. We're celebrating a billion, but it's going much, much faster now. And so I want you to take a look at this map. This map is real time. It's live of people opening the Bible app right now while we're talking. It happens 1 billion times every 39 days. That's the fastest it's ever happened. It's actually 299 times per second. I wish we could get one more time per second. It'd make it 300. It'd be awesome. Almost 300 times per second. The screen behind me is not able to even show it as fast as it's happening. Our eyes aren't able to see it as fast as it's happening. It's 300 times a second. So don't. You can't catch the flashes, but just look at all the little white dots of light and realize that every single one of those dots is an opportunity for the life transforming power of God's word to change someone's heart. You see, God is taking it from their hand and he's putting it into their heart. So we're here today not celebrating A billion. We're here celebrating a billion ones, right? And one of those ones is someone named Dia. She's come a long way to come here and share her story with you today. And so I'd love for you to hear from Dia. Welcome, Dia.
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I grew up as an unbeliever. But more than that, I was a bit of a God hater. As a child who cared deeply about justice, I had lots of questions and resentments toward the concept of a higher power, wondering why a supposedly mighty God would abandon the world to so much suffering. He didn't sound like a God I wanted to love or be loved by. So if ever there was a heart hardened against the Lord, it was mine. But Jesus never hardened his heart toward me. He came into my life in the gentlest way, sending a believing friend, Ty, into my world. Through her kindness, I saw a different side to Christianity, a faith that was lived, not shouted. One visit to her church, one prayer meeting, and one life group later, I prayed the prayer of salvation. It defied all logic. A girl who didn't trust God, surrendering her life into his hands. And not only that. I was moving to India for work, away from my hometown in New Zealand, my support system, and now my church. When I reached India, my life quickly unravelled. I was out of my depth, culturally lonely and without the support that I needed. No matter how hard I tried, I didn't fit in. I knew I needed to dive deeper into my faith, but I didn't know where to start. I downloaded you'd version once upon a time, and I had a physical Bible. But it all felt so intimidating. The longer this went on, the more isolated I became. Before I knew it, I was receiving a diagnosis I had been running from for years. Severe clinical depression. Depression crept into my bones. The criticisms I heard playing in my mind were killing me. You're not good enough. You're failing. You don't deserve to be alive. Everyone would be happier if you weren't here. Because you're such a burden, you'll never feel joy again. The sadness will last forever. I slept as much as I could. When I was awake, I could only lie still, crushed under the weight of my thoughts. I longed for death, to escape the pain of living inside my own mind. One day at a shopping mall, wrestling with God about how much longer I could endure this, I opened the Bible app. To this day, I don't know what I was looking for. But I saw that you could search the Bible by emotion. So I chose exactly what I felt. Overwhelmed and up Came my miracle verse. The mountains and hills may crumble, but my love for you will never end. I will keep forever my promise of peace. So says the Lord who loves you. The promise of that verse kept me alive. And I couldn't have found those words any other way because I didn't know the Bible. YouVersion met me right where I was, in my moment of desperation. One verse for one person, and it changed everything. I attended the Global Leadership Summit a few months later where Pastor Craig gave the closing address. I liked the way he spoke. He was vulnerable, humble, compassionate. He mentioned youversion, and for the first time, I connected a face and a church to the app. That evening, I searched Life Church on YouTube and soon I was listening to more sermons, in many of which Pastor Craig discussed mental health. In those days, I was too tired to sit up. Depression is an exhaustion that no amount of sleep can cure. So I would press play on my phone and lay it by my ear, listening while I stared at the ceiling. Thankfully, faith comes by. Hearing the rhythm of watching Life Church online and spending time in the Bible app every day became my routine and became such a source of strength. Before I knew it, I had something I had prayed for. I finally had a church Life Church. And today I can say only God could take a woman too depressed to even sit up and turn her into a daughter. Standing here testifying to his goodness, knowing his truth. My life is proof that God cares about the 1. If you are in the place that I was once in, I am so sorry for the pain that you're experiencing. I know its weight all too well. But I also know that the good shepherd will climb every mountain to reach you. Cling to his word and cling to him and await your miracle that I know is coming. He will carry you. The good shepherd will bring you home. And if my story has touched you, imagine the millions right now searching, overwhelmed or hopeless or afraid on you vision. Imagine the verse that could keep them alive. The devotional that encourages them to continue fighting faith, the community that reminds them they're not alone. And imagine sowing the seed that makes it possible. Because all it takes is one. One loving friend, one hope filled verse, one miraculous app, one faithful giver, one rescued life, and one perfect God whose love for the One will never end. Thank you.
