At age 69, award-winning TV host and performer Kathie Lee Gifford isn’t content resting on her laurels. Instead, she has a renewed passion to share her Christian faith with others, following in the footsteps of biblical characters.
“Nobody in the Bible ever retired,” Gifford tells The Christian Post. “They died doing what God put them on this earth to do. Moses didn’t say, ‘I think I’ll play golf now.’ Mary Magdalene didn’t take up bridge. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those things. But when you are on fire for the kingdom of God, that will stay with you until the moment the Lord takes the breath from your body and takes you into his arms. And that’s the way I want to spend the rest of my life: refired, not retired.”
Kathie Lee Gifford’s New Film Project ‘The Way’
Gifford, the multitalented former co-host of “Live! With Regis and Kathie Lee,” has been promoting her new film project “The Way.” Now available on Pure Flix, it brings Scripture to life through musical storytelling. Through four oratorios, “The Way” serves as a companion piece to The God of the Way, a bestselling book Gifford co-wrote with Rabbi Jason Sobel.
Several Christian artists contribute songs to “The Way,” including Nicole C. Mullen, Danny Gokey, and BeBe Winans. Gifford, a singer herself, had collaborated with Mullen on an 11-minute oratorio titled “The God Who Sees.” After it was well received, Gifford decided to expand it into a full-length film. “God used that to say to me, basically, ‘Kathie, this is the way I want you to spend the rest of your life,’” she tells The Christian Post. “There are many more stories in the Bible to tell; you will never run out of them.”
Gifford began exploring those stories in The Rock, The Road, and the Rabbi, a 2019 book also co-authored with Sobel. In the Holy Land, Sobel taught Gifford about the origin of biblical accounts.
Although she grew up in the Jewish faith, Gifford became a Christian after watching The Restless Ones, a 1965 Billy Graham Evangelistic Association film, at age 12.
Kathie Lee Gifford Craves Spiritual Depth
Although Gifford doesn’t claim to be a biblical scholar, she yearns to keep going deeper into God’s Word. “I don’t want baby food,” she says about Christian preaching and teaching. “I don’t want to keep learning the same stuff over and over and over again. It’s not changing me. It’s not transforming me.” In fact, Gifford admits she “can’t sit in most churches now, honestly.”
She adds, “The work starts after salvation, the transforming work of the Holy Spirit. And that can only be accomplished through God’s Word…which is flawless. So study it in its flawless form,” she urges, referencing the original Hebrew and Greek texts.