 Welcome to the September edition of Cornerstone Connect. We have a very special program planned just for you. Anna Frye introduced us to a new member of the Hope Today family, Corey Langford, sharing how God prepared him for his time with us here at Cornerstone Network. Origins producer Paul Bixler joins us to talk about the brand new Origins programs coming your way. And Cornerstone Network COO Tom Hollis stops by to encourage us to restlessly pursue God's presence. All that and more coming up next. I'm Brocker, and I have just one question for you. Have you received your Hope Today newsletter in the mail? If not, please give us a call at 888-665-4483 or go to www.ctvn.org. We love to stay connected with you. Well, I just want to let you know that I am so happy to have some mail to read. This comes from Karen, and she said, she loves watching Hope Today and Move Your Mountains. She loves all the panel on the show, and she learns from that show. Well, Karen, we are so thankful to be here for you. This comes from Sheila. She said, thanks for your prayers, amen. We are grateful to have that prayer line that is available 24-7, and that is because of people like you who have supported our network, and we just love you and we appreciate you. This comes from Penny. She said, thank you, Lord, for the blessing of Cornerstone Television. We hope you all, we love you all, and my favorite is Move Your Mountain. Amen, Penny. Well, we're so thankful to hear from you. And this comes from Ruby. She said, I have cancer. I live alone in an independent living facility. I get my inspirational teaching from Cornerstone. Dr. Robert Jeffress, Dr. Charles Stanley, Dr. David Jeremiah, Billy Graham, Joyce Meyer, sister to sister, Andrew Walmack, and others. Well, Ruby, we are so thankful to be here for you. I'm telling you, it makes every dollar worth it. When God lays on your heart to give in to Cornerstone Network, you are touching lives just like Ruby. This comes from Patricia. She said, I call your prayer line and I'm thankful and grateful for your and appreciation to pray for me and someone else in my family. Well, Patricia, we are thankful again to be here. This comes from Evelyn. She said, dear Origins, I have been enjoying your program for some time. I am amazed at how much I have learned. May God continue to bless you. Thank you so much for your ministry. And that comes from Evelyn. Evelyn, thank you so much for writing into us. And the many of you who send notes through email, we are so grateful to hear and know the difference that Cornerstone is making. And it's amazing for all of us to get to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. Well, coming up next, we have Anna Frye and she's gonna introduce us to one of our newest Hope Today co-hosts. Stay tuned. We all long to be in God's presence and to live victoriously through both prayer and action, but sometimes we get off track and our times with God become less and less frequent. Well, perhaps you've been faithful on prayer, but still suffer from anxiety or fear. Let's refocus on the things of God through Cornerstone's 21-day prayer journey to unleash God's power, presence, and purpose in your life. Starting August 29th, we're walking through prayers for you, your family, your community and for accelerated progress in ministry. Ready to get involved? Visit ctvn.org backslash journey and receive your free 21-day download complete with daily prayer prompts and ideas on how to personalize your experience. Save the date for the 21 days of prayer starting August 29th and ending with a live Hope Today program September 18th at 8 p.m. Eastern time. Visit ctvn.org backslash journey to get your free download and details today. Well, it's such an honor to be with you. If we haven't met, I'm Anna Fry. I'm one of the hosts on Hope Today, and I have the privilege of being here today with one of our newest Hope Today team members, Corey Langford. As you've been seeing, our team has been growing and Corey, we're just excited to give you a chance to introduce you more to our CTVN family and have them know like, this is how the Lord is working in your life. So we know this is not the first time you've been with us on CTVN. You started way back in 2009 with his place, right? Yes, it sounds so far away now, you know. But I was, I was an actor on his place. I was, I messaged the studio and heard that they were looking for some actors. And I was going to college for theater communications at Geneva College and I said, this will be great. So I applied and I got the job. Right, and so what has the Lord been doing with your life since 2009? Tell us a bit about God's calling and how he's gotten you back to where you are today. Wow, I mean, there's been so much going on. There's been so much going on from transitioning out of college and then going into life. Generally, I was doing ministry with my family for quite some time, I started in ministry at 15. And, you know, my parents felt there was a calling on my life. So I said, okay, I trust you all, you know. So I was young, I was a teenager going into