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And Dia, thank you for blessing us with the miraculous story of God's grace. His love for you never ends. You guys are welcome to be seated for a minute because I've got too much emotion. I've got to just. I've Got to tell you, our family loves you. Our church loves you. Our Heavenly Father loves you more than you can imagine. And Amy and I were talking to Pastor Bobby and Melissa, and we just agreed if all that we had done with all of our partners and all the donors and everybody through the Virgin Bible, appreciate if you were the only one that it reached, it would have been absolutely and completely worth it. Absolutely and completely worth it.
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And.
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I didn't know you before, but when I know you now and see the joy of the Lord that you have, I can tell to know he pulled you up out of the pit and brought you to this place of unending peace is something only he could do. And church family, this week we had the indescribable honor of baptizing Diaz, her church family. And you can see the watch, the look on her face. New creation in Christ. The old is gone and the new has come. We celebrate the goodness of God through Jesus Christ. And now your church family celebrates the work of Jesus in you. Can you tell Dia one more time? Thank you for blessing us with your story. And it's hard to describe how much her story touched me, because that's one of so many that God is reaching through you, the church. And if you know my story and connect it with this one, I'm one who was changed not by a sermon, not by someone witnessing, but by the word of God when someone else gave and someone else served and some gentleman came out and handed out free Bibles. And it was through reading the word, the free gift given to me, that I received the free gift of salvation through Jesus Christ. And now God allows us as a church to steward this gift. And so I want to just say thank you to you. And then I just want to just ask God to let Bobby's message speak to you, because you have no idea what God can do in your life and through your life with one step. What would that mean? I don't know. It might mean that you share your faith with someone in your family that's far from God, and you take a step of faith. It might be that you take a step of faith and ask God for healing. It might be that you make a blog post and announce something dumb and believe that God's gonna show up and show off. And when you start something, it may be that you start a life group. It may be that you give a gift that God multiplies. You have no idea what God may do through one step of faith. So I'm going to pray for you, and then I'm going to give you a chance just maybe to respond in faith. Heavenly Father, we give you all the praise, we give you all the honor for every life touched by your word. Thank you for trusting us as a church community along with our partners to give away your word to the first billion God believing there will be many more to come. And God, I pray that you would continue to use your church full of people with irrational faith knowing that we don't just go to church but that we are the church and the church doesn't exist for us but we are your body that exists for the world. Stir up the faith within this church to be bold about the love and the grace of Jesus. I want to talk to you as you're just in an attitude of prayer. Those of you online, all of our churches, God wants to do more in you and I want you to hear this. God wants to do more in you and God wants to do more through you. And faith without action is dead. Take the step of faith. What does it mean? Reach out and say I'm sorry. Confess your dream. Share your vision. Pray for somebody today at all of our churches, those of you who are followers of Jesus and say, yes, I want God to grow my faith, but not just grow my faith. I will take the step of faith. Would you lift up your hands right now all over the place. Lift up your hands. God, thank you for bold spirit filled believers who want to do your will. Show your love God, empower us. Stir up the gifts of the Holy Spirit within each other believer God to take the step of faith. God, I pray that you would see people come to faith in Jesus. God, I pray that there would be breakthroughs. I pray there would be miracles. God, because you are the God who does exceedingly and abundantly more God, more than all we can ask, think or imagine according to your power that is at work within your people through your church. God bless this body of believers with the faith to take a step and for you to do more than we could imagine possible as you keep praying today. Campus pastors, get ready, work with me. We're going fast at all of our churches. Those of you that come here today, you may say, hey, I may be believing God, but I don't know him personally. You may be like Dia was. You may feel like you're in a really dark place and you're hurting. I want to tell you about the goodness of a God who loves you. You are not here by accident. God loves you so much he sent his one and only son, Jesus. Who is Jesus the sinless Son of God. The perfect lamb of God who didn't come for the righteous when he came for sinners. He didn't come for healthy. He came for sick people like me who needed hope and healing. He came for you. Jesus died on a cross in our place so our sins could be forgiven. And by the power of God, God raised him from the dead so that anyone, and this includes you, it doesn't matter what you've done. And anyone who calls on the name of the Lord would be saved. I read in Ephesians chapter two that it's by grace through faith that you're saved. It was God's word that brought me to salvation. It's his spirit that brought you here for this moment today at all of our churches. Those of you who say I need it, I don't know where I stand with God. When you call on his name, he hears your prayers. He forgives your sins. He makes you brand new. Just like Dia's life was changed. Just like my life was changed. You're the one God is reaching out to today. All of our churches, you say, yes, I need his grace today. I give my life to Jesus. That's your prayer. Lift your hands high right now. Up all over the place. Lift them up high. God bless you. Here and up there. Right there. Praise God for you. Others of you say yes, right back there. Lift them up high. Let me find you. Come on. Right over there. Others of you today say yes. Jesus, I surrender. Be the Lord of my life. Right back there. God bless you. Others today. Search online. Just comment in this. In the comment section. I'm surrendering my life to Christ. I'm surrendering my life to Christ. Hey, we're live still at all of our campuses as campus pastors are recognizing people. As soon as you guys are done, join me back in prayer. We're gonna pray together right now, live. 45 different locations around the world. Church online. Join me. Nobody prays alone. Pray. Heavenly Father, save me. Jesus, be my Lord. Forgive all of my sins. Make me brand new. Fill me with your holy spirit so I could know you and serve you for the rest of my life. My life is not my own. I give it all to you. Thank you for new life. You held all of mine. In Jesus name I pray. Could somebody give God some glory right now? Give God some praise. Thank God for new life in Christ. Thank God for salvation. Hey. Thank God for the first billion. Thank God for the first billion. Thank God for the first. That's. That's the first billion. There's another one to come. There's another one to come. And hey, I just want to say to you, our church family, thank you. We will lead the way with irrational generosity because we truly believe it's more blessed to give than receive. We will lead the way with irrational this Bible will always be free. You gave the first seed years and years ago and I know you want to give the first seed toward the next billion. Today at all of our churches, if you would like to give toward the next billion, you're welcome to do so. I hope everybody does something cause it would be really special to give the first seed toward the next billion. And here's what's pretty cool. You can do it through the. You can go to the app and give through the app. You can go to the Life Church app. There's a QR code somewhere near me around here. And I just, I hope that. I just hope and pray that everybody would do something. Here's what's pretty cool. We have a generous donor who really believes in this and everything that you give above your normal giving to youversion. If you go to the app, just click on their YouVersion. Everything you give to YouVersion this weekend will be matched up to $1 million. And so I whatever you do, just know that it's more blessed to give than receive. And we've been given free life through Jesus and now it's our honor to give the message all over the world. The word of God is living. It's active. It's sharper than any double edged sword. It will never return void. Can we just take a moment and just say God we thank you for your word. We thank you for your grace. We thank you for salvation through Jesus. Thank you God for using one church and some partners around the world to get your word into a billion hands. God, we ask for a billion more. All for your glory. We pray this in Jesus name and all God's people said Amen. Campus pastors, help me out.
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We are celebrating with those of you who just made the decision to follow Jesus. Check out the show notes for helpful resources and next steps. Don't forget to take the short survey at Life Church PodcastConnect to tell us more about yourself. We'll see you next time for another encouraging message.
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Sam.