ministry, but I was always very interested in theater. And so after college, I had to leave early. There was some financial issues. And so I left early and that was like a blow for me. You know, it was like, oh man, I couldn't graduate. And I came home, I became a security guard. And I was like working in the middle of the night, guarding parked cars. And you talk about dealing with levels of depression. You know, I'm like, I have all these dreams and all these aspirations, these visions that God put inside of me. But I'm here now. And so while sitting in those places, I would just be taking notes on my notebook. I carry tons of journals. And I would be drawing and writing poetry and plays and things like that. And it was really great because there was no one around. And so within my church, I started heading the theater department. And we would do all kinds of different productions that would illustrate the word of God. I also have a ministry called Fighting Light. It's called Fighting Light Studios now, but back then it was called Fighting Light Ministries. And we would illustrate spiritual warfare through martial arts. So we would take somebody who was like struggling in sin, the actor, and then the sin, the demon that represented that sin would come in in combat. We were literally like, ooh, like pyroangers in front of the church. And people were like, they're doing back flips in here. So it was always different for me. I grew up in church and I just really got bored with the tradition of it. I couldn't really follow it. If I didn't understand the preaching, I got lost and impused. You know, I was just like, I wanna go downstairs and go to the bathroom or hang around, do something, go eat something. I was very distracted. So throughout my life, I always was interested in theater. And that's pretty much what I was doing, ministry and theater, and living my life, relationships, falling apart, getting back up, going through the ups and downs of that, all while trying to do ministry and trying to figure out what God really wanted me to do. Yeah, and it's interesting because God used your unique experiences, your personality, the way you experienced church and God to point you in the direction that he wanted you to go, where his calling on your life is really out of the box. It's not necessarily that neat and tidy ministry that is like super accepted by all Christians. And so you're really known for your production, your creation of hell way to heaven. Correct, did I get that right? You got it right. So tell us, you describe yourself, you say, I am not a safe writer and here's how God's using me. Can you unpack that? So when I was young, me and a friend of mine, we wanted to create a haunted house in the back alley. We were so young, in his backyard, we was like, oh, people can line up in the alley and then they can come over here. And I was just very interested in scary things. But I was also a believer. So we weren't allowed to celebrate Halloween or anything like that, right? So I understood we would go to church and dress up in Bible characters. But even then as a kid, I was like, something is missing. I feel like the impact is missing. Here's this whole holiday where everyone's dressing up and theater lovers love Halloween and I'm a theater lover. I'm like, we're missing this. And God opened up an opportunity through our church. Halloween was coming and he said, we need to do something for the kids in the community. And so our basement at the time at that location looked really scary. Looked like people were getting hurt down there. You know what I mean? And I was like, what if we created hell down here? These rooms, what if they were like torture rooms? And now people will be like, what do you mean? But God, he allowed me to express the way that I felt. And I was nervous because other churches would be like, oh, they dressing up like demons in that church and they're doing all this and people will rebuke you in a moment. Absolutely. But God was like, no, you have to do this. I put this in you. So we created a Christian style haunted house where people would come into the production. First they would see scenes of life. So we would go into these scenes like the audience was invisible and the scenes would happen around them. Like scenes of suicide, scenes of people being hurt, scenes of people cutting themselves, whatever. And then they would go down into hell. They would be torred by with an angel and the angel would say, no one can see you here. But they would see people getting tortured and we would all have plastic weapons and stuff. No one was really getting hurt. But then they would go up to heaven and see a Jesus and angels and they were only people in our ministry. Dressing up. No one was getting paid. They just doing it for the love of God and the amount of lives that would give their lives to God through this production over the years as we would grow, people would come from hours away to see this production. And God was affirming me, he was saying, even though it seems weird to everybody else, it's what I called you to do. The way that I called you to do it. And so I'm grateful that God allowed me to do that because a lot of ministries will sit on gifted individuals and rebuke them and say, you know what? You're dealing with a spirit. You're dealing with some other things, but that was never the case for me. Right. It's so awesome to see the fruit of your obedience to step out, to take risks. Even when there was pushback, you kept going forward because God was leading you and affirming that and to see people who would never walk through the doors of a church would be interested in a haunted house. And they had no idea they were coming to meet Jesus and to have their lives changed. So we have just like 30 seconds left. Tell us quickly like why you came back here to Cornerstone Television to be a part of the Hope Today team. Well, you know, I'm thankful for the opportunity I came. I was being interviewed one day and then one of the producers here approached me and said, you know, would you be interested in being a part? And I was honored. I really prayed about it. It wasn't an immediate answer. I really talked to my family and everything like that. But I'm honored to be a part and I accepted the call to share the gospel over the airwaves and I'm here and I'm just ready for God to do whatever he wants to do that I can continue to help impact the world. It's awesome. We're so thankful to have you be a part. And if you want to watch Corey and the rest of the Hope Today team and get into the presence of God Hope Today is on Monday through Friday at 9 a.m. 1 p.m., 8 p.m. and 1 a.m. So Corey, thanks so much for being here. Thank you for having me. All right. Here at Cornerstone Television, we love to provide you with resources that help you grow in your relationship with Jesus. One resource you may not know about is our free daily eDevotional. Each month our devotions focus on a different theme such as the extravagant love of God, your identity in Christ, God's promises for your life and wisdom for every day. Each theme allows you time and space to dig deeper into the rich truths of scripture so you can hear God uniquely speak to your heart. When you sign up, you'll receive the devotion every morning in your inbox. Take each day's truth into your day and watch how God grows your faith and relationship with him and with others. To sign up for our devotionals, go to ctvn.org, scroll to the bottom and enter your name and email. May God's word be a daily blessing to you. If you notice in your newsletter, we have exciting news about the Origins program and we have our very own producer, Paul Bixler, here to tell us all about it. Paul, welcome. Yeah, you know, it's exciting always. You know, I know some people get through the summer, sometimes I've already seen that show, you know? And I said, well, you just have to wait till the fall, you know, so fall is just about here. It's hard to believe. It's after Labor Day, we start our new fall season for Origins. And some of those exciting topics coming up. So we have a bunch of different people, some new ones that are come along too. One of them is this show we did with a fellow that's been here before, Dr. Randy Galloosa, and he was talking, one of the things he was talking about is their eyes. And it was just really, really interesting that they talk about, he talked about two different types of tears that you have in your eye. Like, every time you blink, you have a certain chemical that's released, you know, for your eyes. But when you cry emotionally, it's a totally different kind of, and I was, wow. And so anyway, there's that and there's other people. There's a little town called Liberal, Missouri. We're gonna talk about the history of that with Dr. Brad Herum. And it's a show that's coming up and this fall, so you gotta stay tuned. And it was a town founded on atheism, okay? And they didn't want any Christians involved in the founding of the town. And they found that it was kind of an experiment, no Christian influence and they had a lot of issues. So it's interesting you could follow that show, look for that show to come. Another show related to that is this series, basically Brad goes through and talks about atheism and how it has attacked our country the last 75 years, really. And a lot of the foundations of this go back to Darwinism. And a lot of people don't really think about it, but even influences on Hitler, like for World War II, a lot of that and we did a show on that, basically talking about Hitler and Darwinism. And then we have Jay Siegert, who is also a fellow that has talked a lot about how to defend the creation standpoint. Like when you're talking to people, you can't hit them over the head with facts all the time and make them decide to believe in creation. Just kind of get lays out the tools so that you can help talk about. Have a healthy conversation that might make them think, maybe God is real. Yeah, and one of the things that I've learned too, because people will ask me and I'll try to defend it, all you can do is you can give them the facts and the Holy Spirit has to do the heavy lifting. I mean, if they're receptive to question evolution, you know, I can't convince them to be a creationist. You know, if they're gonna make up their mind and they're gonna listen and the Holy Spirit is only gonna go where he's invited or somebody's really interested in the truth. But, you know, evolutions is just so ingrained in our kids, they teach that at school. And some of this stuff isn't even true anymore, but it's still in our textbooks. So Brad talks about that too. I mean, you know, and some of these guys that teach these professors that teach it in college and teach it in high school, they don't even know that some of this stuff isn't even true. It's been proven to false. But you won't get that on the regular show. So that's why you have to tune in to Origins. That's right. And I know you've been a part of Origins a little bit. I have. And you know, in the past. And I think that you understand a lot of what we're trying to do with the program. That's right. It's so important, Paul. I really believe that Origins is a divine assignment by God. He spoke that to your father and you've been running with it ever since then and continuing. And it's important for people to know the truth. Well, the thing is, I don't even, I'm not doing it just because of my dad. You know, I'm doing it because I really understand how important it is. I mean, God told Job in the Old Testament, have you seen my creation? Have you seen what I created? So it's really important to God. And I just really feel called to this. Amen. And I'm excited that all these new shows that are coming. I think people are gonna be interested to find a lot of these new programs coming their way this fall into the winter. Amen. Well, stay tuned. There's so much more than even what Paul got to share about. But we have one on like conception to birth of a baby and you're not gonna wanna miss that. So just stay tuned to Origins. It's something that as parents, we need so that we can speak truth to our children. And I encourage you to watch Origins. It's on Mondays at 2 p.m. and 9 p.m. only here on Cornerstone Network. We'll be right back after this. Are you facing a detour? Are things not as expected? Discouragement, frustration, anxiousness, sickness? God loves you more than you can ever know. Romans 839 assures nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God. Call our prayer line or connect with us online. Tom Hollis, COO and program director for Cornerstone Network, welcome. Good to be here, Amanda. Well, I just read your article and you encouraged us to restlessly pursue God's presence. Can you tell us how do we do that? Well, you know, first of all, let me say this. I've always admired people just in worldly pursuits, regular pursuits, could be music, could be business, could be athletics is where we see it a lot, where there's a person who's already talented, right? They've already got either a mind for business, they're a talented musician or maybe they're Michael Jordan who knows for basketball, but they still put in a tremendous amount of work, of diligence, of pursuit of this goal. I'm amazed that like, again, athletics is the easiest one for me because I'm a fan, you know, it's easiest one for me to relate to is that they put so much time in into that making themselves the best, even though they have the talent to be the best, if they don't put the time in, they're not the best. And it's not about us being the best Christian or anything like that, but it is a lesson for me to put in the time to know God. Like I've said for a long time, I don't know if I'm really an expert in anything, but if I'm gonna be an expert in something, maybe I need to be an expert in knowing God. That would really be the key, wouldn't it? If you're gonna be really at the top of your field in any one thing, maybe knowing God for a Christian is the top place to be. Amen, I would say. So, give me some practical tips of how Tom Hollis gets to know God. Well, first, let me say this. We're not based on our works. We know Christianity isn't based. We're saved by God's grace. Praise the Lord for that. We are 100% unable to save ourselves. We can't do anything to earn God's favor, God's grace, anything like that. Unmerited favor, that's what His grace is to us. And that's how we're saved. Praise the Lord for that. That doesn't depend on us. But the knowing of God, how well we know God, many times does depend on us. In fact, the Lord says, you will seek me and you will find me when you search for me with what? All your heart. All your heart. So there's an admonition here. There's some kind of calling for us to do that. So, it could be, is it about reading the Bible more? Is it about going to church more? Is it about praying more? Look, we can always do that, right? We can always do those things more. It's different than that, though. It's about a mindset that says, God, I'm latching on to you. I'm latching on to you and I'm gonna hold on. You know, in the Old Testament, they used to hold on to the horns of the altar until they got the answer, you know? It's like, I'm gonna hold on to you and understand who you are. Help me to understand better who you are. So that's part of seeking Him. It's like seeking His face, not what He can give you. It's the, some people have said, it's seeking His face, not His hand. Like when we're praying for things, which is perfectly fine, and it's not wrong to pray for things, we're seeking His hand, we're seeking His provision. It's interesting what God does with that sometimes. He takes a moment. He's not withholding it, but in His good time, He gives us that thing. But we're kind of seeking it, seeking His hand through Him, you know? So we're getting to know God better. So it is a lot about a cry of our heart. And yes, prayer, reading the scriptures, knowing Him better through the scriptures, what could be better than that? Prayer, you know, the early Christians didn't carry around a Bible with them all the time, but they had the Holy Spirit in prayer all the time. They had worship all the time. So they did those things. And they would remember a part of scripture and read the letters of Paul and all those things. But we need to do that. But it's more about a mindset of, I'm gonna seek you, Lord. Than it is about, I did 11 minutes of prayer today or something. Right, right. So one of your top points that I just love, and I think it's so important because unless we forgive others, we can't be forgiven ourselves. And you have that as one of your first points about forgiveness. And we gotta forgive ourselves. And we gotta be able to move forward, forgive other people. But talk to us about the importance of forgiveness. Well, we get forgiveness when we seek God. There are certain promises that we have. We can, and your presence is fullness of joy. Do you want joy? Seek for God's presence. You know, and there's forgiveness there too. That's a place of forgiveness. Now, so we need to be forgiven and we need to forgive others. It's certainly a walk in that because we've all been hurt. And when we've been hurt, it's really, really hard to forgive. And of course there's a whole thing about forgiveness. It doesn't mean that we're to trust that person. It doesn't mean that we're supposed to, you know, let ourselves be hurt again. But it just means we're not gonna let somebody else's bad choices affect our future any longer, you know? And we're gonna forgive them and God forgives us as well. Amen. Well, that is such a powerful word, Tom. We are so thankful to have articles like this and even the presence of God here at Cornerstone Television that is always pointing us in God's direction that is always helping us to stand on that firm foundation of Christ, of His word. Well, thank you so much and we'll be right back after this. Cornerstone Television Network began 43 years ago because of a vision God gave to our founders Russ and Norma Bixler and we're thankful for his continued provision. Hi, I'm Sydney Goldman, host of Hope Today. Glenn recently wrote to us, my parents supported CTVN when Russ and Norma started the ministry. I'm proud to carry on the tradition. CTVN is truly a blessing to me and millions of people who are hearing the message of Jesus Christ. Glenn, thank you for giving. You are part of Miracle's Hope happens here. Well, I sure hope you've enjoyed our time together and learning about what's happening here at Cornerstone. We are so thankful to have each and every one of you as part of our Cornerstone family. And if you've not yet participated, we encourage you to get connected. Be a part of what God is doing and in through Cornerstone Television Network. I just want to reflect on just a few more pieces of mail that came in, this came from Tom and he said, I appreciate the call a few weeks ago offering to pray with me and thanks so much for the TV programs about the pilgrims. I just love our programming here at Cornerstone. What will we do without it? So just thank Jesus and know that he has made the way for us to be here. This comes from Paula. She said, thank you for always being there in both good times and not so good times sending love and appreciation. Paula, we are excited to be able to be here for you and thank you for your programs. This comes from Carol. I love to watch the 700 Club, Bible Discovery, Radiant TV, Superbook, Torchlighters, Origins, hard questions and many more. May God bless you for all you do. And I think just something from Tom's article that popped out to me that I want to read to you is from Isaiah 55 and it's verses six and seven. Seek the Lord while you can find him. Call on him now while he is near. Let the wicked change their hearts, their ways and banish the very thought of doing wrong. Let them turn to the Lord that he may have mercy on them. Yes, turn to our God for he will forgive generously. And that is the good news of the gospel that we can turn from our wicked ways and choose to follow Jesus Christ. And he does not remember our sin any longer. So at this time, just make things right with God and know that we are here for you. We did the desire to see you walk in all that God has for you. He loves you. He died for you. Surrender to him today.